Content uploaded by Vassilis Tsianos
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Vassilis Tsianos on Apr 27, 2017
Content may be subject to copyright.
This article was downloaded by: [Lancaster University Library]
On: 26 April 2013, At: 02:27
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Citizenship Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccst20
After citizenship: autonomy of
migration, organisational ontology and
mobile commons
Dimitris Papadopoulos a & Vassilis S. Tsianos b
a School of Management, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1
7RH, UK
b Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Allende-Platz
1, 20146, Hamburg, Germany
Version of record first published: 25 Apr 2013.
To cite this article: Dimitris Papadopoulos & Vassilis S. Tsianos (2013): After citizenship: autonomy
of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons, Citizenship Studies, 17:2, 178-196
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2013.780736
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-
conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary
sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and
mobile commons
Dimitris Papadopoulos
a
* and Vassilis S. Tsianos
b
a
School of Management, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK;
b
Department of Sociology,
University of Hamburg, Allende-Platz 1, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
(Received 13 May 2011; final version received 25 February 2012)
This paper explores the relevance of the autonomy of migration approach for
understanding the role of citizenship in the sovereign control of mobility. There is an
insurgent configuration of ordinary experiences of mobility emerging against this
regime of control. At its core is the sharing of knowledge and infrastructures of
connectivity, affective cooperation, mutual support and care among people on the move.
The sovereign regime of mobility control is displaced on the level on which it attempts to
take hold: the everyday movements of migrants. The frenetic fixation with security is
challenged by the creation of common worlds of existence; the obsession with
governance is replaced by inhabiting social spaces below the radar of existing political
structures. This paper attempts to contribute to a reconstruction of this mundane
ontology of transmigration, an ontology which we will describe as the mobile commons
of migration.
Keywords: autonomy of migration; citizenship; mobile commons; organisation;
ontology
For Sarah, Sidik and Indres who are on the road right now
1. Sapik in Europe
Do I use Facebook to stay in contact with my family? – No, all you need is a mobile phone.
At home, up there, they don’t have anything except mobiles. Sometimes you just beep them so
that they can see from your area code, where you are and that you’ve done a step further. In
Facebook I have recovered some friends that I have lost for years – now they live in Paris.
Last year, after the Pagani camp I wanted to continue to Germany together with a friend.
We traveled through Macedonia and Serbia until Hungary, where we split. We prepared
everything, we had every part of the route as a copy from Google Earth with us, printed in
Internet cafes. And we used GPS on our mobiles. My friend took a train to Germany, but he
fell asleep and had to drop out in Vienna where they caught him. I was arrested in Hungary
and brought to a camp for six weeks. They threatened me to remain detained for years if
I wouldn’t want leave the country voluntarily. So I decided to return to Greece. In Serbia the
police stole all of my money and my mobile phone and together with many others I was
brought to a cell. Such a thing I didn’t ever experience in Greece. When I finally arrived in
Macedonia the police asked me if I was on my way to Serbia or to Greece. They showed me
the path and even gave me some coins to make a phone call. I already spoke on the phone with
a friend who through Evros came to Athens where he now lives. He tells me that actually it is
very cheap in Evros, only $400. And this is certainly linked to the fingerprint questions. If you
try to make it through the islands it is much more difficult without being fingerprinted. That’s
why it is more expensive. In Evros you can pass without much money and without
fingerprints. (Interview with Sapik, Lesvos, Greece, 7 September 2010)
q2013 Taylor & Francis
*Emails: d.papadopoulos@leicester.ac.uk; vassilis.tsianos@wiso.uni-hamburg.de
Citizenship Studies, 2013
Vol. 17, No. 2, 178–196, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2013.780736
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
The shared knowledge, affective cooperation, mutual support and care between migrants
when they are on the road or when they arrive somewhere is the main topic of this paper.
Here, we attempt to contribute to a reconstruction of this flat mundane ontology of the
moving people, an ontology which we will describe as the mobile commons of migration.
Sapik reminds us what it means to cross the borders into Europe. Once one is in Europe an
even more brutally patrolled border stands in the way: European citizenship. Our focus on
the mobile commons does not attempt to question citizenship and its possible importance
in certain situations but rather to open, as Peter Linebaugh says, a chink in the wall and
explore the possibilities that lie behind the horizon of contempoary European discourses
and practices of citizenship. For many, citizenship appears as a wall indeed. There is no
doubt that citizenship is hard fought between those who try to restrict it and those who
invest in the efficacy of citizenship as a potential guarantor of rights, justice and liberation.
Such critical investments can be found in the idea of citizenship beyond sovereignty and
the state which will be discussed later or in ideas of local citizenship, citizen labs,
transnational citizenship, global citizenship, or acts of citizenship. But whatever the
definition of citizenship is, it operates as a wall when it represents the ultimate horizon of
political practice and social analysis – this is the argument that this paper will try to
develop. In order to respond to the increasing securitisation and abjection through
citizenship, one could see as a possible solution the invention of another qualifying
adjective to the concept of citizenship. But this is not the aim of this paper. Rather the
methodological principle guiding this work is to see through the chink in the wall, to
cultivate an imaginary and a practical sensibility to what lies after citizenship. And what
we see through this chink is the mundane organisational practices of mobile people. Our
starting point will be migrants on the ground, on the road – transmigrants. It is the
multiplicity of these lives and movements of people that forces a break not with citizenship
as such but with it as a central category in migration policy as well as academic research.
2. Labour and migration
Despite the fierce labour struggles and social struggles that were played out in the past
decades on a global scale, the ghost of the working class as the avant-garde of social change
is disappearing. The spectre of the working class undergoes a transmutation which threatens
equally political institutions and the fragile identities of the populations in the Global North:
the spectre of the migrant worker. For almost 40 years now, the response was to exclude
mobility from the constitution of polity. Mobility was also seen as external to labour, and
class was thought independent of movement. But migration not only brings the current
political system into turmoil, it also destabilises and recomposes what class is. The question
of the past decades was how to suppress and silence migrants. Now this question is rendered
obsolete by the very fact that people did not stop moving, creating new lives elsewhere,
mixing with the native working classes and capital did not stop capitalising on them. We are
facing a new situation, one which is dominated by a different question: not how to
immobilise migrants but how to institutionalise mobility. The concern today is how to
codify mobility, how to make it productive and sustainable, and how to combine it with a
new political order and the decline of sovereignty.
This is a moment when the cards of labour, mobility and sovereignty are mixed and
redistributed again. We used to think of mobility as a movement through space. And this is
of course true: migration is applied geopolitics on the ground. This approach focussed on
the idea of territoriality in conceptualising mobility. Consider the spatial strategies of
territorialisation in the workhouse which attempted to capture the wandering mob in
Citizenship Studies 179
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
Europe of the late Middle Ages (Ignatieff 1978, Federici 2004) or the first foreign worker
hostels of the Gastarbeiter era (von Oswald 2002), to name just two examples. The
governance of mobile populations now appears as an important site for the exercise of
control and the genesis of biopower. The recurring pattern was the attempt to suffocate
mobility by terminating it. Mobility – immobility was the driving conflict. In these
conditions, immobility is associated primarily with terrioriality, docile labour, becoming
native and integration with the local people; mobility is conceived as sabotage,
insubordination, escape, untrained work, multiple belongings. Nation state –territory –
people is the golden triptych of capitalist sovereignty. But as soon as mobility becomes
fused with labour and with the structures of sovereignty which try to contain it, a new
perspective on mobility emerges: mobility as a movement in time.
