European Citizenship and the Place of Migrants’ Struggles in a New Radical Europe. An interview with Sandro Mezzadra. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Migrant Resistance, Introduction, 2019.pdf
Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe, 2019
Over the past few years, increased ‘unauthorised’ migrations into the territories of Europe have resulted in one of the most severe crises in the history of the European Union. Stierl explores migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and the ways in which they animate, problematise, and transform the region and its political formation. This volume follows public protests of migrant activists, less visible attempts of those on the move to ‘irregularly’ subvert borders, as well as new solidarities and communities that emerge in interwoven struggles for the freedom of movement. Stierl offers a conceptualisation of migrant resistances as forces of animation through which European forms of border governance can be productively explored. As catalysts that set socio-political processes into frictional motion, they are developed as modes of critical investigation, indeed, as method. By ethnographically following and being implicated in different migration struggles that contest the ways in which Europe decides over and enacts who does, and does not, belong, the author probes what they reveal about the condition of Europe in the contemporary moment.
Nordic journal of migration research, 2021
The book Migration, Borders and Citizenship: Between Policy and Public Spheres, edited by Ambrosini, Cinalli, and Jacobson, is a volume that is both theoretically challenging and empirically rich. It proposes to address the relationship between borders and citizenship in a multilevel governance setting where policy at different levels interacts-in cooperation or in conflict-with the public sphere and its various actors. The book gathers authors from different disciplines (chiefly sociologists but also lawyers and geographers) who, resorting to different qualitative methods, tackle a wealth of interesting issues, such as inter alia: borders in the European Union (EU) and in the larger Euro-Mediterranean region (Chapter 3), the contorted situation of the Dreamers in the United States (Chapter 4), the roles of medical expertise in the EU's hotspots (Chapter 7), and the narratives surrounding the construction of the French-Italian border in a historical perspective (Chapter 8). This brief review does not do justice to the variety of contributions, but selects some of the main take-aways the book offers for academics and students interested in migration and governance. In the lines that follow, I first present the theoretical contribution of the book and notably the original conceptualization of borders as seams stitching entities together rather than dividing them. Second, I outline some of the empirical findings of interest, which I group in two categories: one that reflects the local turn in migration policies while nuancing the role of local authorities, and another that provides insights in the activities of nonorganized civil society as actors of solidarity. From the theoretical standpoint, the book proposes a range of approaches to the bordercitizenship relationship. While borders are looked at as limits between territories, which consequently determines membership to the citizenry, they are also considered as less tangible walls that may erect within the state and entail different treatment between natives and foreigners or between different categories of citizens. But, the key conceptual contribution