1,721,065 research outputs found
The multiple genealogies of abolitionism: Undoing the detractive rights’ logics and the reform-revolution dichotomy
No full textThis chapter advances border abolitionism as a method for elaborating a critique of the border regime, focusing on the interlocking, racialised modes of mobility containment. An abolitionist perspective, the chapter argues, challenges migrants’ confinement beyond the distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants and, thus, dismantles the very logics of migration confinement and kidnapping. Abolitionism as an approach, equips us with the analytical tools for engaging in transformative political processes while undoing the binary opposition between democratising borders or removing them: indeed, the specificity of abolitionist practices consists in holding together processes of dismantling and building up. The chapter contends that it is key to multiply the genealogies of abolitionism, by de-centring US-focused framing of it. In order to do that, it draws attention to the movement against psychiatric hospitals, called Psichiatria Democratica, led by Franco Basaglia in Italy, between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s. The anti-asylums movement, as this chapter illustrates, has been of inspiration to struggles against prisons across Europe and more broadly against the confinement continuum, and it has been key for developing abolitionism beyond the reform/revolution dichotomy
A Passport to Freedom? COVID-19 and the Re-bordering of the World
No full textThis paper argues that COVID-19 has triggered a multiplication of heterogeneous bordering mechanisms that, far from stopping movement as such, have enhanced hierarchies of mobility. In particular, it shows that a confinement continuum has been put in place in the name of the contain to protect principle: migrants have been subjected to protracted lockdown measures in the name of their own protection. The piece concludes by interrogating how to rearticulate critique in COVID times in light of the enforcement of discriminatory passports to freedom (COVID-19 travel certificates)
Border abolitionism: Migrants' containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue
No full textBuilding on an abolitionist perspective, this book offers an essential critique of migration and border policies, unsettling the distinction between migrants and citizens. This is the only book that brings together carceral abolitionist debates and critical migration literature. It explores the multiplication of modes of migration confinement and detention in Europe, examining how these are justified in the name of migrants' protection. It argues that the collective memory of past struggles has partly informed current solidarity movements in support of migrants. A grounded critique of migration policies involves challenging the idea that migrants' rights go to the detriment of citizens. An abolitionist approach to borders entails situating the right to mobility as part of struggle for the commons
Infrastructural clashes: Induced scarcity and governing refugees through depletion
No full textThis paper deals with the repeated infrastructural breakdowns in Greek refugee camps. It introduces the concept of “infrastructural clashes” to highlight the apparent clash between, on the one hand, high-tech control systems and, on the other, the failures and scarcity of basic infrastructures in camps - such as electricity, running water and food. It argues that infrastructural clashes are not side-effects but, rather, constitutive components of modes of governing by debilitating refugees. The article starts by developing the concept of infrastructural clashes, grounding it in the literature on camp geographies and migration infrastructures. It moves on by exploring the nexus between infrastructural clashes and politics of induced scarcity in Greece, illustrating how this depletes refugees and extracts value from their vitality. It contends that they enhance carcerality beyond detention. The last section engages with refugees’ mobilisations against induced scarcity: their claims foreground that infrastructural clashes enhance protracted dependency. The depletion strengthened through infrastructural clashes shows that refugees are not only obstructed in their mobility but also in their attempt to re-build their lives and to engage in autonomous social reproduction activities
Migration and the racialised politics of desire
Full text linkThis article interrogates the reservations in the Left in Europe towards claims for freedom of
movement and stay. The piece argues that an unequal right to desire – conceived as an aspiration
move, to stay and to seek for a better life – underpins those criticisms and suggests that for
developing counter-politics of migration, it is key to challenge such racialised predicament. The
first section shows how expansive claims for equal access to mobility and the right to stay are
discredited as utopian and non-realistic. The second section unsettles the politics of number
that sustains public discourses on migration showing that this can be turned to the advantage
of arguments in support of border controls. It moves on contending that a critique of racialising
borders needs to unpack the unequal right to desire. The fourth section draws attention to the
nexus between the disruption of futurity and the unequal right to desire and argues that this
enables tracing connections between migrants and (some) citizens through the lens of dispossessed
future. It suggests that the allegedly utopian character of claims for freedom of movement does
not the depend on the failure of past struggles but on the unquestioned racialised right to desir
Refugees’(In) dependency Conundrum: Obstructed Social Reproduction Activities and Unpaid Labour in Refugee Camps.
Full text linkThis 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
Producing the intolerable: Anti-prison struggles, abolitionist genealogies
Full text linkIn this piece, I focus on the interconnected political genealogies of the prison revolts in the US and in France, and on the partially different angles of attack and claims they mobilised, bearing in mind that such struggles took place in a larger world context of prison uprisings. While events were unfolding in the early 1970s, the members of Le groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), or the Prison Information Group, in France referred frequently in their texts to the revolts in the prisons in the US, they supported the Black Panthers, and Michel Foucault himself visited Attica in 1972. Yet, on the US side, the knowledge of what was happening in France was quite limited. This was partly due to linguistic factors – in the US the experience of the GIP was not well known, and their texts were mostly untranslated. Retracing these partially interconnected political genealogies nonetheless enables us to foreground the resonances and mutual influences between struggles that would otherwise remain bounded within national frameworks
If the border is not a downstream of technology - Excavating sedimented bordering mechanisms and emergent racisms
No full textComment/response to Louise Amoore's keynote at the Royal Geographic Conference (RGS, London 2021)
Extractive humanitarianism: Unpaid labour and participatory detention in refugees' governmentality
No full textThis chapter interrogates the political economy of labour and the modes of value extraction which are at play in refugee governmentality. It centres on “extractive humanitarianism”, which consists in humanitarian interventions which capitalise upon unpaid refugees’ labour and on the repeated extraction of data from refugees’ mobility and activities. The essay focuses on Cash Assistance Programmes for asylum seekers to data extraction activities in refugee camps and explores the labour economies at stake there. It opens with a literature review about how labour and value are analysed in refugee and migration studies, considering works that discuss the so called “migration industry”, states’ exploitation of migrants’ labour force, and the labour performed by humanitarian actors and volunteers. The chapter argues that cashless economies and data extraction processes enable considering two other labour activities which are key to the governing of refugees. First, refugees as debit card beneficiaries perform unpaid labour, as they produce data through their transactions which are key for the datafication of their mobility. Related to this, refugees are at the same time requested to perform free labour by producing data and providing feedback concerning their use of the debit cards. Second, techno-humanitarianism requires labour on the part of international organisations and humanitarian actors for populating databases, keeping them up to date and make data circulate. The chapter concludes by illustrating how extractive humanitarianism generates value not only through migrant detention and border security industry but also by capitalising on refugees’ activities and mobility
Genealogia dei passaggi migranti e del lavoro imbrigliato alla frontiera alpina.
No full textThis article traces a genealogy of migrant passages and border controls practices at the French-Italian Alpine border building on Moulier-Boutang’s conceptualisation of “bridled labour” and autonomy of migration’ s reflections on the “right to escape”. It argues that for developing a critique of the border regime it is key to intertwine an analysis of migration controls with one of labour mobility. Drawing on archival research and interviews, the piece retraces the history of how some of people who crossed the Alpine frontier in the past had been turned into “migrants” and how they had been classified by French and Italian authorities. In the second part, the article takes into account the way in which migrants and refugees’ labour mobility has been channelled and regulated by the French government in the twentieth century. In the final section, it traces a genealogy of mountain rescue to investigate how solidarity practices developed through the encounter between rescuers and migrants
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