Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic insights with undocumented migrants and analyses different ways of resisting official and unofficial forms of border control.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on insights gained with people on the move, characterized in official discourse as undocumented migrants or asylum-seekers, this paper examines corporeal forms of resistance. It departs from the frame of smooth functioning of administrative power that seeks to contain individuals in the places assigned to them, and thus regulate and stop irregular forms of global mobilities. The paper highlights mobile persons' potential of disturbing this power, indeed resisting it in different ways. In so doing, they challenge not only the administrative and legal categorizations but also question taken-for-granted assumptions within fluid migrant communities and among solidarity advocates. The paper analyses three acts of resistance targeting different embodiments of power, figured in a young and scrawny body journeying unassisted through various countries, a male body onto which the European quest to Control its borders has carved its marks, and leaders of shadow communities negotiating the access to the people they are to protect.