In conditions in which migration becomes one of the main forces in the production and
reproduction of capital, the role of control is not to suppress mobility. The role of
migration control is to make different time registers of the entry in the productive sphere
along the path of mobile populations compatible. In particular, it attempts to render the
speed of absorption into the local labour markets compatible with the speed of flows of
mobile populations. Migration control is about speed and its regulation. Migration control
works as an equaliser between labour markets and migratory movements. For example,
camps are less a form of blocking the circulation of mobility; they reinsert irregular
migration back into the productive logics of society by making out of irregular mobility,
either controllable populations or illegalised people; camps are speed boxes of migratory
movements.
From forced migration to managed migration during the 1950s and 1960s, mobility
was governed productively by territorialising movements and inserting them into the
spatial regulation of working bodies (see the work of Castles and Miller 2003, Karakayali
2008). As we move to the temporal regime of mobility control, the main concern is to
transform ungovernable streams to governable subjects of mobility that adjust to the needs
of local labour markets. Of course we know that the needs of local labour markets are not
‘natural’ – just pure numbers depicting how much workforce each market can absorb –
but they are politically over-determined by issues related to security, nationalism, populist
gambling of mainstream political parties, neoliberal policies, etc. This is what the border
regime does: it is not there to block migration; it tries to institutionalise it by controlling its
speed and magnitude (De Genova and Peutz 2010). The control of mobility is effectively
performed through the exercise of sovereignty. Sovereignty is not about sovereign
borders. Secure borders do not exist and cannot exist; sovereignty is the futile attempt to
regulate the porosity of borders: this can be conceived of as porocracy (see chapter 11 in
Papadopoulos et al. 2008).
Institutionalising the temporal intensities of mobility is what is needed in order to
insert migration into labour in conditions in which spatialisation is not enough. Legal or
illegal, regular or irregular, managed or unauthorised migration is directly entangled to
labour and its local contingencies (see Alberti 2011). So, in order to understand migration
we need to rethink the changing forms of exploitation which is at the heart of the current
regime of accumulation. The intensification of labour, that is the duration of labour and the
intensity of labour are the main two dimensions that define the degree of exploitation
(Nichols 1980). Inserting mobility into labour compels us to expand this understanding of
appropriation of labour: the intensification of exploitation needs to be complemented by
another mode or surplus value extraction which goes beyond the working day and involves
the whole existence of the worker. We are not only dealing with an intensification of
exploitation but also with its extensification. Exploitation extends across the whole
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos180
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
existential conditions of living labour, the lines of fight and exploitation multiply and
traverse different domains of life.
This complicates the meaning of labour power which becomes variable capital in
the valorisation process. The neoliberal counter-revolution intensified exploitation by
expanding the appropriation of labour power beyond the mere capacity to produce. In order
to be able to become and remain productive, people mobilise their social and personal
investments – social relations, non-work related skills, informal networks, ideas and their
capacity to be mobile (Dyer-Witheford 1999, Negri 2005). As work – in order to become
productive – becomes incorporated into the non-labour sphere, the exploitation of labour
power takes place through the contingencies of the lives of each individual worker; it
becomes embodied, that is it becomes an indissoluble characteristic of the whole situated
existence of living labour (Moulier Boutang 2012). Intensification and extensification of
exploitation have both created a different pattern of surplus value extraction: capitalism
becomes embodied, ingrained in every part of the body and in every social activity. One of
the key dimensions of the embodiment of capitalist relations is extracting surplus value
from the very fact that bodies can become mobile in the most averse circumstances
(Alberti 2011). The institutionalisation of mobility is the attempt to include mobility as
one of the core ingredients of labour exploitation. This happens by creating different
regimes and types of labour in order to reinsert specific segments of the mobile classes into
the global labour market. The current increase in research on processes of differential
inclusion of migrants in contemporary Global North societies (Bosniak 2006, Anderson
2010) testifies for this fusion of mobility, labour and sovereignty. Differential inclusion
means that different modalities of entry into a country and different residence statuses –
mainly through immigration controls and legal requirements – create different subjects of
labour.
3. Differential inclusion is citizenship is control
The differential inclusion of mobile populations points always to the way labour, mobility
and security are all directly connected with the machinations of sovereignty. The toll to
govern this tripartite relationship is citizenship. Of course, the process of differential
inclusion is not exclusively related to the modern politics of citizenship. On the contrary,
differential inclusion accompanies multiple forms of belonging and multiple forms of the
production of difference in different historical periods. The different ways of inclusion of
the poor in the European medieval city; the temporary enslavement of white labourers in
the British colonies; the freed black slave owners in the American South; the thin line
between free and unfree as well as between waged and unpaid labour which varies
historically, socially and culturally and produces different forms of social stratification;
the different racisms that were mobilised to fragment black peoples and include them in
different positions in polity – all this are just few examples showing the contingent
historical configuration of differential inclusion (see for instance Lowe 1996, Brass and
Linden 1997, Lucassen and Lucassen 1997, Steinfeld 2001, Glenn 2004). Thus, when we
talk of differential inclusion this is not to highlight its historical novelty or historical
uniqueness, rather we want to argue that the specificity of today’s differential inclusion
functions through citizenship: the term citizenship is used in this paper as a specific form
of governance that regulates the relation between rights and representation. This double-R
axiom is the foundation of modern polity. Rights are considered as crucial for governing
migration (who is subject to rights and who is not is a crucial way to create different
segments of citizens). But representation has increasingly played a role in defining who is
Citizenship Studies 181
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
entitled to have rights and what kind of rights one is entitled to have. Cultural identity and
collective affects of belonging emerge among mobile or marginalised populations which
create a social subject that then can become a subject of rights. Only through
representation are rights possible. Citizenship is the form of governing this unstable and
dangerous balance of the double-R axiom. Too much representation of a certain group
(e.g. Sans Papiers) without rights can create a potential explosive social situation because
this particular group is socially active without having any legal, social or political rights.
Too restricted a representation of a social group makes exclusion and structural racism
apparent (as the 2005 Banlieus uprising in France showed).
Imagine a scale where we have on the one pole full rights and on the other complete
illegalisation and invisibility. It is somewhere between these two extreme poles that a cut
is placed. This cut is citizenship. Where the cut is placed is a political question (e.g. in the
current conditions affected by the crisis and the broader conservative backlash the cut
moves towards illegalisation and invisibility). Citizenship is this toll of sovereign
governance that regulates the balance between rights and representation and renders
certain populations as legitimate bearers of rights while other populations are marked as
inexistent. In her work on British citizenship, Tyler (2010) shows persuasively how
selective and by design exclusionary the practice of citizenship is (for a description of
similar practices in the postcolonial context of Cyprus see the important work of
Trimikliniotis 2009). Tyler analyses the 1981 Nationality Act – which is still the
cornerstone of current politics of citizenship and immigration in Britain – and shows that
it was designed to exclude the peoples of the ex-colonies by protecting only the right to
British citizenship by those who had a lineage to someone born on the British island.
