How Migrant Movements Radically Transform Borders

Un très bon texte, #merci @cdb_77

What this means is that there is an additional challenge for — and an additional border within — the social movement for free mobility. It is the way we perceive what is political and important about this struggle. These everyday acts of escape are often less valued than the more expressly “political” parts of this movement. They often go unrecognized as resistance by the movement itself, and by those who view and comment on it. This weakens the movement.

Behind all the headline-grabbing actions are all those numerous micro-resistances and everyday, even mundane, subversions. We need to better recognize that struggles for the freedom of movement take place at the everyday level of life-making, as well as in the “big-P” political actions of demonstrations and press statements.

A mettre en lien avec cet autre article, scientifique cette fois-ci, d’une jeune chercheuse que j’aime beaucoup :

Containment through mobility : migrants’ spatial disobediences and the reshaping of control through the hotspot system

This article deals with the modes of (contested) control that are at play at the Mediterranean frontier for containing, dividing and discipling unruly mobility. Building on ethnographic research conducted on the island of Lesvos and of Lampedusa, it focuses on the implementation and the functioning of the Hotspot System in Greece and in Italy, analysing beyond the fences of detention centres and by looking at the broader logistics of channels, infrastructures and governmental measures deployed for regaining control over migration movements. The article argues that more than control in terms of surveillance and tracking, the Hotspot System contributes to enforce forms of containment through mobility that consists in controlling migration by obstructing, decelerating and troubling migrants’ geographies – more than in fully blocking them. The article takes into account migrants’ refusals of being fingerprinted, showing how migrants radically unsettle the association between seeking refuge and lack of choice, enacting their right to choose where to go and claim asylum.

▻https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1401514