On dancing with dictators - Thomas Meaney in LRB in 2019:

“The Sahara is one of the few places on earth no one has been foolish enough to try to conquer. There have, however, been attempts, over the centuries, to govern it. In Ghat, one of the last Libyan towns in the Fezzan before the desert takes over, there are vestiges of efforts to bring the land to order: Bedouin trails that date from the Middle Ages; a rough-hewn fortress, started by the Ottomans and finished by Italian Fascists, that overlooks the hollowed-out ruins of a medina below. The traders, militiamen, shop owners and tour operators here have a range of views about Europe’s rekindled interest in their region. For some, it is the promise of a better livelihood: to get their share of the vast amount of money the EU is now pouring into North Africa, or at least to recoup the losses that followed Nato’s destruction of Gaddafi’s distribution networks. (When Gaddafi’s son was released from prison two years ago, the citizens of Ghat celebrated in the streets with gunfire.) For others, new electronic fences, biometric scanning stations, military outposts and an increasing number of European soldiers are signs that delicate circuits of kinship and commerce are being disrupted. At a makeshift café in a petrol station on the outskirts of Ghat I met a Tuareg man associated with a local militia. ‘They get tired, they want to leave,’ he said of the European forces, as if their arrival was a nuisance rather than a paradigm shift.”

(…)

“For Brussels, Sisi’s waxing authoritarianism appears a small price to pay for his perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant unemployment, especially among the young. As the Dutch president, Mark Rutte, put it in Cairo, ‘sometimes you have to dance with whoever’s on the dance floor.’”

(…)

“As the political scientist Max Gallien has shown, just because an economy is informal doesn’t mean it’s unregulated. For more than thirty years, the borders of Saharan states have been controlled zones of carefully choreographed illicit trade.”

(…)

“But Europe itself seems to have settled on a narrow strip of common ground. Ursula von der Leyden, the incoming EU commissioner, has proposed renaming the job of top migration officer in Europe ‘Vice President for Protecting Our Way of Life’. Jean-Claude Juncker, her predecessor, agrees: ‘We want a Europe that protects ... a Europe that defends.

Read the article here.

Not much has changed since 2019.
Migration has only become more f the issue that will drive (some) people to the polls.

And dancing with dictators is more and more considered an honorable thing, the dictator can get things done. At least that’s what some people believe.

The informal but regulated economies still exist, they thrive.