The passage of this Act through parliament was thus a significant event in the history of
British race relations, a moment when, through citizenship, racism was implicitly
incorporated within the judicial body of the state becoming an active component part of its
operational system of ‘legal justice’. (Tyler 2010)
We can think of the 1981 Nationality Act as a cut (that is a particular configuration of
citizenship) in this scale which has on the one pole full rights and on the other complete
illegalisation in conditions of Thatcher’s 1980s Britain. Once the cut is positioned, certain
groups have different tools for changing the place of the cut, most importantly
demonstrations, uprisings, social mobilisations and protests (and sometimes academic
social research can contribute to this also). Tyler (2010) describes how the Brixton riots of
1981 and the broader civil unrest of that period can be read as a response to the
exclusionary design and function of the 1981 Nationality Act. More generally, we can say
that it is through all these struggles that sovereignty is pushed towards the pole of full
rights. And there are always long periods of backlash when there is a growing anti-
immigrant sentiment and the cut is pushed back towards the pole of illegalisation.
4. The impossible citizenship
There is a paradox in this function of citizenship as the regulatory mechanism of inclusion
and exclusion: the more a society moves towards citizenship, the more it creates the
conditions for its disappearance as a form of governance. If you include everyone and if
you assign rights to everyone, citizenship becomes obsolete. ‘Citizenship for all’ is an
impossible term. Citizenship is ‘designed to fail’ (Tyler 2010), and it is always
‘incomplete’ (Gunsteren 1998). Or else, imagine a society which assigns citizenship to
everyone. In this fictional society, citizenship is not connected to rights or any other legal
status, it is a mere social ritual. Citizenship would be granted automatically to every
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos182
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
denizen and to the extent that, as in any society, rituals for social cohesion are important,
everyone who wants to demonstrate a strong identification with this society can buy in
almost every convenience shop a Home Office Citizenship Medalwfor £8.99. You can
wear it every day or just forget it in a drawer or lose it. This fictional society would be very
different, of course, than the societies we know. But probably the most important
difference is that this society would not have borders. To think this the other way round:
citizenship is coexistent with borders. Citizenship is coexistent with the exercise of
sovereign control, as Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright show in their
research (e.g. Anderson et al. 2009). The more we talk about security, the more we talk
about citizenship. This is the predicament of citizenship. It feeds from the power of
sovereignty to erect and maintain borders – borders that it cannot ultimately fully control.
Citizenship cannot be thought outside of sovereignty and control.
O’Connell Davidson’s (2010) work on trafficking exemplifies this function of
citizenship from another perspective, namely how in the name of protecting human rights
and liberal citizenship sovereign control promotes a tougher take on the freedom of
mobility and leads to the introduction of restrictive migration measures as pro-human
rights policies. In this sense, we can think of citizenship as a form of governance that
performs exclusion not inclusion. Whatever qualifying attribute we add to citizenship –
accidental, activist, irregular, imperfect, biological, sexual, reversible, unrecognized
(Gunsteren 1998, Bell and Binnie 2004, Sassen 2004, Nyers 2009) – it cannot avoid an
optic which looks at peoples’ movements from the perspective of control. The vision that
citizenship is inherently liberal can be historically revealed as a fiction. There is no global
unified citizenship and this because citizenship exists only as one of the tools that are
deployed to build up national sovereignty. It is, thus, limited to the territorial space of the
nation state and stops where the borders of a country stop – while the rest of a country’s
activities (such capital movements, trade, circulation of elite populations, war, etc.) can
extend beyond its borders. The limits of citizenship are the limits of sovereignty. But
liberal citizenship is not only problematic because it excludes by design everyone who is
outside its borders, but also because there is a long history of actively ‘denationalising’
dangerous or unwelcomed citizens and of creating categories of citizenship which can be
viewed as accidental (Nyers 2006) or reversible (Tsianos and Pieper 2011). And these
limits are even more obvious if we look at citizenship from a global perspective: different
national citizenships are bound to the strict hierarchy of the global world system, in which
certain countries and their citizenships are far more valued and powerful than others
(Balibar and Wallerstein 1991).
Liberal citizenship is a fiction and could not be materialised in the post-WWII period.
Elsewhere, we used the term post-liberal conditions to discuss how these ambivalences of
citizenship push liberal democracies to their limits (Papadopoulos et al. 2008, see also
Buckel et al. 2010). The example of the denationalisation of one of the most prominent
Dutch politicians, the Somali-Dutch Hirsi Ali exemplifies this form of post-liberal politics.
Hirsi Ali, a paradigmatic liberal citizen well known for her critical stance towards Islam in
Holland, was stripped of her Dutch citizenship (and her seat in the Dutch parliament) when
it became public that some narrative elements of her asylum case were fictional. What
from a legalist perspective appears as a correct procedure, demonstrates the paradox and
ultimately the impossibility of liberal citizenship. Hirsi Ali lost her citizenship although
she was fully embodying and practising its core values. In post-liberal conditions,
citizenship has to be always protected from expanding too much and including somebody
who ‘should not’ be in. Citizenship in post-liberalism decouples lived embodied existence
and the singular subject of rights of a certain nation by making citizenship principally
Citizenship Studies 183
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
reversible (Tsianos and Pieper 2011). Not even her lived and active belonging to the Dutch
community could deter the exclusionary logic of citizenship.
Thus, understanding and theorising migration in terms of differential inclusion and
citizenship is a necessary and important step in analysing the current configuration of
sovereign control. But at the same time, when we perceive migration through the lens of
citizenship, we always contribute to the creation of its others, of its outside. This is because
citizenship as a non-exclusionary category, citizenship for all, is a contradiction in terms.
Citizenship is an important tool for creating possibilities for certain groups to be included,
but it can never respond to the question which migration poses to capitalist sovereignty:
what about all those who are mobile and cannot be included, that is the majority of the
mobile populations?
5. Autonomy of migration revisited
In order to be able to answer this question we need to shift our perspective from the order
of sovereign control to the primacy of migrants’ mobility, that is to read capitalism
through migration and to understand sovereignty through mobility, rather than the other
way round.
This represents probably the most important insight of the autonomous approach to
migration: the attempt to see migration not simply as a response to political and economic
necessities, but as a constituent force in the formation of polity and social life (Rodriguez
1996, Karakayali and Tsianos 2005, Papadopoulos et al. 2008, Mezzadra 2010). Yann
Moulier Boutang (1998) has offered an impressive account of this movement historically.
The autonomy of migration approach foregrounds that migration is not primarily a
movement that is defined and acts by making claims to institutional power. It rather means
that the very movement itself becomes a political movement and a social movement.
The autonomy of migration thesis highlights the social and subjective aspects of mobility
before control. It rejects understanding migration as a mere response to economic and social
malaise (e.g. Jessop and Sum 2006). Instead migration is autonomous, meaning that it has
the capacity to develop its own logics, its own motivation, its own trajectories that control
comes later to respond to, not the other way round (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe
2006). This does not of course mean that mobility operates independently of control. Very
often, it is subjected to it and succumbs to a violent state or to private interventions that
attempt to tame it; probably the politics of detention and deportation is the best example of
such violence which shows how migrant mobility can be halted and brutally controlled
(see Tyler’s contribution to this issue and Schuster 2003).
There is no space for romanticisation of nomadism and migration in the autonomy of
migration approach. Migration grapples with the harsh, often deadly, realities of control.
