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Articles

After citizenship: autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons

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Pages 178-196 | Received 13 May 2011, Accepted 25 Feb 2012, Published online: 25 Apr 2013
 

Abstract

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.

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.

Notes

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].

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