Paper short abstract:

Drawing from direct experience working at an asylum seekers’ reception centre, the paper analyses the factors contributing to turning the international protection regime into a deadlock and shows how the state strategically uses issues of waiting and immobility to keep the undesired at bay.

Paper long abstract:

Human migrations, with their role in the development of humankind and the rise and fall of civilisations, have been historically tackled through the prism of movement. However, with the growing hardening of borders worldwide, the so-called “people-on-the-move” face frequent and prolonged periods of immobilisation and deadlock, stranded several times along their journeys in no man’s lands, camps and reception centres. For this reason, recent scholarship has been increasingly stressing the “stuckedness” (Hage 2009) and forced immobility experienced by migrants illegalised by contemporary border regimes. These are equally devices of inclusion and exclusion (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013) that operate as assemblages of policies and managing practices directed at “where the migrant is” (De Genova et al. 2014). Especially those lacking a definitive legal status are made unable to move on and constantly threatened to be moved back; and, with asylum procedures stretching for years, their temporary and conditional admission becomes almost a permanent state of “enduring liminality” (Ramadan 2013). In my proposal, I draw from my experience working at an asylum seekers’ reception centre to analyse the factors contributing to this condition and show how the state strategically uses issues of waiting and immobility to keep the undesired at bay.