Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Preliminary Material -- Listening to Migrant Voices: An Introduction / Robert Lawrence McKenzie and Alessandro Triulzi -- Sub-Saharan Migrants Heading North: A Mobility Perspective / Joris Schapendonk -- Nigerian Border Crossers: Women Travelling to Europe by Land / Kristin Kastner -- High-Risk Migration: From Senegal to the Canary Islands by Sea / Miranda Poeze -- Stranded in Mauritania: Sub-Saharan Migrants in Post-Transit Context / Armelle Choplin and Jérôme Lombard -- Untangling Immobility in Transit: Sub-Saharan Migrants in Istanbul / Brigitte Suter -- Marabouts and Migrations: Senegalese between Dakar and Diaspora / Amber Gemmeke -- “Today, I Would Never Go to Europe”: Mobility for Resources and Local Development in West Africa / Laurence Marfaing -- Migration, Class and Symbolic Status: Nigerians in the Netherlands and Greece / Apostolos Andrikopoulos -- Lessons for Life: Two Migratory Portraits from Eritrea / Magnus Treiber -- “Like a plate of spaghetti”: Migrant Narratives from the Libya-Lampedusa Route / Alessandro Triulzi -- Our Journey / Dagmawi Yimer -- Notes on Contributors -- Index of authors -- Index of Places -- Index of Subjects.

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Trapped inside lorries or huddled aboard unseaworthy boats, irregular African migrants make for troubling headlines in western media, fueling fever pitch fears of an impending \'African exodus\' to Europe. Despite the increasing, albeit sensational, attention irregular migration attracts on both sides of the Mediterranean, little is known about what shapes and influences the lives of these Africans before, during, and after their “migratory projects.” By privileging migrants' narratives and drawing on evidence-based field research from different disciplinary backgrounds, the volume demystifies and dislodges many common assumptions about the human ecology of irregular African migration to Europe, arguably one of the most widely debated, yet least understood, phenomenon of our time.