The APAD conference panel focuses on the empirical and "bottom-up" (Bayard 1981, 2008) study of people on the African continent confronted with Western migration management policies and the institutions that implement them. By anchoring themselves in the experiences and practices of African migrants, their strategies of action, their tactics, their capacity for resilience and resistance, their activism, the papers for this panel will be part of an anthropological approach that will enable us to understand the effects and counter-effects of these migration policies promoted by the West and the evolution of the figure of the migrant in the West on African social practices.

 The papers also sheds light on other issues linked to African realities, particularly geopolitical ones (situations of "crisis", wars of attrition, dirty wars, etc.), which help explain why and how people position themselves in the face of these migration management policies and programmes. This panel is therefore part of a non-normative anthropology with an empirical vocation, in a dynamist political anthropology (Balandier, 2007).