However, the point is migration is not just responding to them. Rather it creates new
realities that allow migrants to exercise their own mobility against or beyond existing
control. In this sense, the autonomy of migration thesis is about training our senses to see
movement before capital (but not independent from it) and mobility before control (but not
as disconnected from it). One of the most common critiques of the autonomy of migration
approach (Du
¨vell 2006, Sharma 2008) is that it substitutes all these different migrant
subjectivities and the diverse concrete spatialities of movements into a new big narration of
migration. The term migration supposedly homogenises and effectively erases the diverse
lived experiences of migrants vis-a
`-vis the state. We agree, of course, that migration
encompasses a broad spectrum of practices of mobility: humanitarian, forced, war,
environmental, cultural, economic, circular, seasonal and internal migration – all these are
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos184
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
radically different types of migrant mobility. All these migrations are, however, not neutral
definitions of migrational movements. Much of our empirical research – among of course a
myriad of similar studies in the field of transnationalism – shows when, where and how a
young transmigrant, to use just an example here, can be attributed the category of an
unaccompanied refugee minor or could be considered as somebody who circulates between
the country of origin and the country of destination or as an economic migrant is less self-
evident than it appears in the first instance (O’Connell Davidson 2011). Furthermore, the
underlying drive behind these migratory movements is also usually obscure. One can, for
example, understand migration as the exercising of agency from below in the diffuse
conditions of globalisation (Appadurai 1996); or as a metaphor for a fluid modernity that is
driven by an ever increasing penetration of the neoliberal doctrine (Bauman 2007); or even
as an approach inspired by complexity theory in which all different forms of mobility –
from tourism to transnational terrorism – exist equally next to each other (Urry 2003).
But subsuming all these different types, cases and approaches to migration under the
concept of migration does not mean flattening out their differences; rather, it attempts to
articulate their commonalities which stem from all these different struggles for movement
that confront the regimes of mobility control. The supposedly abstract and homogenising
category of migration does not attempt to unify all the existing multiplicity of movements
under one single logic, but to signify that all these singularities contribute to an affective and
generic gesture of freedom that evade the concrete violence and control of moving people.
Migration in the autonomy of migration approach refers to a kind of politics that neither
entails uniformity nor abstraction; rather, it relies on struggles for movement that escape
and subsequently delegitimise and derail sovereign control. So, the first meaning of
migration in the autonomy of migration approach is an empirical one: the real struggles,
practices, tactics that escape control. This approach to migration is important because it is
an answer to the heterogenising practices of state regulation of mobility: sovereignty breaks
the connectivity between multiple migratory subjects in order to make them visible and
render them governable subjects of mobility. And it does this through operationalising the
category of the citizen in order to create different classes of citizens. The heterogenising
effects of power should not be confused here with the multiplicity of mobile subjectivities
and struggles. These are effaced at the expense of making clearly defined heterogeneous
objects of governance. The second meaning of migration in the autonomy of migration
approach appears here: migration nurtures the belief in the possibi lity to be free to move. It is
true that this second meaning of migration in the autonomy of migration approach is
figurative. It is a figure that embodies virtuality as secure, free and warm as it can get in the
harsh conditions of sovereign control which gives strength to people to move when they are
on the road. Migration, in this second sense is more related to an affective imaginary, and it
exists as potentia and virtuality that becomes actualised and materialised through the
diverse movements of people.
6. ‘I work only for papers’ – the illegalisation of migration
This double dimension of autonomy of migration can be best exemplified in an
emblematic type of migration: illegalised border crossing. It is from this perspective that
we need to analyse mobility that fails out of citizenship and is excluded from it. When
migrants are considered as irregular citizens, they are commonly conceived either as
criminals or as being forced to move, not as active creators of the realities they find
themselves in or of the realities they create when they move (for a typical example see
Jordan and Du
¨vell 2002). This constructs them as irregular or unauthorised subjects. It is
Citizenship Studies 185
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
not primarily the legal context that creates the category of the illegal migrant, but it is the
political and theoretical view that does not allow for forms of agency that is not driven by
external necessities; the legal context only follows to consolidate this perspective and
standardise them into manageable categories.
However, in conditions where illegal migration has become one of the main, or
probably the main, migration route to the societies of the Global North (on this see the
detailed work of Karakayali 2008), irregularity can always be perceived in a double
perspective: either from the perspective of citizenship – which attempts to disclose how
irregularity is produced and maintained through control and through the responding acts of
migrants – or from the perspective of mobile migrants that use clandestinity in order to
facilitate their everyday movements. The difference here is very small but of importance
for understanding the autonomy of migration approach: contesting irregularity is not a
political act in itself. Irregularity is a practice of governance that illegalises migrants in
order to control them through the current arrangement of borders, securitisation and public
safety. Irregularity makes sense only as illegalisation of migrants through the machinic
order of sovereignty and the governance of citizenship not as an indented (or even
unintended) political act of migrants.
Research on irregularity and citizenship is a necessary and important analytical tool,
but focussing solely on this seems to be superseded not only by the practices of migration
itself but also by the current processes of migration control. From the perspective of the
current digitalised, porocratic configuration of control, mobility is not the enemy. Mobility
is considered a necessary, in fact, social and economically indispensable element of
current European societies: it only needs to be institutionalised through discourses of
citizenship in order to sustain the new flexible configuration of labour that relies on
extensified exploitation – as discussed earlier in Section 2. This creates of course a
political problem for every approach to migration through citizenship. The more one tries
to support rights and representation through citizenship, the more one contributes to the
restriction of movement. This is a dilemma that is well known to activist organisations that
engage with migration and border radical politics (see Rigby and Schlembach in this
issue). The dilemma is that migrants do not usually get involved in political mobilisations
about migration as such. Migrants tend to become invisible, to disappear, to disidentify
themselves (Broeders and Engbersen 2007, and the various examples in Chapter 11 and 12
in Papadopoulos et al. 2008). And when migrants mobilise politically, they only do it in a
strategic way because they encounter a particular and direct form of discrimination in a
concrete situation.
Many of the transmigrants we talked to in the camps of Pagani and Igoumenitsa
(Greece) in the past 3 years used the phrase ‘I work only for papers’. Initially we struggled
to understand this phrase: On the one hand, we know that a lot of them work in the worst
possible conditions, without being documented and only for money. On the other hand,
‘papers’ – that is the necessary documents which one needs in order to make it to the target
destination – is not something which ‘you work for’, rather we think of ‘papers’ as
something which one is legally entitled to (or not). But these transmigrants challenged two
of the widespread assumptions of what a migrant is: firstly, the assumption that migrants
are labourers where their subjectivity is defined by their capacity to offer their labour
power in ‘foreign’ labour markets. Secondly, the very distinction between legality and
illegality by questioning the dualism between those who are legal subjects of citizenship
(if they have ‘papers’) and those who are illegal subjects outside of citizenship (if they do
not have ‘papers’). These transmigrants turn both of these assumptions on their heads:
Not only is work secondary for their subjectivity, but they see that the actual work they
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos186
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
do is the work for acquiring ‘papers’ – something which Vasta (2011) describes as
‘irregular formality’ to articulate the fluidity between irregular and regular statuses from
the migrant point of view. This is a double blasphemy against the logic of labour as well as
the logic of citizenship. In fact, these transmigrants do not even intend to play the game of
political participation in our institutions and practices or engage in acts of citizenship
through mobilising their subjectivity as citizens or as workers. Or we could even say that
they would engage in any act of political participation if this would help them to get the
necessary ‘papers’.
7. The politics of migration
The forms of political action that migrants engage cannot be confused with a mobilisation
that resembles the action of a collective historical or political subject. The very conditions
of current migration defy the possibility of constructing a viable intentional and permanent
subjectivity. It also defies the whole subject-form, whether this is related to the liberal
governmental subject or the radical subject of social change. To the extent that one cannot
build liberal democracies with migration, to the same extent one cannot do Leninist
politics with it. It is impossible to adapt migration to our own political targets be it right,
left, liberal or radical left. And if this happens, it will only be for a short period of time,
until the new migration wave arrives, until new relations of care between mobile migrants
are built on the ground, until new transnational mobile communities emerge that
undermine any permanence of classical representational politics.
