Rethinking mobilities: Solidarity and migrant struggles beyond narratives of crisis

Abstract

Recent mobilities towards Europe have been framed through a discourse of crisis. This discourse presents migratory movements as illegitimate and exceptional, and calls for the deployment of emergency measures in order to restore putative order and normality. In this article, I propose to think of mobilities beyond crisis. First, I challenge the notion that Europe is experiencing a migrant crisis by relocating recent mobilities in a larger history of confrontation between sovereign power and movement. Second, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with refugees and solidarity activists in order to bring to the fore wider histories of autonomous migrant struggles against Europe’s borders and to uncover alternative accounts of identity and subjectivity that are being enacted within ‘Europe’. Last, I examine the discourse of Mediterranean Solidarity mobilised by migrants and activists and assess the way in which it disrupts the dominant European geography of borders. This investigation allows us to perceive and assess existing forms of political and ethical community that transcend the citizen/non-citizen dichotomy and open up the possibilities of non-territorial imagination of identity and belonging.