 Like Sean, my empirical starting point will be with the recent major transformations in migration dynamics across and around the Mediterranean that has affected very, you know, importantly the whole region and beyond. But while my primary focus, so to speak, is European responses, my main focus is indeed on what these responses are producing in terms of impact on African politics as one of the main, you know, targets of these poor partners, if you want to put it differently, of this new policy approach to some extent new policy approach. Just briefly, the ground I will try to cover in these 20 minutes, first some background quickly on recent African migration to Europe and how it shapes our perceptions and policies. Then I will say something on what I consider the key developments, namely a dramatic change in policy priorities of European Union and member states with a growing prioritization of Sub-Saharan Africa in European policies on migration, but also the other way around a growing prioritization of migration in other policies of European actors in Africa. Then I'll come to my fundamental interest, which is in this paper of the impact of such changing priorities on African countries and on African politics, which is I think a crucial but still quite neglected issue, both in the policy domain, but also in the scholarly domain. And I will say a few words if I have time on the kind of theoretical tools that I try to apply to the study of this topic and introduce briefly this concept that I try to propose of negative extroversion. And then finally, if I have time again, some brief remarks on implications for future research and particularly for Afro-European cooperation in the field of migration policy studies for the future. Now briefly on perceptions of what has been happening in the last few years across the Mediterranean and around it. If one Googles African migrants just like this, what comes out as a first image is this kind of image. So a very peculiar and very partial representation of a destitute, disorderly, chaotic, and miserable, and potentially threatening phenomenon, which is something which is clearly not representative. Professor Tarp reminded us how South-South migration is still largely predominant, but this is what comes out in a global arena if you try to give these two keywords. African migrants. And the official narrative, at least in Europe, reflects this kind of distorted perception. Frontex, which is the European border agency, talks in its last strategy report of a steady increase in migration pressure from the African continent and in particular West Africa. Now is this correct? It depends on where you look and what you look for. If you look at irregular crossings of the Mediterranean to South Europe, the nationality of those arriving in particularly in Italy, which is currently the main point of disembarkation of arrival, indeed Western African countries are prominently represented, but this is certainly just one of the modes of the types of the channels of migration from Africa to Europe, although by far the most visible and the most influential one in shaping perceptions and policies, at least in the global North and certainly in Europe. This is the first two quarters of 2017. You see, Nigeria is the largest-sending country, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and others, much smaller than what currently is the Middle East that has been until the closure of a so-called Balkan route, the largest-sending Basie. And then you have Bangladesh as an important sending, but crossing through Libya as well. Now, all this situation is tightly and strongly associated with a contingent situation in Libya. These are irregular arrivals in Italy over the last few years, and you see that the peaks in 2018 and 2014, then with a stabilizing on very high numbers, are both connected with key developments in Libya. So all this situation is almost inextricably associated with the specific policy developments in a given country, which is Libya, which has turned into the main gate of access for this type of African migration to the European continent. 2016 has been an old-time peak with substantial, like always, seasonal variations when you talk about maritime migration. Total arrivals were, as I said, as I showed in the previous picture, over 180,000. What happens in 2017, the trend has been reversed recently. I give this just as a brief background. Arrivals in 2017 and in the 15th of September have gone down, considering the seasonal effects to 100,000, which is still sizable. But there is a very clear decrease after August, which are normally months of very important arrivals, volumes. The reason why there was this, if not closure, major reduction of arrivals through the Libyan route is a long-standing diplomatic effort, mainly by Italian authorities, which has brought results in the final few weeks and months. We have a meeting between the Prime Minister of Italy and Faisal Sarraj, the Prime Minister of Government in Tripoli in February, a meeting with leaders of southern tribes, and the Ministry of Interior of Italy, a very unusual kind of diplomatic configuration, and again, Minister of Interior of Italy with his counterparts in Niger, Chad, and Libya. This has produced results and basically is, so far, creating a major reduction of arrivals across Libya. But beside Libya, and here I shift to Africa, to sub-Saharan Africa, which is the main sending basin for these kind of flows, sub-Saharan Africa has emerged over the last couple of years as a key priority for European migration policies. I try to very quickly reconstruct the evolution of European policy responses to this crisis. There was first an attempt to manage it, to fix it internally by redistributing arrivals among member states. You know, there was the adoption of a sort of relocation program in order to distribute those arriving amongst all the 28 member states, and not only the countries of first arrival and final destination, namely Germany and Sweden mainly, this failed dramatically. Under this failure of internal responses, there was a very dramatic shift to external responses. If we cannot welcome them in a homogeneous and balanced way, we'll try to stop them from coming, you know, to prevent arrival. And this shift to an external response had a very crucial turning point in March 2016, with the agreement with Turkey that, as you know, brought to an end of transit across the Balkans to Eastern and Central and Northern Europe, mainly. In all this, Africa emerges as a key priority in the fall of 2015 with a big summit of EU African Union leaders in Valetta, in Malta, followed by the adoption of an EU emergency trust for addressing root causes of irregular migration as the official language of the European Union goes, and an injection, a substantial injection of development fund aimed at preventing migration through this fund and other financial facility. June 17, the European Union launched its partnership framework with third countries for purposes of mitigation of a migratory pressure. So a partnership framework with third countries, but it is essentially about African countries, Sub-Saharan African countries, and particularly about a handful of African countries that have been singled out as absolute priorities for this new wave in European policies on migration. And the official priorities of a new partnership framework are these five countries, Senegal, Malini, Jair, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. In the policy of the