CODESRIA

THEME: “MIGRATION GOVERNANCE”:  RETHINKING MOBILITY AND DEMOCRATIC AGENCY IN AFRICA

Dates: 28 September to 9 October

Venue:  Lagos (Nigeria)

Application Deadline: 31 August 2026

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the call for submission of proposals from academics, academically inclined policy actors and researchers in African universities and related research centres for the 2026 Democratic Governance Institute (DGI). The 2026 Institute is being organised in partnership with the Centre for Migration Studies (CMS) of the University of Ghana. The institute will convene in Lagos (Nigeria) from 28 September to 9 October 2026 on the theme: “Migration Governance”: Rethinking Mobility and Democratic Agency in Africa.

Theme for the 2026 Institute

Migration is among the most defining yet persistently mischaracterized feature of African societies and the continent’s political economy. Across the continent, mobility has historically been a constitutive dimension of livelihoods, knowledge acquisition and dissemination, cultural identity, and regional belonging. In these roles, it long predates the colonial imposition of contemporary state boundaries. Yet, the dominant conceptual lenses through which migration in Africa is understood and governed, whether at the national, regional, or continental level remain largely derivative of external framings that prioritize security, containment, and the control of mobility over its transformational, social, democratic and human rights dimensions. The consequence is a persistent contradiction between the lived experiences of millions of Africans who move within and across the continent, and the governance systems ostensibly designed to manage, facilitate, or protect them. The 2026 CODESRIA Democratic Governance Institute invites scholars to interrogate this gap through the lens of democratic governance in its broadest, grassroots and emancipatory meaning.

Regional and Continental Migration Governance: Sovereignty, External Influence, and Democratic Tensions

Two-thirds of Africa’s international migrants move within the continent itself, yet the frameworks for facilitation of intra-African mobility remains structurally underfunded, conceptually fragmented, and politically contested. The Regional Economic Communities (RECs), including the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the East African Community (EAC) have developed distinct frameworks for managing the movement of persons, reflecting the diversity of historical pathways, migration realities, and institutional priorities across sub-regions. ECOWAS, for instance, operates through a relatively formalised free movement protocol that give member-state nationals the right of entry, residence, and establishment, while IGAD has historically relied more heavily on informal cooperative relations to manage one of the world’s most complex forced displacement situations. Despite these varied architectures, a common challenge runs through them: the significant gap between what is formally agreed at the regional level and what is actually implemented at national and sub-national levels, a gap that is widened by the rolling back of state capacity as part of neoliberal statecraft, protectionist policy instincts, and the contradictions between regional commitments and the imperatives of domestic political economy.

At the level of the African Union, the normative framework to purportedly govern migration has become considerably more developed over the past two decades, from the 2006 Migration Policy Framework for Africa through to the AU’s active engagement with the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Yet the translation of continental commitments into sub-regional and national policy practice remains deeply uneven, exposing fundamental questions about African agency, political will, and the democratic legitimacy of migration governance institutions. Public attitudes toward cross-border movement are not uniform, and recent empirical work across multiple African countries demonstrates that support for open borders is significantly higher in regions with well-established free movement protocols, suggesting that governance structures both shape and reflect popular dispositions toward mobility. This finding has profound implications for thinking about the democratic foundations of migration governance, the alignment or misalignment between formal institutions, elite policy preferences, and the views and self-activity of ordinary citizens, including migrants themselves.

Complicating this picture further is the role of external actors most prominently the European Union whose “migration governance” agenda has increasingly penetrated African policy spaces through bilateral partnerships, financial conditionalities, and capacity-building programmes ostensibly framed as cooperation. Research on EU-Africa migration governance has documented a pronounced disjuncture between the rhetoric of partnership and the practice of migration control externalization: while both sides produce similar managerial language in policy documents, European objectives are primarily oriented toward restricting mobility and shifting humanitarian responsibilities onto African states, often regardless of the costs to African sovereignty, regional integration commitments, or the human rights of migrants in transit. These dynamics have generated what scholars describe as “rippling effects” consequences that extend well beyond immediate policy outcomes to reshape local political economies, institutional capacities, and state-society relations, inter-group solidarities, and tensions in ways that African analysts are only beginning to document systematically. The 2023-2027 CODESRIA Strategic Plan, which thematises the State and Democratisation in Africa in a context of global transition and transformation, makes it urgent that African scholarship reclaims the terms of engagement in this domain.

Recently, digital technologies also have increasingly become a major factor, reshaping the governance of migration across Africa. From biometric identification systems and digital border controls to data-driven surveillance, these technologies are often presented as tools for efficiency and security. However, they raise critical concerns about privacy and data ownership, influenced by the power relations between African states and their external partners, who design and manage such systems. These rapid developments necessitate a critical examination of how digitalisation is transforming migration governance, and what this means for democratic accountability and the rights of migrants.

Governance from Below: Agency, Informality, and Inequality

Below the level of states and regional organisations, the migration architecture in Africa involves a complex ecology of non-state actors: civil society organisations, community associations, migrant networks, non-governmental organisations, and academic institutions. These actors occupy spaces that are sometimes invented from below, sometimes invited into formal policy processes, and sometimes instrumentalised by states or external partners to legitimise predetermined agendas. The question of how these actors participate in, shape, resist, co-opt or are co-opted by the discourse and framework of migration governance is central to any assessment of the democratic credentials of those frameworks. Similarly, the voices and micronarratives of migrants themselves, those who move along the West African coastal corridors, traverse the Saharan interior routes, or navigate the regulatory labyrinths of Southern African labour migration rarely find adequate expression in the policy architectures that purport to govern their lives. Centering these voices is not merely an ethical imperative; it is an epistemological one.

