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Paper short abstract:

Relocation aims to move refugees in the EU. It is a contemporary example of the circulation of bodies between state instantiations that has been little studied. The paper aims to fill this gap. It shows how the state governs refugees through relocation, understood as a form of governmental mobility.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the relocation of refugees in the European Union (EU). Relocation is a policy instrument which aims to select and transfer refugees within the EU. In 2015, it was adopted as a plan to solve the so-called migration crisis. It is a contemporary example of the circulation of bodies between state instantiations that has been at the heart of political debates on European migration policies. However, it has been little studied by academic research. This paper intends to fill this gap by focusing on the case of Malta, which was the first EU member state to experiment relocation as a sending country, between 2009 and 2011. Multi-sited fieldwork conducted between Malta and Brussels shows that a wide range of actors was involved in the relocation of refugees from Malta, such as state actors, employees of international organisations and European civil servants. Although refugees were portrayed by institutional actors as indefinitely immobilised populations on an island-border, which justified relocation, they were only temporarily contained and they were actually mobile. Indeed, most refugees managed to leave the island permanently by their own means, even if they were not entitled to do so. However, the expectation of relocation is not considered as a side-effect of EU migration policies but as an actual part of them. This research aims to show how refugees are governed through relocation, understood as a form of governmental mobility. This concept highlights that relocation prevents refugees from controlling their own migratory trajectory and thus contributes to the experience of self-deprivation.

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Paper short abstract:

I present an insight into the spatial dimension of the State by focusing on how it becomes instantiated through specific public interventions in the field of tourism, therefore orchestrating and channelling a set of mobilities and practices through which the (touristic) space is socially produced.

Paper long abstract:

In this intervention I focus on touristic mobilities, significantly different from those of migrants or asylum seekers, mainly consisting in voluntary and circular displacements, temporal liminalities (Graburn, 1989; Jafari, 1987), oriented to pleasure. Based on a current research on the development of the Penedès region (Spain) as a wine tourism destination, grounded in a historical ethnography, I present an approximation to the role of the State (and its effects) in the production of the touristic circulation of bodies and their practices.

The Penedès' Tourism Promotion Consortium, born in 1998, led to the creation of the Wine Routes of Penedès; which have become a sort of ritualistic itineraries (Delgado, 2000; Graburn, 1989) that connect the cellars and other touristic infrastructures and attractions. Later, the region became part of a wider national strategy to de-concentrate and de-seasonalize tourism from Barcelona to lesser local and regional destinations. I suggest taking these kind of routes, and the national circuits to new touristic centres (Córdoba, 2020; Mansilla & Milano, 2019), as a specific form of State instantiation through which not only the tourists' bodies, but also its practices (visits, tastings, meals, activities and "experiences", etc.), are oriented and channelled.

This allows us to think on the spatialization of the State through public interventions, in the sense of: a) its existence in the space (crystallised in routes, indications, viewpoints, maps and guides…); and b) its conditioning of the practices and mobilities through which, following Lefebvre (2013, 1991), the (touristic) space is socially produced, represented and objectified.

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Paper short abstract:

Starting from an ethnography of the Humanitarian corridor between Lebanon and Italy, this paper intends to outline how the enchainment of different actors produce a hybrid infrastructure of migration to individuate who can move and how, according to a specific regime of circulation

Paper long abstract:

Since 2016, an assemblage of NGOs and Italian institutions has launched the “Humanitarian corridors” programme in order to construct “legal paths of migration” for subjects considered eligible for humanitarian or political protection. Initially the program was built for Syrian refugees stuck in Lebanon, waiting indefinitely in the UNHCR resettlement list, but was later expanded to other areas of irregular mobility such as Libya, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. The aim of this paper is to grasp how this migration policy is based upon a specific governmentality of circulation, intended as a techno-political software capable of shaping spaces and times through the implementation of circuits of movement. In the age of global connectivity, this social practise – far from being free and unruled – is in fact overly structured by mixed chains of state and non-state actors in order to maximise speed, efficiency and security of circulation. In this sense, the humanitarian corridor can be considered a particular circuit of movement that seeks to canalise the fluxes of irregular mobility, taming them through selection rituals and departure schedule, while they inevitably contribute to devaluate the right to move of those who are excluded from these programs. Starting from an ethnography of the humanitarian corridor between Lebanon and Italy, this paper intends to outline how the enchainment of different actors produce a hybrid infrastructure of migration to individuate who can move and how, according to a specific regime of circulation.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on French - Italian alpine border, investigating the undocuments migrants' journey, and the enactment of the "health border". It considers how state and local government practices - with the specific role of PT - increase immobilities and the processes of social exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

Covid19 pandemic highlight the strengthening of pre-existing asymmetries (Fassin, 2021), showing the fragility of "right of free movement" notion, in particular at the border, whose presence affects mostly people for whom the movement is existential: undocumented migrants (Tazzioli 2021).

This proposal explores how these processes occur at the French-Italian border in Val Susa. We show the strong impact that mobility measures designed by the State for pandemic government had on the circulation of migrants' bodies.

Infrastructure (Venkatesan et al, 2018) has a crucial role in the reconfiguration of anthropological approaches on politics: configured as ways of exercising and displaying power, systems through which the circulation of goods, knowledge, meanings, and bodies is ensured, but also through which the very threads of power are unraveled (Amin - Thrift, 2017).

The French-Italian border became the epitome of this exercise of power, in particular in zones of intensified governmental control at transportational nodal points, as train and bus stations. In these zones, various dispositives of control are applied to modulate the movement of people (Optiz S., 2016). This involves, i.e., compulsory health pass to access public transport -hardly obtainable by undocumented people-, the increased controls in the railway stations, as well as the decrease of bus runs and their stops near the French-Italian border that caused a general gradual unpredictability of the service. This further highlights how transit places can become a constitutive element of bordering and migration control, and turns once again evident the political dimension of mobility (Cresswell, 2006; Sheller, 2018).

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Paper short abstract:

The French state insists that the asylum system must be "fluid" and humane. I explore how non-governmental "operators" negotiate human-centred social work alongside the fluid circulation of bodies. I argue that their negotiations are crucial in tempering the dismantlement of French welfare.

Paper long abstract:

As the French state outsources the social work of sheltering asylum seekers and resettling refugees to non-governmental "operators," it imposes "fluidity"—a particular kind of efficiency logic, aiming to ensure that bodies exit shelters and resettlement programs when rights to these services expire. Concurrent with this fluid fantasy, the French government asserts that "humanity" is a central principle of asylum.

Examining state documents (laws, financial reports, call-for-tenders, and implementation memos), I track how the fluid circulation of migratory flows is imagined as one efficient chain of operation, reminiscent of the Fordist assembly-line. In these documents, fluidity is the idealised answer to overstretched sheltering and support services. I show how the "fluid" circulation of bodies comes to be justified along "humane" grounds: the outflow of those having completed twelve-month resettlement programs or reached the end of their asylum procedure, makes space for others.

Yet non-governmental workers were sceptical of the "humanism" of this regime of fluidity. Constrained by state target indicators, rigid administrative categories, and delimited programming, non-governmental workers often questioned the meaning behind the "social work" they undertook. Though they were tasked with addressing asylum seekers' and refugees' legal, housing, health and income issues, rarely were workers able to ensure the personalised and sustainable solutions to precarity long promised by French welfare. I argue that in brokering limited solutions for select casefiles, and in performing human closeness on behalf of a state increasingly seen as a dehumanised machine, non-governmental workers tempered welfare dismantlement.