The spectre of migration will never become a new working class. It will always remain
a spectre, which comes in the night through the backdoor of your nation on a smuggled
vessel, by using false papers, by crossing hundreds of miles of snowed mountains, by
changing one’s own identity, by destroying the skin of one’s own fingertips with acid and a
knife to avoid identification, by overstaying a visa, an au pair contract, or the regular
tourist period of stay. The spectre of migration will always remain a spectre, one that is
much more present though than any of the political ghosts summoned in the history of
political thought and political struggle in order to fulfil the desire for securitisation or
revolution alike. The spectre of migration will always be with us, among us, more real than
anything else: cleaning your home, cleaning your office, cleaning your roads, cleaning
your buses, taking care of your kids, fixing your computer, fixing your car, providing sex,
providing care, providing babysitting, ironing your shirts, answering your phone calls,
doing your gardening, building your house, collecting your strawberries, living in the flat
next door. Migrants do not hold the place of a historical or a political subject as such,
rather they tend to become imperceptible to history (see chapter 6 and 12 in Papadopoulos
et al. 2008). But the more they do this, the more they change history by undermining the
sovereign pillars of contemporary societies. The more the paranoid enterprise of a
securitising sovereignty and the toxic discourse of public safety intensifies, the more it
becomes inoperative to sustain capitalist production and capitalist polity.
The approach we are presenting here breaks with the dominant integrationist canon of
migration studies which maintains the fundamental assumption that migrants’ practices
become political only if they become integrated into an existing polity – be it in the
country of origin or in the country of destination or in one of the countries through which
transmigrants pass. The cohesion of this polity is taken for granted and migrants’ political
practices are political only if they address and operate in it (for an extended critique of
integrationism see Glick-Schiller and C¸ aglar 2008, Hess et al. 2009). So, what kind of
politics do migrants do if we reject integrationism? What are the politics of migration
Citizenship Studies 187
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
when they cross borders? What kinds of politics are performed when people become
mobile despite the restrictions of migration controls? What kind of politics characterise all
these migrant practices which neither attempt to integrate people into an existing polity
nor to systematically resist this polity?
Following Rancie
`re (1998), we rather see migrants political practices not as acts of
resistance but as attempts to create a new situation that allows those who have no part – to
enter and change the conditions of social existence altogether. How else can we
understand the silent and mundane transformations that happen when migrants who
clandestinely defy the borders that block their future expose the limits of liberal
citizenship without ever intending it? These are politics which transform the political
without ever addressing it in its own terms and practices. Migrants’ politics develop their
own codes, their own practices, their own logics which are almost imperceptible from the
perspective of existing political action: firstly, because we are not trained to perceive them
as ‘proper’ politics and, secondly, because they create an excess that cannot be addressed
in the existing system of political representation. But these politics are so powerful that
they change the very conditions of a certain situation and the very conditions of existence
of the participating actors (Tsianos et al. 2012).
Migrants’ politics are in this sense non-politics (that is non-representable in the
dominant existing polity). With Asef Bayat we could call them ‘social non-movements’.
In his work on recent social and political change in the Muslim Middle East, Bayat (2010)
describes the invisible everyday activities that prepared all these radical transformations –
non-movements because for years they were sustained and nurtured silently through the
everyday and seemingly non-political experiences and actions of people. It is these non-
movements that when they were confronted with the brutality of the state, they crafted a
non-identitarian collectivity of insurrection. In a similar vein, Zibechi (2011) describes the
struggles of the urban poor and the indigenous movements in South America as anti-
representational politics. Their aim is to appropriate and self-organise social territory in
cities or rural areas in the midst of a strict and immovable order of political and social
power. These struggles create, in the words of Zibechi, post-capitalist ‘societies in
movement’.
The mundane gestures of sociality that nurture people when they are in the move or
arrive and try to settle in a new place, these ‘societies in movement’ are imperceptible
from the perspective of an existing polity. The more the migrants become imperceptible,
the more they become like everyone. Becoming everyone is the death of citizenship. The
moment when you buy your Home Office Citizenship Medalwfor the price of £8.99 in
every corner of the British island will be the moment in which freedom of movement will
be a reality. But becoming everyone is not an event to come. It is not salvation awaiting,
it is the universal strategy of mobility when it moves through places and continents and
even when it becomes clandestine and passes through the biopolitical controls of
sovereignty. It is a magical moment of transformation in the objectivity of the present.
Becoming everyone is a move based on respect and care of the worlds we are creating
when we leave behind marked and secure social positions and selves; becoming everyone
is a necessary strategy of everyday survival for migrants on the road and for migrants
facing racism when they try to settle in a place.
Crossing Calais can be seen as an ‘act of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008) only to
the extent that the very moment of hiding in a lorry is an illegalised activity. From the
perspective of migrants, this is an act of immediate justice for sustaining their everyday
life. Let us put it in a different way, to the extent that migration undermines the
securitisation of sovereignty by its very existence, to the same extent it undermines the
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos188
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
liberal as well as radical left political projects and announces – together with many other
social movements of course – a different form of politics. This sounds perhaps
disappointing, but there are reasons to celebrate also. It forces both, capitalism as well as
its opponents to change their strategies and to take seriously the principle guiding
migrants’ mobility: ‘freedom of movement for myself, my children, my friends, my
relatives, my fellow travellers and the people who deserve it’. Migration is forcing us to
repudiate the implicit avant-gardism of earlier versions of the autonomy of migration
approach (Mezzadra 2001, Bojadzijev et al. 2004, Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007).
An avant-gardism which by attempting to improve citizenship and change governance
tries to realign migrants with the working classes (‘Migrants and precarious workers
together!’) and to resurrect a new social protagonism of migration. Of course, there is a
growing proximity between migrant labour and precarious labour since migrant labour
becomes increasingly precarised (especially after the 2008 economic crisis) and
precarious labour becomes increasingly mobile. However, if there is a potential for
transversal politics between the worlds of migration and precarity, this is not in a form of
solidarity or in the creation of a new hybrid political subject. Rather, we believe that where
migrants and precarious workers meet is in sharing the same urban spaces and that both of
them, from their very different positions and with very different aims, participate in the
metropolitan uprisings of European cities.
8. ‘Making connections’ and the gift economy of migration
On 27 August 2009 together with an Amnesty International Representative, we organised
a meeting with a group of young transmigrants in one of central cafe snack bars of Mytilini
(Greece). Mytilini was at this time a heavily used route for crossing from Turkey into
Greece. As a result, the detention camps were overcrowded. Responding to this situation,
there was a no borders mobilisation organised on the island in August 2009, which resulted
in the closure of this camp (Alberti 2010, Lafazani 2011).