It is also below the level of the state, at the level of individual experience, that one notices migration is not experienced uniformly. Gendered dynamics influence who moves and under what conditions. These dynamics also determine the risks involved in mobility, particularly with regard to care economies and informal labour. Besides gender, generational disparities and class inequalities also demonstrate that migration is not experienced in the same way by everyone. For example, youth mobility reflects employment and political exclusion-related aspirations and frustrations, while access to mobility and legal protection is unevenly distributed across social classes. These differentiated experiences raise fundamental questions related to the governance of migration, particularly in terms of whose mobility is recognised, protected, and represented within existing policy frameworks.

Knowledge Production, Narratives, and Epistemic Justice

The conceptual work required is as important as the empirical. African scholarship on “migration governance” has, in recent years, produced important contributions that challenge Eurocentric framings, historicise border regimes, and theorise the political economy of mobility governance from African vantage points. Yet the field remains insufficiently integrated across sub-regional traditions and disciplinary boundaries. It also largely lives intact the class dimension and content of governance. For, in a neoliberalised Africa where liberal democracy’s failure to meet people’s basic demands is raising fundamental questions about the state – society relations, “migration governance” must be thought through the basis of the political community itself, i.e. what would governance look like if its starting point is the lived realities, struggles, and aspiration of ordinary working people across Africa, whether mobile or sedentary?

Such an approach opens up space to carefully understand the interests that lie behind the tension that sits at the attempt to govern migration in Africa: the tension between migration as a governance problem to be managed and migration as a right to be protected; the relationship between regional integration commitments, the legacy and contemporary re-assertion of Pan-Africanism by Africa’s youth, and national sovereignty claims; the intersections of migration with labour markets, gender relations, climate dynamics, and citizenship regimes; the appropriate conceptual vocabulary for understanding African mobility in its own right rather than as a variant of global South-to-North movement. All of these remain contested and undertheorised. The undertheorising partly results from the self-contained study of African migration outside of the broad social structural realities informed by history and shaped political economy, among other factors. Thus, “migration governance”, just like the study of African migration is studied in analytical silo, instead of being placed within the various intersections and social questions that migration lends itself. The 2026 DGI offers a critical space to move beyond these shortcomings towards a rich theoretical and empirical work understanding. It brings together a new generation of African scholars to deepen the analysis and contribute to a research agenda commensurate with the complexity of the challenge.

The 2026 Institute engages a number of interconnected questions.

1. The first concerns historicing population control and struggles around the governance of movement in Africa: what norms, institutions, and economic and political factors governed the peopling of Africa? How did struggles from below inform, contest and shape the ways in which movement was governed historically? What lessons can we learn from that past and repurpose for the present?
2. The second set of questions relate to governance architecture and democratic legitimacy: how are “migration governance” frameworks in Africa constructed, contested, and implemented across national, regional, and continental scales? What are the conditions under which regional migration governance becomes democratic; that is, accountable, inclusive, and responsive to those it affects?
3. The third concerns the politics of knowledge and representation: how do dominant narratives about African migration produced by Africanists, external actors, national governments, or international organisations shape policy responses in ways that may diverge from, or actively marginalise, the realities of migrants and border communities? What alternative basis of knowledge production do we need to root the production of knowledge on and about African migration in existing African realities?
4. The fourth concerns the future of migration governance in Africa: in a context of rapidly shifting geopolitical alignments and the reconfiguration of the global political economy, what democratic governance innovations are required to ensure that migration becomes a resource for democratic transformation?

These questions are animated by the conviction consistent with CODESRIA’s founding intellectual commitments that governance derives its meaning from the democratic struggles of ordinary people, and that scholarship has a responsibility to generate knowledge that serves those struggles rather than legitimising the architectures of power, control and exploitation that contain them.

Call for Applications

Application for Resource Persons

Applications for the position of resource person should include:

1. An application letter.
2. A curriculum vitae.
3. Two (2) published papers relevant to the theme of the Institute.
4. A proposal of not more than five (5) pages outlining the issues to be covered in two (2) proposed lectures, including one on methodological issues.

Applications for Laureates

Applicants who wish to be considered as laureates should be PhD candidates or scholars in the early stages of their academic careers with a demonstrated capacity to conduct research on the theme of the Institute. Intellectuals active in the policy process and/or in social movements and civil society organisations are also encouraged to apply. The number of places offered by CODESRIA at each session is limited to fifteen (15). CODESRIA will additionally provide for up to five (5) places for participants willing to self-fund their participation. Young African academics from the diaspora and non-African scholars who are able to fund their participation may also apply for a limited number of places. It is absolutely important that applicants demonstrate a serious engagement with the intellectual concerns of this call in their proposals.

Applications for participation as laureate should include:

1. One duly completed application form.
2. An application letter.
3. A letter indicating institutional or organisational affiliation.
4. A curriculum vitae.
5. A research proposal not exceeding ten (10) pages, including a descriptive analysis of the work the applicant intends to undertake, an outline of the theoretical interest of the topic chosen, and the relationship of the topic to the problematic and concerns of the 2026 Institute.
6. Two (2) reference letters from scholars or researchers known for their competence and expertise in the candidate’s research area (geographic and disciplinary), including their names, physical addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses.
7. A copy of the passport.

Applications Deadline

The deadline for the submission of applications is 31 August 2026.

Selected applicants will be notified by 11 September 2026.

Laureates will be required to revise their proposals, which will be presented during the Institute as draft research papers.

Draft papers should be submitted to CODESRIA not later than 18 September 2026.

Laureates will be required to work on their papers during the Institute in preparation for publication after the Institute.

Submission of Applications

All applications or requests for additional information should be sent electronically to: https://apply.codesria.org/