The theme for the chair's plenaries at the 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS‐IBG) Annual Conference is ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’. This commentary explains why this pursuit of critical consciousness via decolonial thinking could do more harm than good. We show how the emphasis on decolonising geographical knowledges rather than structures, institutions and praxis reproduces coloniality, because it recentres non‐Indigenous, white and otherwise privileged groups in the global architecture of knowledge production. It is argued that an effective decolonial movement within geography must recognise the intersectionality of indigeneity and race, and necessitates that the terms on which the discipline starts debates about decolonisation and decoloniality are determined by those racialised as Indigenous and non‐white by coloniality.

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/This article investigates the rationale leading growing numbers of West African males to pursue a career\ud in professional football, by taking the particular case of male youth in Accra and exploring how and why\ud they are drawn into the football industry. Football is used as a lens to extend contemporary geographical\ud debates over the agency, resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people residing in the Global\ud South. The transition from junior to senior secondary school is found to be a pivotal moment within many\ud of the biographical accounts collected in Accra. I use theorisations of youth in sub-Saharan Africa to conceptualise\ud this moment as a vital conjuncture, and shed light on how a career in football is now seen as a\ud way to circumvent an education system considered to lead to unemployment, or unacceptable employment.\ud Significantly, against a backdrop of neoliberal reform and an absence of state welfare, the perception\ud that a career in professional football offers a means to create an income and be self-sufficient is very\ud appealing. But it also offers more than that. It provides a means to demonstrate one’s masculinity, specifically,\ud displays of wealth through conspicuous consumption, behaviour that young Ghanaians refer\ud to as living the X-Way. It is argued that for male Ghanaian youth, the professional football player who\ud is able to draw upon his latent sporting bodily capital and live the X-Way embodies resourcefulness.\ud He is his own enterprise, a Foucauldian ‘entrepreneur of self’

This paper is embargoed until February 2018.During the past decade, there has been an increased focus on mobility in the social sciences linked to the so-called ‘mobility turn’, which claims that as mobility is so pervasive it should not be viewed as a rupture in society but as a normal way of life. This is certainly the case in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa where mobility forms an integral part of livelihood and income-generating activities. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research conducted in Accra, the capital of Ghana, this paper explores the mobility of urban residents in differing parts of the city in relation to their livelihood strategies. Through illustrating the ways in which the mobility of urban residents is aided or hindered by Accra’s transport system, and by examining how this in turn influences their livelihood strategies, the paper contributes to an alternative new mobilities paradigm that is more considerate of, and builds upon insights from, the global South where such research has a longer pedigree than in the global North

The migration of male African youth within the football industry—particularly cases involving human trafficking—has become a subject of academic and political interest. This paper contributes to work on this topic and to literature on the agency of youth in the urban Global South by turning the academic gaze away from European actors and settings, and towards their African counterparts. Drawing upon research conducted in Ghana, the paper reveals how youth perceive migration through football as a solution to the socioeconomic uncertainty and life constraints facing them in neoliberal Accra. This perception is tied to broader representations of spatial mobility as a precursor for social mobility. Youth attempt to achieve spatial mobility through football by ‘trying their luck’, a form of social navigation that is used to mediate the uncertainty associated with this strategy for realizing spatial change. Through illustrating why youth want to be spatially mobile and how they attempt to do so through football, this paper demonstrates why studies of African football migration need to engage better with how conditions inside the football industry interact with those beyond it.

The association between the football industry and the trafficking of West African youth has captivated academic, media and political interest. This article uses football trafficking as a case study to think through the broader conception of mobile African male bodies in football migration and trafficking discourses. I contribute to and move beyond existing literature on African football migration by stepping away from structural approaches currently used to conceptualise this migratory process. This is achieved by bringing migrants' subjectivities to the fore, and in doing so I also provide a novel critique of policy responses to irregular football migration. The article draws on data obtained from migrants who left West Africa for Europe, exploring the journeys these would-be footballers took, and their trajectories and circumstances after arrival. The central argument is that existing policy responses frame irregular football migrants as being ‘better off at home’. Problematically this creates a tension as for many of these migrants their country of origin is precisely where they do not want to be. Consequently, many remain in destination countries illegally without any means of subsistence.