Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon my research between North Africa and Europe, this contribution aims to analyse the 'desire of elsewhere' and the underpinning global imaginaries which inform the motivation to move (often 'at any cost') of people of different origins.

Paper long abstract:

If migration has been a normal aspect of social life throughout history, every epoch may have configured some peculiar patterns of human mobility, based upon time-related forms and reasons. Observed from the so-called "sending countries", contemporary reasons seem to take up some specific features, which are representative of a sort of "global form of life" with hegemonic traits. Whereas people have normally explained their desire to move as a search for a better life, criteria against which 'better life' is defined today are influenced by standards whose origin is situated in a wider field of models and values. If material achievement through consumption is conceived as the primary source of visible success - a sort of "material citizenship" that enables to think to oneself (and to be deemed) as different - transnational circulation is regarded as the primary way to "become first class" (Ferguson) in a world in which movement represents one of the clearest forms of social power.

Drawing on my fifteen-year research in anthropology and psychology between North Africa and Europe, this contribution analyses the impact of hegemonic global values on the "desire of migration" and on the imaginary construction of the elsewhere.