1
Many of the detainees escaped
the camp without being registered and their fingerprints being taken in EURODAC, a
centralised Euro-wide database of fingerprints of asylum applicants and illegalised
immigrants. Many of the migrants we met that afternoon were women in their twenties
coming from different cities in the Horn of Africa. They told us that some of them have
previously worked as domestic carers and workers in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. The
working conditions there were very bad, so they decided to migrate again, this time to
Canada because relatives and friends told them that they had better experiences as
domestic workers. They used different routes to arrive in Turkey and then eventually
crossed the EU border to Greece on a boat. They were intercepted by Frontex patrols, the
European border security agency, and had to destroy their boat so that they will be
transported as shipwrecked asylum seekers to a camp Greece. They preferred this because
they were confident that they would be able to meet other people on the move in the camp
and check possibilities to continue their journey, rather than simply be arrested and
returned immediately back to Turkey (for an extensive discussion of this context see the
ethnographic research of Ibrahim 2010). They were interned in the Pagani camp. The
Amnesty International Representative explained that they were released after 38 days with
no formal procedure for claiming asylum, but on the condition they leave the country
voluntarily and return to their countries of origin (Panagiotidis and Tsianos 2006).
What was the most striking aspect of this encounter was that none of our discussants
looked or behaved in a way that would fit the image of the typical illegalised victim
circulating in media and mainstream politics. They protested against detention and
Citizenship Studies 189
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
complained how they were treated by the border police, but one could not see the picture
of misery, exploitation and oppression that they had suffered while they were interned in
horrendous conditions in the Pagani camp. Rather they looked tired, calm, decided and
optimist. When we were parting ways, we asked them how they were going to spend the
rest of the day. They replied that they did not know, but the next thing they were going to
do was to go to cybercafe to check emails and their Facebook accounts: ‘Making
connections. Making our route’ they said before leaving. (Later we got to know through a
contact of a friend that some of them are not as planned in Canada but working in
Norway.)
In the same way that ‘migrants as agents’ do not do the politics we expect them to do,
‘migrants as victims’ do not behave as victims should. Rather than being the isolated,
individualised victim, these young women appeared to negotiate the difficult and
dangerous lives they live through the continuous recourse to the idea of some sort of
‘social connections’ that will help them to move on and continue their journey. In a strange
way, you had the feeling that when they were talking they were referring to a ‘we’, without
ever describing it, a ‘we’ which has the potential to recode or even to interrupt the logic of
the border control and detention. Virtual spaces such as chatrooms, facebook, emails as
well as the spaces of the camps and of migrant neighbourhoods are the spaces that help one
stay mobile, collect information about routes, possibilities for survival and learn tactics of
existence (Panagiotidis and Tsianos 2006, Kuster 2011). This is a knowledge and affective
reservoir that offers vital resources and energies to migrants on the road or when they
arrive in a new place. This ‘mobile commons’ needs to be continuously updated and
extended; and it is the innumerable uncoordinated but cooperative actions of mobile
people that contribute to its making.
People on the move create a world of knowledge, of information, of tricks for survival,
of mutual care, of social relations, of services exchange, of solidarity and sociability that
can be shared, used and where people contribute to sustain and expand it. This is the world
that facilates Sapik’s movements as described in the interview excerpt at the beginning of
this paper. However, it is not just that Sapik uses all these invisible resources to remain
mobile, but that by actually using them and by remaining mobile he contributes to expand
and circulate this knowledge for coming migrants. This contribution is neither related to
the good intentions of those who participate nor to a presumably ‘natural’ solidarity
‘reflex’ between migrants. Migration, as we described it in this paper, is by definition a
process which relies on a multitude of other persons and things. This extreme
dependability can only be managed through reciprocity, and reciprocity between migrants
means the multiplication of access to mobility for others. Multiplying access is the gift
economy of migration. This is the world of the mobile commons. This is a second world,
World 2, and beyond the world most of us experience as subjects of rights, as citizens, and
as political activists (Papadopoulos 2006). World 2 – the world of transmigrants whether
they are on the road, in a new country, or in a new neighbourhood, whether they are settled,
clandestine, have refugee status, or are documented workers – is the world that exists as a
common world in the making.
9. Organising the mobile commons
The mobile commons is neither private nor public, neither state owned nor part of civil
society; rather it exists to the extent that people share it and generate it as they are mobile
and when they arrive somewhere. But beyond its use and actualisation, it is equally
important to partake in the creation of the mobile commons, in the making of a common
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos190
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
non-proprietary and non-enclosed world of mobility (as discussed by Anderson et al.
2009). The making of the commons is the continuation of life through ‘commoning’
(Linebaugh 2008) the immediate sociality and materiality of existence (Papadopoulos
2012). This is a flight into a world where the primary condition of existence is the
immersion into the worlds you inhabit and share with other people, animals, plants and the
soil as you move. The knowledge and practices of mobility circulate beyond the
enclosures of public, private and civil society institutions, and they are cooperatively
produced in the commons and through the commons (Bollier 2003, Peuter and Dyer-
Witheford 2010).
Autonomy of migration is less a discourse about investigating contemporary migration
as a social subject against the workings of sovereignty and capital and more an organising
practice for supporting and facilitating freedom of movement. Here, we mean a form of
organising which goes beyond the traditional question of mobilising migrants against their
oppression and for their rights in existing institutions such as trade unions or civil society
organisations (Bishop 2011). We rather understand organisation as the practice of
producing alternative ontologies, that is alternative everyday forms of existence and
alternative forms of life (Winner 1986). Migration – as the empirical reality of struggles
that evade the control of mobility and as the virtual imaginary of the freedom of
movement – is autonomous, that is it can remain autonomous to the extent that it creates
such forms of life. We call the organisational ontology of these other forms of life mobile
commons: the ability to cultivate, generate and regenerate the contents, practices and
affects that facilitate the movements of mobile people.
The mobile commons comprise of:
.the invisible knowledge of mobility that circulates between the people on the move
(knowledge about border crossings, routes, shelters, hubs, escape routes, resting
places; knowledge about policing and surveillance, ways to defy control, strategies
against biosurveillance, etc.) but also between transmigrants attempting to settle in a
place (knowledge about existing communities, social support, educational
resources, access to health, ethnic economies, micro-banks, etc.).
.an infrastucture of connectivity which is crucial to distributing these knowledges
and for facilitating the circular logistics of support to stay mobile: collecting,
updating and evaluating knowledge by using a wide range of platforms and media –
from the embodied knowledge travelling from mouth to mouth to social networks
sites, geolocation technologies and alternative databases and communication
streams.
.a multiplicity of informal economies. The mobile commons is not outside of
existing relations of production, reproduction and even exploitation. It covers all
these economic activities and services that cannot not be easily accessed through the
public sector or privately: how to find (and let alone pay) a doctor or a lawyer; how
to find short-term work or more permanent working arrangements, send and receive
money, communicate with friends, family and fellow travellers, make it through the
economies of smuggling, get the necessary papers for your move, pay for your rent
and find the right person ‘to talk to’.
.diverse forms of transnational communities of justice: alliances and coalitions
between different groups, local governments, political organisation, NGOs, etc.;
access to power; the selective organisation of campaigns in collaboration with local
groups and other social movements and civil society organisations; the organisation
of camps or support actions.
Citizenship Studies 191
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
.the last and probably most crucial dimension of the mobile commons is the politics
of care, care as the general dimension of caring for the other as well as immediate
relations of care and support: mutual cooperation, friendships, favours that you
never return, affective support, trust, care for other people’s relatives and children,
transnational relations of care, the gift economy between mobile people, etc. (see an
impressive account on this in Bishop 2011, see also Puig De La Bellacasa 2012).
