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Faced with ongoing African immigration, the European Union (EU) and its member states have revitalized population sciences to slow movements toward its borders. Post-2015 initiatives include collaborations with African population registries, enhanced data aggregation systems, and elaborate movement tracking systems. Couched in a progressive language of global partnership, the Europeans are marshalling knowledge to further a racialized form of global pre- criminalization. Within this rubric of scientific containment, African protestations are epistemically erased. The data generated to support this containment project is itself embedded in an ever more elaborate moral economy of knowledge incorporating scholars outside and across Africa. Their cooperation legitimizes and normalizes the EU’s criminological project, making complicit even scholars employing data to unsettle the narratives of risk and paternalistic protection used to justify exclusion.

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