Introduction
Mondays used to be busy days for the passeurs of Agadez as it was the day they often launched their journeys taking clients north across the desert, sometimes with military escorts. At the height of the land crossing from Niger to Libya in the mid-2010s, tens of thousands of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants traversed these desert routes each month, part of an entrenched economy that supported a wide range of actors, including security agents, smugglers, transport companies, shop owners, and—importantly—migrants.
Much of the recent attention on Niger has been on its role in the Central Mediterranean migration route to Europe and its increasing importance to the European Union (EU) and international organisations as a staging ground for migration and asylum schemes. However, the country has been the site of migration flows for generations because of its long porous borders, geographical location, tribal make-up, and close migratory ties to countries across the Sahel region.