The mobile commons, that is the real world of moving people, is assembled and
materialised in these fields of everyday life. The autonomy of migration approach we are
arguing for here can be thought as a contribution to facilitate migration movements though
multiplying, spreading, and extending any of these properties of the mobile commons. The
term autonomy in ‘autonomy of migration’ refers to a multiplicity of actors who install
relations of justice on the ground in the midst of current capitalist power and sovereign
control. In fact, the autonomy of migration approach is only possible if it contributes to
creating conditions of thick everyday performative and practical justice so that everyday
mobility, clandestine or open, becomes possible. This is a form of thick justice which
creates new forms of life that sustain migrants’ ordinary movements. The sustaining of
such forms of life is driven by the immediacy of the quest for justice. And from the
perspective of migration justice is the making of daily social relations, connections and
conditions that evade the control of mobility.
Justice here resembles an affective index that designates how appropriate are the
means used to arrive somewhere, the limits of what one can endure throughout this
journey, and, most importantly, it indicates what is just and unjust in conditions that are by
design outside of formalised law. The justice of the mobile commons is the moral
economy of migration. It is similar to what Thompson (1971) called the moral economy of
the poor: the immediate feeling and judgement of the crowd about what is just and what is
unjust in relation to the everyday conditions of existence, such as the price of food or the
prohibition of using the commons. From the perspective of migration, justice cannot be
achieved only through the assignment of rights and citizenship or through attempts to
organise migrants in unions and parties (although we want to note here that all of these are
in certain conditions indispensable, necessary and crucial for migrants) but through
changing ordinary existence in a way that allows people to move when they want or need
to and to maintain a liveable life when they reside in a certain place. The mobile commons
are migrants’ resource and path for surviving the pressures of sovereignty and capitalist
exploitation. Autonomy of migration has been for too long concerned with the discourse
about citizenship rights, differential inclusion and control and so little with the ontology of
migration. A materialist autonomist perspective on migration is about betraying the
discourse of security and citizenship in defence of everyday sociability of mobile people
and the worlds they are creating. The mobile commons is the ontology of transmigration.
10. Coda
Since we met Sapik in the summer of 2009 in the Pagani camp, we have been regularly
taking to him on the phone or in the net. He became a co-researcher and a research adviser.
Sapik has a very active Facebook life and his account is linked to a very well-informed and
useful blog about mobility and transit issues relevant to his peoples. Sapik is a true
commoner in the mobile commons. Suddenly, while writing this paper, it became
impossible to contact him. We were very concerned. For many years now, there is a steep
increase in fascist and racist attacks in Greece, and Sapik could be one of their targets since
he is a well-known and active figure in his community. Thankfully, he contacted us and
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos192
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
said that he was doing well. He had left the island and moved to Athens. He said that he
was very scared when he experienced the racisct riots in Athens. But he went to Athens
because he wanted to understand ‘what is happening in this country’. He was not hopeful
that the big mobilisations against the government and the imposed austerity measures in
May and June 2011 would be successful. His voice was quiet. We asked him when he
would go back to the island where, at least in comparison to Athens, things are much more
secure for him. He did not reply, and the silence indicated that we did not understand what
he was saying. He was in Athens in order to understand the current situation in Greece.
He said that he did not know when he would be able to contact us again. And he no longer
has a Facebook account. He had to close his account because he was threatened by neo-
fascist users. Then he said goodbye and hung up. Very shortly after this phonecall, we
received a text message with a new Facebook name and a smily.
11. Coda 2
In the period between submitting the first version of the paper, waiting for the reviews and
reworking this paper for the final submission, Sapik decided to leave his clandestine
existence in Greece. Although he was satisfied with his life there and had already built a
strong community, close links to political activists and a stable way to make his living, he
wanted to leave behind the life without papers: ‘I want to live like you’, he told us.
He recently arrived in a city in Northern Europe and claimed asylum. He was strongly
supported through his connections in his transnational community and the euro-wide
activist networks and his lawyer is confident that he will be granted asylum. Just few days
before finishing this paper, we talked to Sapik and he told us that he was preparing his
illegal trip back to Greece. We were very surprised, even horrified, when he said that he
was firmly decided to leave the country and effectively drop his asylum case despite that
his application was progressing very well. ‘There is no love here!’, he said, ‘see you in
Greece’.
Acknowledgements
Many of the ideas presented here were developed in conversations with our fellow traveller Hywel
Bishop. We are truly grateful to him. Special thanks go to our editor, Imogen Tyler, for her insightful
suggestions and encouragement and to Gabriella Alberti, Nicholas De Genova, Dagmar Diesner and
Aida Ibrahim for their generous comments on our work. We would like to thank Nelli Kambouri,
Brigitta Kuster, Dimitri Parsanoglou and Nico Trimiklinioti for sharing with us their thoughts about
our common fieldwork. Some of the empirical and theoretical research presented here was funded by
the European Commission FP7 programme MIG@NET: Transnational Digital Networks, Migration
and Gender.
Note
1. See also the documentation of the Welcome to Europe network: http://w2eu.net/nobordertv/
pagani-detention-center-2/pagani-detention-center/ [Accessed 1 December 2011].
References
Alberti, G., 2010. Across the borders of Lesvos: the gendering of migrants’ detention in the Aegean.
Feminist review, 94 (1), 138– 147.
Alberti, G., 2011. Transient working lives: migrant women’s everyday politics in London’s
hospitality industry, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. Unpublished PhD
dissertation.
Citizenship Studies 193
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
Anderson, B., 2010. Migration, immigration controls and the fashioning of precarious workers.
Work, employment & society, 24 (2), 300– 317.
Anderson, B., Sharma, N. and Wright, C., 2009. Editorial: why no borders? Refuge, 26, 5 – 18.
Appadurai, A., 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I.M., 1991. Race, nation, class: ambiguous identities. London: Verso.
Bauman, Z., 2007. Liquid times: living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Bayat, A., 2010. Life as politics. How ordinary people change the Middle East. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Bell, D. and Binnie, J., 2004. Authenticating queer apace: citizenship, urbanism and governance.
Urban studies, 41 (9), 1807– 1820.
Bishop, H., 2011. The worlds that migrants are making: the politics of care and transnational
mobility, Cardiff University, Cardiff. Unpublished PhD dissertation.
Bojadzijev, M., Karakayali, S. and Tsianos, V., 2004. Le myste
`re de l’arrive
´e. Des camps et des
spectres. Multitudes, 19, 41–52.
Bollier, D., 2003. Silent theft. The private plunder of our common wealth. London: Routledge.
Bosniak, L., 2006. The citizen and the alien: dilemmas of contemporary membership. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Brass, T. and Linden, M.V.D., 1997. Free and unfree labour: the debate continues. Bern: Peter Lang
& International Institute of Social History.
Broeders, D. and Engbersen, G., 2007. The fight against illegal migration. Identification policies and
immigrants’ counterstrategies. American behavioral scientist, 50 (12), 1592 – 1609.
Buckel, S., Fischer-Lescano, A. and Oberndorfer, L., 2010. Postneoliberale Rechtsordnung?
Suchprozesse in der Krise. Kritische justiz, 4, 375– 383.
Castles, S. and Miller, M.J., 2003. The age of migration. International population movements in the
modern world. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Genova, N. and Peutz, N.M., 2010. The deportation regime: sovereignty, space, and the freedom
of movement. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dyer-Witheford, N., 1999. Cyber-Marx: cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology
capitalism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Du
¨vell, F., 2006. Europa
¨ische und internationale migration. Einfu
¨hrung in historische,
soziologische und politische Analysen. Hamburg: Lit.
Federici, S., 2004. Caliban and the witch. New York, NY: Autonomedia.
