This article proposes ‘biopolitics multiple’ as an approach to the heterogeneity of biopolitical technologies deployed to govern migration today. Building on work that has started to develop ...analytical vocabularies to diagnose biopolitical technologies that work neither by fostering life nor by making people die in a necropolitical sense, it conceptualises ‘extraction’ and ‘subtraction’ as two such technologies that take ‘hold’ of migrants’ lives today. Extraction, explored in the article through a focus on borderzones in Greece, captures the imbrication of biopolitics and value through the ‘outside’ creation of the economic conditions of data circulation. Subtraction, which is analysed in this article through a focus on Calais, captures the practices of (partial) non-governing by taking material and legal terrain away from migrants and reconfiguring convoluted geographies of (forced) hyper-mobility. This move allows us to understand the governmentality of migration beyond binary oppositions such as ‘making live/letting die’, biopolitics/necropolitics and inclusion/exclusion.
Biopolítica múltiple: migración, extracción, sustracción
This paper looks at current migrant crossing on the Alps from the standpoint of a history of runaways. It interrogates the traces left by the recent migrants’ fleeting presence at the Northern ...French-Italian Alpine border situating these in connection with both the memory of past migrants’ passages and with mountain rescue practices and solidarity networks that have shaped those Alpine valleys. It starts with a section on mobile infrastructures of solidarity deployed at the French-Italian Alpine border, retracing its brief history as well as of the sedimented memory of the struggles in the Susa Valley. The paper moves on with a section about the history of mountain rescue at the French-Alpine border, showing how foreigners and also Italian “clandestine emigrants” were rescued there in the past. It concludes by advancing a history of mountain runaways as an analytical framework to politicise migrants’ passages on the Alps.
L’articolo analizza, prendendo la prospettiva di una storia dei fuggitivi, gli attuali transiti dei migranti attraverso le Alpi. Si interroga sulle tracce lasciate dalla presenza fuggevole dei ...migranti al confine alpino tra la Francia e l’Italia, leggendole in connessione sia con la memoria delle mobilità del passato sia con le pratiche del soccorso alpino e delle reti di solidarietà che hanno toccato queste stessi valli. L’articolo inizia con una parte sulle infrastrutture mobili di solidarietà dispiegate al confine alpino franco-italiano, tracciandone la loro breve storia e mettendola in parallelo con la memoria sedimentata delle lotte in Val di Susa. L’articolo continua approfondendo la storia del soccorso alpino al confine franco-italiano, indicando come gli stranieri così come gli “emigranti clandestini” italiani siano stati salvati in questa stessa zona in passato. Infine, si conclude proponendo il concetto di “storia dei fuggitivi” in montagna come quadro teorico che permette una lettura politica dell’attraversamento delle Alpi da parte dei migranti.
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.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
•When spatial restrictions are not sufficient for containing migration, temporal borders are enacted.•The implementation of the Hotspot System has contributed to accelerate the temporality of ...migration control.•Lampedusa and Lesbos are privileged sites for grasping the temporality of control.•The Hotspot System contributes to slow down migrants’ speed.•Temporal borders multiply migration profiles and categories, producing degrees of irregularity.
This article starts from the non-juridical meaning of subjectivity that counter-conducts entail and from the asymmetrical forms of refusal they generate. Foucault’s understanding of counter-conducts ...as productive practices, internal to the regime of norms that they oppose, enables analysing struggles and modes of life that were not defined by Foucault in these terms, or those counter-conducts that are more recent. In the first section, the article engages with the meaning of “counter-conduct,” situating it within the omnes et singulatim nexus, interrogating how the level of multiplicities is at stake in contemporary forms of counter-conduct. Then, it focuses on The Punitive Society, showing that the modes of life and strategies of flight against the capitalist system described by Foucault allow us to grasp the excess of discordant conducts with respect to technologies of power that try to discipline them. In the final section, the article explores the entanglement between singularities and multiplicities at play in the government of refugees, focusing on the spatial disobedience enacted by rejected refugees at Choucha refugee camp in Tunisia. Refugees’ strategic embracement of the condition of subjects eminently governed by the humanitarian rationale illuminates a form of biopolitics of the governed.
