Ever since the coming and going of ‘migrant crises’ at Europe’s borders, the EU and its member states have sought to control international migration flows. Yet whereas initiatives to stymie large inflows of migrants at Europe’s outer borders continue to attract widespread attention, the EU’s own efforts to manage the root causes of ‘irregular migration’ in Europe’s frontiers remain underexplored. One example of how the EU, aiming to tackle ‘the drivers of irregular migration’ from Africa, has tried to contain Europe’s African frontiers can be found in the shape of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF).

This paper examines the EU’s ‘development aid as migration control’ approach by zooming in on one of the EUTF-funded projects in Gambella, a regional state nestled between the borders of Ethiopia and South Sudan. Relying on interviews with 21 stakeholders involved with the project in question, I show that managing Ethiopian frontiers to stem the tide of migration is anything but a straightforward undertaking. Comparing and contrasting the relationship between the European Union as ‘project initiator’ and NGO’s as ‘implementing partners’, it transpires the relationship between the two is complex, messy, and multidimensional. Within this context, I argue that European efforts to control African frontier spaces are not to be viewed as top-down or unidirectional. Rather, managing migratory frontiers is a multidirectional affair, seldom yielding unambiguous or ‘satisfactory’ outcomes.

In recent years, EU institutions have intensified efforts to improve their image in African countries, motivated by geopolitical competition with China and growing criticism from African elites. Initiatives such as Team Europe and Global Gateway, social media campaigns and outreach to African journalists aim to raise the EU’s profile. Yet, the success of these endeavours remains uncertain. Drawing on marketing theories, we expect that “mere exposure” to EU strategic communication measures should enhance African citizens’ attitudes towards their countries’ cooperation with the EU. Using representative public opinion surveys in six African countries, our analysis supports this expectation. Having heard of Team Europe or Global Gateway or regularly hearing about the EU in the media is associated with positive views on the EU. We also find that the specific substantive profile African citizens attribute to the EU does not matter. Even citizens who view the EU primarily as an influential actor in controversial areas, such as migration, are likely to view the EU’s overall cooperation with their country positively. Our findings thereby indicate that the substance of EU actions has less influence on African public opinion than research on EU actorness or external perceptions would suggest.

In December 2021, the European Union launched the Global Gateway Strategy under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen to reposition EU development cooperation within this world-changing order by serving as a trusted partner in designing sustainable, high-quality projects without debt and delivering lasting social and economic benefits to local communities.

In February 2022, the Global Gateway Africa-EU investment package was unveiled, seeking to mobilise large-scale investment in infrastructure, digitalisation, energy transition, transport, health, and education. Framed as a values-based, partnership-oriented alternative to competing global connectivity initiatives, the Global Gateway Africa-EU initiative has sparked debate over the balance between development objectives and strategic interests.

This study critically assesses Global Gateway Africa as both a geopolitical strategy and a development cooperation instrument, situating it within broader debates on the EU’s role as a global development actor in a multipolar international system. Drawing on insights from critical political economy and contemporary development theory, the analysis foregrounds questions of agenda-setting, power and governance rather than treating development policy as a neutral or purely technical exercise. The study argues that while Global Gateway Africa holds potential to enhance EU–Africa development cooperation, its effectiveness is constrained by structural tensions between geopolitical imperatives and development objectives. These tensions reflect broader debates over whether EU development initiatives risk being shaped by strategic competition with other global actors rather than being driven primarily by African development priorities.

This study identifies three interrelated challenges. First, the increasing entanglement of development cooperation with geopolitical competition risks prioritising strategic visibility over needs-based development outcomes. Also, persistent power asymmetries constrain African agenda-setting capacity, raising questions about the depth of Global Gateway Africa's partnership and co-ownership. Lastly, the initiative's focus on infrastructure-led development, blended finance, and complex multi-actor governance frameworks complicates accountability and may undermine inclusive social outcomes if not managed effectively.

In response, the study proposes three policy priorities for the European Commission: strengthening agenda-setting procedures for African co-ownership, aligning geopolitical considerations with needs-based development criteria, and incorporating inclusive development benchmarks across Global Gateway Africa programmes. Rather than condemning the initiative, these recommendations emphasise recalibrating policy, reforming governance, and strategically prioritising within existing institutional constraints.

The study contributes to ongoing debates on the future of EU external action and the credibility of the EU as a global development actor in a contested international order.

The imperial afterlife is everywhere. Occupying a budding set of temporal connections, geographies of empire live on as malleable manifestations of politics, culture, and materiality as represented by peoples, objects, ideas, images, and events. Never truly ‘dead’, imperial afterlives are part of a diverse spectrum of imperial sustenance, manifesting themselves as rhythms of the past haunting the present in time and space. One such example of where imperial sustenance can be found is in the context of EU migration control, as also seen through the geopolitics of the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF for Africa).

This paper traces these imperial afterlives as maintained by the EUTF for Africa. Reading the EUTF as a contemporary expression of historical European attempts at managing African spaces, I demonstrate how the Trust Fund’s cartographical choices exhibit strong echoes of an imperial past. Focusing on the EUTF as a ‘mapping exercise’, I show how each of the three EUTF windows — including the window structure itself —contain important traces of a central but forgotten post-imperial project: Eurafrica. Weaving together Eurafrica as ‘past’ and the EUTF as ‘present’, the EU Trust Fund today is reflective of a tangled set of historical European-African relationships rearticulated through the contemporary context of EU migration control. Both a product of ‘the past’ as well as productive of ‘a past’ reanimated, and complicating our understanding of the relationship between ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’, the EUTF represents a panoply of imperial afterlives, hiding as they are in plain sight.