Paper short abstract:

The paper argues that the multi-scalar and diverse governmentality of the migration apparatus produces ambiguous social connections and political subjectivities, which reflect the continuous shapeshifting of borders and the geopolitical and historical contingencies that shape them.

Paper long abstract:

The paper argues that the productive, multi-scalar, and diverse governmentality of the migration apparatus, while working through mediated and abstracted social relations (Feldman, 2011), also accidentally fosters direct social connections, as the ones between asylum workers and asylum seekers in receptive facilities. These social connections weave a relational mycelium that exceeds border scripts and extend beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the mobility regime. Using mine and my main interlocutors' social connections as ethnographic objects, I describe the silences, omissions, double-binds, and awkward moments they provoked in the course of my fieldwork on "post-asylum" political subjectivities between Italy and The Gambia. In so doing, I argue that the humanitarian/securitarian nexus of the migration apparatus co-constructs not just migrant subjectivities but also non-migrant ones, reflecting broader dynamics of interconnectedness. These dynamics could be used as a litmus test to analyse the features of the current mobility regime. Their intrinsic ambiguity caused indeed in the ethnographic cases I present, what I call epistemic and ethical entrapment, the fruit of the counter-intuitive logic of the mobility regime’s functioning and simultaneously of its deep historical genealogy. The interrogation of such entrapments and "zones of awkward engagement" (Tsing, 2005) could shed light on the continuous shapeshifting of borders and of the geopolitical and historical contingencies in which they take place, while exposing the processual and unpredictable dimension of the political subjectivities reconfiguring the Euro-African space.