The abstract of the paper:

After 2015, European states invested in deportation cooperation within the Valletta process to target ‘unwanted’ African migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines how protests by West African migrants in Germany, accompanied by parallel actions in West Africa, contested West African authorities’ participation in German deportations. The protesters questioned the international legality of deportation as a moral double standard by referring to Euro-African borders as the ‘Borders of Berlin,’ drawn at the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference. It is argued that this unsettled the European policy concept of deportation as a ‘return’ to one’s supposed place and as ‘readmission’ obliging states, based on assumptions of equal national sovereignty and harmonious belonging. Building on post- and decolonial scholarship on borders and the international order, the article reads ‘Borders of Berlin’ as a situated critique of the postcolonial nation-state order by black and diasporic social movements. Arguably, this critique also proposes an alternative moral order by interpreting postcolonial African migration as a decolonizing practice of international law from below. The article also reflects on the fragility of the ‘Borders of Berlin’ as a decolonizing imaginary shared by ordinary West African migrants.After 2015, European states invested in deportation cooperation within the Valletta process to target ‘unwanted’ African migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines how protests by West African migrants in Germany, accompanied by parallel actions in West Africa, contested West African authorities’ participation in German deportations. The protesters questioned the international legality of deportation as a moral double standard by referring to Euro-African borders as the ‘Borders of Berlin,’ drawn at the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference. It is argued that this unsettled the European policy concept of deportation as a ‘return’ to one’s supposed place and as ‘readmission’ obliging states, based on assumptions of equal national sovereignty and harmonious belonging. Building on post- and decolonial scholarship on borders and the international order, the article reads ‘Borders of Berlin’ as a situated critique of the postcolonial nation-state order by black and diasporic social movements. Arguably, this critique also proposes an alternative moral order by interpreting postcolonial African migration as a decolonizing practice of international law from below. The article also reflects on the fragility of the ‘Borders of Berlin’ as a decolonizing imaginary shared by ordinary West African migrants.