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11 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 26 JUNE 2019 Ruben Andersson is Associate Professor in Migration and Development at the University of Oxford OPINION AT the US-Mexico border, President Donald Trump's migration "emergency" has led to children being locked up and a threatened trade war. In Libya, now the frontline of Europe's own migration "crisis", people are being de- tained in horrific conditions as the UN warns of a "sea of blood" amid cuts and crack- downs on rescues in the Med- iterranean. A chronic state of emergen- cy now infects border politics in the West. But our view of how this has come to pass is too narrow. The politics of crisis must be understood as part of a re-mapping of the relationship between West- ern powers and their histori- cal "backyards". The objec- tive is now to keep perceived danger at bay, out of sight and out of mind – and at any cost. Almost two decades on from 9/11, ours is a gated-up world: green versus red zone, safety versus danger, citizen versus unwanted intruder. In my research on security and conflict for my book No Go World, I've heard the gate clang shut across borders and distant "danger zones". At the border barriers in Ari- zona and Spain, guards have told me how they fight back dramatic entry attempts past "useless" fences. On Lampe- dusa in 2015, before Italy shut its door to rescue ships, I saw African migrants greeted by biohazard suits, scabies checks and transport to fara- way "reception" centres, set behind tall walls. And in dan- ger zones such as conflict-hit Mali, I met European soldiers cowering behind similar walls while insurgents roamed the hinterland. Maps deepen the divide. On the news, larger-than-life jihadist figures loom across Syria or the Sahara. In travel risk advisories, red blotches of no-go advice bleed across the map while border agen- cies and think tanks add threatening arrows depicting flows of migration or contra- band. Their maps speak of en- croaching danger – of how, as former US Vice President Joe Biden put it, the "wolves" are slavering at the door. Maps tell stories about our world, and the fearful tale of today's danger maps is haunt- ed by older ones. On medieval European maps of the world, or mappaemundi, monstrous figures roamed the margins. In the "age of discovery", blank spaces on the maps spurred on colonial conquest before giving way to boastful cartographies of empire. To- day, the connected world of Google Earth coexists with maps of danger that thrive on distancing and division. In our globalised era, blank spaces are paradoxically re- emerging. The 'banana of badness' The end of the Cold War was the catalyst. As the Soviet foe perished, assorted pundits and neoconservatives set out on a search for "monsters to destroy". Among them was journalist Robert Kaplan, who prophesied that a "criminal anarchy" would soon become the real strategic danger. President Bill Clinton lis- tened, and so did his succes- sor George W. Bush. On the eve of the Iraq inva- sion, one Pentagon strategist blithely divided the world into a connected "core" and a dangerously disconnected "gap" which must be brought into line by force. The world of counter-terror and border walls had found its map of doom. However, the security in- terventions staged in the red zones and along the borders have made things worse. As the "war on terror" esca- lated, so did worldwide ter- ror fatalities. As Washington ramped up border security, more Mexicans stayed in the US and became long-term un- documented migrants. And as Europe spent years "fighting migration", migrant despera- tion and smuggling networks were entrenched. One Euro- pean police attaché told me in 2010 that "we're in the eye of the cyclone now … when you bolt all doors, you'll have a pressure cooker". His proph- ecy, for one, proved correct. But instead of changing tack, Western powers double down with each new "crisis". They reinforce security op- erations, escalate the rhetoric and sharpen the divides. Con- sider EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini, who calls the Sahel and Horn of Africa the "one single place" where Europe has to invest all its ef- forts to combat irregular mi- gration and terrorism. In such turns of phrase – which I have heard time and again from high officials – any sense of local society is washed aside, replaced by swathes of danger stretching across a bewilder- ing array of countries. This "arc of instability" has be- come so commonplace that it has even received its own moniker in UK Foreign Of- fice backrooms: the "banana of badness". Dealing with this banana ripe with badness is a messy business, as I saw in Mali. In the capital, Bamako, every- one – from border officials to peacekeepers, aid workers and counter-terror operatives – was busy bunkering up. In this cut-price version of Baghdad's green zone, West- ern aid managers "produce reports and create new little strategies" to "justify their salaries", as one scathing offi- cial put it. European military officers have retreated into intelligence gathering while badly equipped Africans face attacks by insurgents on the frontlines. Amid this remote- controlled "security", vio- lence has proliferated and lo- cal anger grown – leading the interveners to retreat further behind their bunker walls. Shifting blame The divided maps reinforce this picture through what psychoanalysts would call projection – it's others who are at fault. But this is a fal- lacy. Danger is not geographic but systemic, and those who intervene are part of this sys- tem. Western interventions – from NATO's campaign in Libya to Washington's war on terror and meddling in Cen- tral America – have directly contributed to instability in the "red zones". The first to note this were those on the frontline. In his military barracks in Bamako, an officer told me: "It's NA- TO which went along and did all that in Libya, and it's Europe which has let all these terrorists loose," fomenting insurgency in Mali. His voice rose as he pointed at the TV, which showed the advances of Islamic State in Iraq: "It's you! It's you!" He was both right and wrong. Right, in that much as in colonial times, today's di- vided map allows for the dis- astrous blowback of interven- tions to be shifted onto poorer "buffer zones" – and the Sahel has become just such a zone. Wrong, in that the politics of danger creates vested inter- ests both in the West and in those buffer zones. Unscrupulous Western poli- ticians can ramp up the fears at home for political ends, but so can enemies and "partner states" in fighting migration or terrorism. The higher the value attached to fighting one perceived danger or other, the higher the price that is charged to prevent hell from breaking loose. The result is a merry-go-round of danger feeding on danger, as seen from Turkey to Libya and the Sahel. An exit from the bunker must start by reversing the negative spiral via different incentives, and a different narrative. In short, we need a new map. But for now, Mali's President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta will have the last word. Asked by a journalist what he would tell those French citi- zens who thought the coun- try's counter-terror operation in the Sahel was too expen- sive, his answer was: "That Mali is a dam and if this dam breaks, Europe will be flood- ed." Ruben Andersson How the West is withdrawing into a bunker of its own making