Revisiting the omnes et singulatim bond: The production of irregular conducts and the biopolitics of the governed

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

Governing refugees through disorientation: Fragmented knowledges and forced technological mediations

This article investigates the fragmented knowledges that migrants need to deal with in order to get access to asylum, and the related effects of disorientation it generates on them. The piece argues that disorientation is as a constitutive political technology of refugee governance and develops this argument by focusing on the Greek asylum system. It starts by drawing attention to the multiple technological steps and forced digital intermediations that asylum seekers in Greece need to navigate, focusing in particular on the Cash Assistance Programme, and it shows how asylum seekers need to deal with dispersed knowledges. The article moves on by analysing how the governing through disorientation underpin the asylum legal system in Greece and how this ends up in debilitating asylum seekers and hampering them from accessing rights and humanitarian support. The final section explores how asylum seekers are racialised and treated as deceitful subjects, and argues that not only their speech but also their conduct and behaviour are assumed to be deceptive, and therefore their knowledge turns out to be pointless. It concludes by challenging claims for more transparency and more knowledge as a response to the governing through disorientation

The making of racialized subjects: Practices, history, struggles

My intervention advances two related methodological and epistemic pathways. First, it foregrounds heterogeneous biopolitical technologies connected but not limited to security and humanitarianism, and warns against the dehistoricization of migrants and refugees. Second, going beyond an exclusive focus on representation and discourses, it draws attention to racializing administrative and legal practices. In the conclusion, I draw attention to anti-racist struggles and coalitions, arguing that a political reading of racialized security practices should start from that. Indeed, engaging with the partial neglect of race in international relations ‘is more than simply a matter of talking about race’ (Gupta and Virdee, 2018: 1748). Nor should an insight into racialization be incorporated just as a corrective to the Eurocentrism of critical security studies. Here, I mobilize racialization as a referent to scrutinize recursive security practices and, at the same time, to shed light on the history of anti-racist transversal struggles

The politics of migrant dispersal. Policing and dividing migrant multiplicities

This article focuses on the politics of migrant dispersal that has been enforced in Europe for regaining control over ‘unruly’ migrants’ presence and movements, with a specific focus on the French and on the Italian contexts. The article shows that dispersal can be considered as a spatial strategy of governmentality and that far from being a new policy, it was already adopted to manage former colonised populations. The article argues that strategies of migrant dispersal are today enacted by state authorities, in collaboration with humanitarian actors, for troubling migrants’ presence and autonomous movements, as well as for disrupting and dividing temporary migrant collective formations. First, it retraces a colonial genealogy of dispersal, as a political technology used for disciplining unruly populations. Then, it analyses how dispersal strategies have been put into place in France (Calais and Paris) and in Italy (Ventimiglia) not only by scattering migrants across space but also by dismantling migrant spaces of life (‘lieux de vie’). The article moves on demonstrating that the politics of dispersal is mainly enforced for preventing the consolidation of migrant multiplicities, criminalising them as ‘migrant mobs’ and spatially dividing them. The third section of the article brings attention to the effects of migrants’ forced hypermobility and to the convoluted geographies that dispersal triggers. It concludes by bringing attention to the increasing criminalisation of migrant support networks that try to prevent the dismantling of migrant autonomous spaces

A “Passport to Freedom”? COVID-19 and the Re-bordering of the World

This 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)

Which Europe?: Migrants’ uneven geographies and counter-mapping at the limits of representation

Looking at three snapshots of migrant struggles in Europe, this paper deals with the limits and the challenges of representing migration. Starting from that, it investigates the theoretical and political challenges of mapping migration – both as a cartographic practice and as a form of narrative. The article mobilizes a counter-mapping analytics which looks at the European space through the spatial transformations generated by migration movements

The technological obstructions of asylum: Asylum seekers as forced techno-users and governing through disorientation

This article deals with the technologies and apps that asylum seekers need to navigate as forced hindered techno-users in order to get access to asylum and financial support. With a focus on the Greek refugee system, it discusses the multiple technological intermediations that asylum seekers face when dealing with the cash assistance programme and how asylum seekers are obstructed in accessing asylum and financial support. It explores the widespread disorientation that asylum seekers experience as they navigate un-legible techno-scripts that change over time. The article critically engages with the literature on the securitization and victimization of refugees, and it argues that asylum seekers are not treated exclusively as potential threats or as victims, but also as forced hindered subjects; that is, they are kept in a condition of protracted uncertainty during which they must find out the multiple technological and bureaucratic steps they are requested to comply with. In the final section, the article illustrates how forced technological mediations actually reinforce asylum seekers’ dependence on humanitarian actors and enhance socio-legal precarity

Excavating the genealogies of struggles and of the migrant mob

Response to book forum on "The Making of Migration" (Tazzioli, Sage, 2019)

What is Left of Migrants’ Spaces? Transversal Alliances and the Temporality of Solidarity

This article deals with the political legacy of migrants’ spaces across Europe that are the outcome of border enforcement policies but that are also shaped by migrants’ struggles and movements. It interrogates what is left, after their vanishing forced eviction, at the level of spatial-political traces, as well as in the collective memory of the citizens of those places. The main argument of the piece is that in order to come to grips with these spaces beyond their ephemeral dimension, we need to consider the temporality of migrant struggles and of solidarity practices – between migrants and citizens. The article focuses, first, on the French-Italian Alpine border, and analyses how the sedimented memory of the struggles in that valley has been reactivated in the present to support the migrants in transit. Then, the article moves on by developing the notion of transversal alliances through an insight into the Gilets Noirs movement in France, a collective of undocumented migrants which mobilised towards getting to permit to stay and accommodation, while at the same time framing their struggle as a broader battle against precarity and exploitation. The piece concludes suggesting that by bringing in the genealogy of struggles and solidarity practices, migrants’ spaces appear as part of a precarious mobile common in the making