This article deals with the ways in which migrants are controlled, contained and selected after landing in Italy and in Greece, drawing attention to strategies of containment aimed at disciplining ...mobility and showing how they are not narrowed to detention infrastructures. The article starts by tracing a genealogy of the use of the term ‘hotspot’ in policy documents and suggests that the multiplication of hotspots-like spaces is related to a reconceptualisation of the border as a critical site that requires prompt enforcement intervention. The article moves on by investigating the mechanisms of partitioning, identification and preventive illegalisation that are at stake in the hotspots of Lampedusa and Lesbos. Hotspots are not analysed here as sites of detention per se: rather, the essay turns the attention to the channels of forced mobility that are connected to the Hotspot System, focusing in particular on the forced transfers of migrants from the Italian cities of Ventimiglia and Como to the hotspot of Taranto. The article concludes by analysing channels of forced mobility in the light of the fight against ‘secondary movements’ that is at the core of the current European Union’s political agenda, suggesting that further academic research could engage in a genealogy of practices of migration containment.
This article focuses on the twofold relationship between migrants’ mobility and modes of government, suggesting that mobility is an object of government and, at once, a technique for governing ...migrants. It focuses on mobility as a technology of government, investigating how intra-European migration movements are managed by national authorities, with particular attention to illegalized migrants who fall under the Dublin Regulation. Building on ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017, the article centres first on the Italian–French border (Ventimiglia) and on the Swiss–Italian border (Como). Then, it moves on exploring how migrants are currently managed in France, being transferred from Calais to hosting centres across the country. It highlights how migrants’ movements are controlled, disrupted and diverted not (only) through detention and immobility but by generating effects of containment keeping migrants on the move and forcing them to engage in convoluted geography. It shows that one of the main strategies for governing migration through mobility consists in the politics of migrant dispersal, that is by scattering migrants across spaces and dividing emergent migrant groups.
This article uses the analytical lens of (in)dependency conundrum to highlight how asylum seekers in refugee camps are pushed to be self‐reliant while, however, their autonomous social reproduction ...activities and spaces of liveability are hindered. Focusing on Greece, it intertwines critical migration scholarship with feminist geography literature on unpaid labour to investigate refugees’ obstructed social reproduction activities. It moves on by exploring the (in)dependency conundrum that refugees face in Greece from a condition of protracted carcerality enforced beyond detention. In the third section it highlights the continuum between social reproduction activities and other unpaid labours done by asylum seekers in camps, as a result of humanitarianism’ s subtle coercion. In the last section it draws attention to refugees’ collective mobilisations in Greek refugee camps: raising punctual demands about food and accommodation, they articulated expansive claims about their right to autonomous social reproduction activities and to build infrastructures of liveability.
This paper focuses on the “grey area of migration governmentality” by dealing with modes of border violence which are opaque and remain under the threshold of political visibility and that, however, ...highly disrupt and hamper migrants' lives and movements. It starts by conceptualising the notion of “grey area” by building on scholarship that questions the biopolitical formula “making live/letting die” highlighting modes of governing migration through choking and injuring. Building on that, the paper shows that the grey area consists of heterogenous political technologies that choke migrants and disrupt their infrastructures of liveability. In light of that, it moves on by analysing how migrants across Europe are contained and governed by being choked and cramped, with a specific focus on Calais and Ventimiglia. The third section shows that to be disrupted are not only migrants’ but also their infrastructures of liveability: migrants are hampered from building collective spaces of life. In the last part, the article comes to grips with opacity as a constitutive feature of the grey area of governmentality, analysing how this is played out both in local decrees and through police tactics.
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