Glenn, E.N., 2004. Unequal freedom. How race and gender shaped American citizenship and labor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Glick-Schiller, N. and C¸ aglar, A., 2008. Migrant incorporation and city scale: towards a theory of
locality in migration studies. Malmo
¨: Malmo
¨Institute for Studies of Migration, Diversity and
Welfare & Department of International Migration and Ethnic Relations, Malmo
¨University.
Gunsteren, H.V., 1998. A theory of citizenship: organizing plurality in contemporary democracies.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Hess, S., Binder, J. and Moser, J., 2009. No integration. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitra
¨ge zur
Integrationsdebatte in Europa. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Ibrahim, A., 2010. Eritreische Frauen auf der Flucht. In: ConnectionE.V. Pro Asyl, ed. Eritrea:
Desertion, Flucht & Asyl. Frankfurt: Pro Asyl, 36– 48.
Ignatieff, M., 1978. A just measure of pain: the penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750-1850.
New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Isin, E. and Nielsen, G.M., eds, 2008. Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books.
Jessop, B. and Sum, N.-L., 2006. Beyond the regulation approach: putting capitalist economies in
their place. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Jordan, B. and Du
¨vell, F., 2002. Irregular migration: the dilemmas of transnational mobility.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Karakayali, S., 2008. Gespenster der Migration: zur Genealogie illegaler Einwanderung in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Karakayali, S. and Tsianos, V., 2005. Mapping the order of new migration. Undokumentierte Arbeit
und die Autonomie der Migration. Peripherie, 97/98, 35 – 64.
Kuster, B., 2011. Camps und Heterotopien der Gegenwart. A
`props de Rien ne vaut que la vie, mais
la vie me
ˆme ne vaut rien. In: M.-H. Gutberlet and S. Helff, eds. Die Kunst der Migration.
Aktuelle Positionen zum europa
¨isch-afrikanischen Diskurs. Bielefeld: Transcript, 147– 157.
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos194
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
Lafazani, O., 2011. The border from the border: Critical perspectives on EU borders migration
policies and beyond, In: Paper presented at the conference Border regions in transition XI, 6 – 9
September 2011, Geneva, Switzerland.
Linebaugh, P., 2008. The Magna Carta manifesto: liberties and commons for all. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Lowe, L., 1996. Immigrant acts: on Asian American cultural politics. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Lucassen, J. and Lucassen, L., 1997. Migration, migration history, history: old paradigms and new
perspectives. Bern: International Institute of Social History.
Mezzadra, S., 2001. Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Verona: Ombre
Corte.
Mezzadra, S., 2010. The gaze of autonomy. Capitalism, migration and social struggles. In: V. Squire,
ed. The contested politics of mobility. Borderzones and irregularity. New York, NY: Routledge,
121–142.
Moulier Boutang, Y., 1998. De l’esclavage au salariat. Economie historique du salariat bride
´. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Moulier Boutang, Y., 2012. Cognitive capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Negri, A., 2005. The politics of subversion: a manifesto for the twenty-first century. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge Polity.
Nichols, T. ed., 1980. Capital and labour: studies in the capitalist labour process. London: Fontana.
Nyers, P., 2006. The accidental citizen: acts of sovereignty and (un)making citizenship. Economy
and society, 35 (1), 22– 41.
Nyers, P. ed., 2009. Securitizations of citizenship. London: Routledge.
O’Connell Davidson, J., 2010. New slavery, old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of
‘freedom’. Global networks, 10 (2), 244– 261.
O’Connell Davidson, J., 2011. Moving children? child trafficking, child migration, and child rights.
Critical social policy, 31 (3), 454 – 477.
Panagiotidis, E. and Tsianos, V., 2006. Denaturalising the camp. In: Transit Migration
Forschungsgruppe, ed. Turbulente ra
¨nder. neue perspektiven auf migration an den grenzen
Europas. Bielefeld: Transcript, 59–88.
Papadopoulos, D., 2006. World 2. On the significance and impossibility of articulation. Culture,
theory and critique, 47, 165– 179.
Papadopoulos, D., 2012.Worlding justice/commoning matter. Occasion: interdisciplinary studies in the
humanities, 3 (15 March) [online]. Available from: http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/79.
Papadopoulos, D. and Tsianos, V., 2007. The autonomy of migration: The animals of undocumented
mobility. In: A. Hickey-Moody and P. Malins, eds. Deleuzian encounters. Studies in
contemporary social issues. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 223– 235.
Papadopoulos, D., Stephenson, N. and Tsianos, V., 2008. Escape routes. control and subversion in
the 21st century. London: Pluto Press.
Peuter, G.D. and Dyer-Witheford, N., 2010. Commons and cooperatives. Affinities: a journal of
radical theory, culture, and action, 4, 30– 56.
Puig De La Bellacasa, M., 2012. ‘Nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care. The
Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216.
Rancie
`re, J., 1998. Disagreement: politics and philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
Rodriguez, N., 1996. The battle for the border: notes on autonomous migration, transnational
communities, and the state. Social justice, 23 (3), 21 – 37.
Sassen, S., 2004. The repositioning of citizenship: emergent subjects and spaces for politics. In: P.A.
Passavant and J. Dean, eds. Empire’s new clothes: reading Hardt and Negri. New York, NY:
Routledge, 175–198.
Schuster, L., 2003. The use and abuse of political asylum in Britain and Germany. London:
Frank Cass.
Sharma, N., 2008. Escape artists: migrants and the politics of naming. Subjectivity, 29, 467– 476.
Steinfeld, R.J., 2001. Coercion, contract, and free labor in the nineteenth century. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, E.P., 1971. The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past &
Present, 50, 76–136.
Citizenship Studies 195
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013
Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, ed., 2006. Turbulente ra
¨nder. neue perspektiven auf migration
an den grenzen europas. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Trimikliniotis, N., 2009. Nationality and citizenship in Cyprus since 1945: Communal citizenship,
gendered nationality and the adventures of a post-colonial subject in a divided country.
In: R. Baubo
¨Ck, B. Perchinig and W. Sievers, eds. Citizenship policies in the new Europe. 2nd
ed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 389 – 418.
Tsianos, V. and Pieper, M., 2011. Postliberale assemblagen. rassismus in zeiten der gleichheit.
In: S. Friedrich, ed. Rassismus in der leistungsgesellschaft. analysen und kritische perspektiven
zu den rassistischen normalisierungsprozessen der ‘sarrazindebatte’.Mu
¨nster: Edition
Assemblage, 114–133.
Tsianos, V., Papadopoulos, D. and Stephenson, N., 2012. This is class war from above and they are
winning it. What is to be done? Rethinking marxism: a journal of economics, culture & society,
24 (3), 448–457.
Tyler, I., 2010. Designed to fail: a biopolitics of British citizenship. Citizenship studies, 14 (1),
61–74.
Urry, J., 2003. Global complexity. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Vasta, E., 2011. Immigrants and the paper market: borrowing, renting and buying identities. Ethnic
and racial studies, 34 (2), 187– 206.
Von Oswald, A., 2002. Volkswagen, Wolfsburg und die italienischen ‘Gastarbeiter’. Archiv fu
¨r
sozialgeschichte, 42, 55–79.
Winner, L., 1986. The whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Zibechi, R., 2011. Territorien des widerstands. eine politische kartografie der urbanen peripherien
lateinamerikas. Hamburg: Assoziation A.
D. Papadopoulos and V.S. Tsianos196
Downloaded by [Lancaster University Library] at 02:27 26 April 2013