Search

Contemporary research on migration and border regimes highlights that migration produces effects beyond border control, as migrants act autonomously (at least partially) as individual or collective agents. On the discursive level, many representations tend to foster imaginaries of refugees as autonomous political fighters which overlooks their frequently peaceful aims and thereby ignores non-violent (micro)politics. Providing an example from Laura Otto’s fieldwork with young migrants on Malta, we claim first, that it is important for critical migration theory not to subsume diverse forms of agency and concrete actions of migrants too easily under the umbrella of the autonomy of migration, as autonomy is to be regarded as a highly ambivalent concept and not as an aim in itself. Second, we propose to clearly distinguish between belligerent and peaceful forms of political agency. Beyond an understanding of autonomy as combative by principle, a post-autonomous viewpoint takes interdependencies into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the fundamental relationship between migrants’ existential waiting in Athens and the polysemic EUropean border regime after the closure of the so called Balkan Route. A conception of the border as a regime, operating not just at physical borders or within mechanisms of European border externalization but unfolding its existential impact also within cities, allows to outline its practices of classification which deprive migrants of their possibility to act, to live and to move on. To think this regime as embedded in complex relations of a specific territorial assemblage makes it possible to connect these dynamic power relations of the EUropean border regime and the existential waiting of migrants with networks of resistance in Athens, whereas the latter are focusing on collective practices, ranging from a refusal of the long-term wait to concrete exit strategies, enabling migrants to speak and to act together on an equal level. Thus, these networks are an important factor of local changes and collective mutations of the dominance of the border regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction builds on recent debates, e.g. in the Berlin Migration Lab, that claim to connect, rather than separate the regimes governing borders and mobilities in joint, rather than separated research fields. We argue that this combined view allows us to investigate the power relations between the privileged freedom of movement of the Few (classified as global Northern, white travelers, tourists, expatriates) and the interdependent, entangled, stigmatized movements of the Many (declassified as global Southern, non-white migrants and refugees). We propose to focus on overlapping, intersecting mobilities_regimes to arrive at a broader understanding of dynamic assemblages of practices of mobilities and politics of de/regulation: assemblages in which also the category “migration” is positioned and negotiated in relation to other projects of mobility. The introduction invites to read the contributions to this volume of Movements from this conceptual angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]