Transnational migration and the extractivist logic of global capitalism: the EU–Eastern Africa geopolitical space

The chapter traces the ways in which transnational migration is an inherent part of the evolving modes of value extraction and capital accumulation. It argues that transnational migration is embedded in the political economy of global capitalism in two ways: accelerating extractivist practices coproduces the structural causes of transnational migration and then transnational migration becomes a surface of value extraction through the militarisation, securitisation, and datafication of border management. This makes transnational migration both a result and one of the drivers of extractivist logic, which is exemplified by the extractive industries but does not end with them. Extractivist logic is manifested in financialization and financial speculation, datafication and digital dispossession, the intensified marketisation of social life, and the bioeconomy that extracts profit from human life itself. The author analyses these processes in the context of the geopolitical space between the EU and Eastern Africa. The chapter describes how the extractivist logic is currently playing out in Eastern Africa, sheds light on the broader structural context of migration, and discusses how the EU’s economic strategies and political responses to migration contribute to and reaffirm this logic.