European Union, however, there are also other priorities, well, two are obvious, and we get back to the Sean's presentation, Lebanon and Jordan has two major receivers who are in need of help in order not to release these big numbers that they were able to retain. This is in the perspective of many decision-makers in Brussels and elsewhere. There are some unofficial priorities that cannot be directly and explicitly addressed in a policy because there are some somehow critical situations that you cannot easily address in an explicit and formal way, so Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia are certainly at the core of the diplomatic and policy and security effort in this case. And then you have this constant semi-official super priority, which is Libya, which is the main channel for these flows in this highly-securitized Belt and Chown that is emerging in European capitals associated with African migration. This, I argue, it's a deep transformation of European strategic approach to Africa and it is not just a prioritization of sub-Saharan Africa in European migration policies, which is clear, but it is also, as I said, the other way around, a prioritization of migration in other policy areas. So migration becomes prominent in particularly in the field of development policies with these ideas, these ideas of addressing root causes of migration as a priority for development policies, but it also becomes crucial in the area of trade, for instance, think of the great centrality that migration is assuming in the debate on the future of the EU-ACP partnership under the post-Cotonou framework. So what is emerging, I argue, is a sort of pan-migratory approach where the migratory variable becomes key in driving policy choices, strategic policy choices by European actors in the African context. This has, I think, attracted insufficient public attention, but particularly scholarly attention, certainly in Europe. This approach, this pan-migratory approach, I'm really running through maybe too many contents that I put in this presentation, but is relying upon, is based upon some fundamental conceptual ambiguities and practical dysfunctionalities. Conceptually, it is heavily based on a very questionable assumption, namely that development can be a way to prevent migration. We know that most economic and social sciences literature points in the opposite direction, in this phase, more or less the opposite, although it's much more complex than this, and here I'm in a temple of development economics, but the idea that root causes can be addressed and therefore migration can be stamped is very much at the core, at least of the official policy agenda of the European Union in this phase. Practically, in the short term, the money doesn't even go to development because it goes primarily to security objectives, so to border control strategies rather than to development priorities and development actors, and I'm getting back to this and to the implications of such distribution of aid in a second. The risk, just to characterize this very, very, maybe in a simplistic and quick way, but is that this approach, this unbalanced approach, brings to a temporary reduction of migration pressure, of course, but maybe to a constant, if not augmented, propensity to emigrate plus other perverse effects. I'm trying to explain this, well, just briefly, my theoretic, maybe I'll drop this because I'll have an attempt at finding some, at forging some theoretical tools to explain this in the paper, and I think I should rather send you there for this, but getting back to the negative side effects of an unbalanced migration control externalization. The first phenomenon, these are not research findings, I must say, but rather research hypothesis for a research agenda that I think we should probably think of developing together. The relationship between donors in this phase, this type of donors, is mainly with security apparatuses in what are singled out as key sending and transit countries for this kind of irregular migration, which is the core concern for Europeans, and channeling money on security apparatuses, of course, creates unbalances, further unbalances in policies which are sometimes already quite unbalanced from that point of view, and some possible examples of unintended, indirect negative effects of this kind have been pointed out by advocates, but by policy advocates, but also by researchers in countries as diverse as Ethiopia, Turkey, Sudan, it is very hard to substantiate this kind of general assessment on the policy impact at such a strategic level, but it is something that should closely monitor, but also research in a systematic and consistent way. Another problem with this, you know, what can be roughly maybe a bit brutally called outsourcing of migration repression is that it can undermine consensus to local governing elite, because basically it is a delegation of migration control on their own people to local governance. In certain contexts, this is very clear, and for instance, there are scholars of the so-called Arab Spring who argue that the restrictions to emigration for Arab youth was one of the components in creating the explosive potential that generated the Arab Springs in 2011. A third possible, you know, strength of unintended effects, yes, thank you, is on enhanced pressure to beef up, to reinforce border controls also in sending and transit regions may have a disrupting effect on attempts at regional economic integration, and this is something that has been witnessed in the past in the western Balkans, for instance, with the introduction of hard borders in areas which used to be areas of relatively free exchange of persons and goods, and this is something that, you know, has been seen emerging also in the ECOWAS region, and again, this is not a hard research finding, but rather suggestions and hypotheses for future research. Finally, increased controls is demonstrated to be also a boost to irregular migration and particularly to those who are able to capitalize on demand for irregular migration. Effects of this kind, professionalization of smugglers and incentive to corruption have been clearly observed along the frontera in North America, between Mexico and the US, similar effects are being witnessed of displacement and reinforcement of irregular trends and smuggling trends are witnessed, this is mainly, you know, kind of journalistic accounts and some research accounts in places such as Niger and other Saharan localities. Perhaps even more fundamentally, and I will conclude with this slide, what is at stake is international standards and values, I'll read, yes, just let me read these few lines, if I may, governments in Africa are watching what Europe is doing. They see how Europe wants to prevent migration because Europeans think of migration as a problem. As a consequence, some of our government, it is of course an African person who speaks, are changing their approach and copying the European template. They have started to make deals with other countries to make sure that people stay there. Some African governments are now using Europe as an excuse for not taking responsibility. They say, if Europe doesn't do it, why should we with fewer resources do it? This was, I think, a very effective discourse by a person who is an executive director for South Africa of Oxfam during the European development days in Brussels just a few months ago, and I think I would like to conclude with these, I think, very thoughtful and powerful words. Thank you.