Migration Control, Forced Immobility & Violent Mobilization

Abstract

Abstract

The results of the project offer an innovative understanding the controlling of movement to contain human mobility that is undesired and designated as a security threat in general and international migration towards Europe in particular. We showed the practices of remaking the local border a global one. A multiperspectival study of borders revealed that the border is not only made by the state and their agents, but also by surrounding actors, such as citizens winning and loosing from shifting border and mobility regimes. The project was able to show how mobility as a context-specific ensemble of movement, representations of this movement and concrete mobile practices is above all political. We downscaled the concept of mobility regime to understand (im)mobility regimes as constituted by a specific set of infrastructures and infrastructuring practices through which movement is contained or, more generally, through which (im)mobilities are governed, and the ways the targeted subjects respond. Thinking of the relations of mobility and stasis as both an outcome of, and the shaping of, a regime allows us to reveal the entangled power relations at work in the respective infrastructures.