Focaal

In this introductory article, we critically analyze which rules govern human mobility and how mobility regulations and codes are resisted, transgressed, broken, and remade. To play by the rules of mobility means to follow habits and laws governed by social norms and institutional control. Our point of departure is that social and institutional mobility rules both abound and are intertwined and that they are routinely disputed by individuals, groups, and institutions. Drawing on ethnographic examples and the literature on legal anthropology, mobilities, and transnational migration, the article disentangles the specific mechanisms, principles, and symbolic power of mobility rules—written and non-written, legal and non-legal, formal and informal, codified and non-codified, explicit and implicit. In short, we address how people are navigating rules of mobility that operate in contradictory, ambiguous, and hidden ways.

This article analyzes how African migrants are confronted in Europe with contrasting mobility rules. We argue that mobility rules not only come from formalized immigration bureaucracies but also emerge from people's transnational social spaces. From there, we first seek to capture the particular mobility regimes and the social imaginaries that produce desirable and undesirable mobility. Subsequently, we ethnographically engage with people's actual responses to particular formal and informal mobility rules. These insights construct a highly dynamic and translocal topology whereby bureaucracies and social lifeworlds intersect, which makes questions of success/failure, good migranthood as well as mobility/immobility highly diffuse. We use these insights to reflect on uncertainty in the light of shifting im/mobility itineraries and consider migrant navigations as political acts.

This article examines a case in which three fishermen were sentenced for people smuggling after having rescued 99 refugees from their sinking ship near Indonesia. The analysis is grounded in the juxtaposition of three different sets of mobility rules – Indonesian migration law, customary law of the sea, and international law for search and rescue at sea. It argues that recent mobility restrictions at the Indonesian state level implemented to deter maritime movements are in violation of longer-standing local and international sets of mobility rules meant to protect lives at sea. The findings show a legal precedent that could cause potential non-state rescuers to abandon rescue to avoid state sanctions, while states may enjoy impunity for disregarding international law concerning the rescue of people in distress at sea.

“Backway” is the Gambian term for the outflow of people, mostly via the Mediterranean and oceanic routes that during the 2010s turned the country into one of the highest per capita origin points for sub-Saharan migrants in Europe. From the standpoint of Kerewan, a Gambian rural community proud of its migratory legacy, a mobility rules perspective uncovers the specificity of the “backway” in sensible arenas of village life: household and family networks, intergenerational relationships, and development. Since 2017, initiatives linked to the Euro-African mobility regime to immobilize young Gambians meet the practical rationality on the ground of communities like Kerewan engaged in a moral conversation about what family, village, intergenerational and transnational solidarity, and development should and do mean in the current predicament.

 Precarious migrants must cope with various restrictions and exceptional policies while challenging anti-migrant images and crisis discourses. Using the concept infrapolitical mobilities, this article draws attention to minor acts that resist and/or navigate the constraints imposed by the racialization and criminalization of migrant (im)mobilities. We emphasize the agency and practices performed by migrants and their allies, that, intentionally or not, challenge mobility rules related to expulsability, transient (im)mobilities, and insecure livelihoods. Our attention to infrapolitics of mobility exposes not only how mobility rules often work in practice, but also how they are resisted, negotiated, and reshaped by apparently minor acts that have unintended political effects of co-producing mobility rules.

In this article, I discuss the interplay between the formal and informal mobility rules regulating migration, asylum, and reception regimes in Italy. Engaging with the blurred grounds generated by mobility rules in practice, I argue that the (ir)regular functioning of bureaucracies of asylum and its gray zones created systemic injustice, while also accidentally fostering what I call a “relational mycelium” and support networks between the migrant and non-migrant population. The contribution dialogues with my former experience as reception worker and later as researcher with that of a group of Gambian asylum seekers to understand how subjectivities, goals, hopes, and desires were invested and reshaped through the asylum system, and by the relational networks developed in reception facilities.

The “commons” have become a rallying point of social mobilization against privatization and a linchpin of collective civic empowerment and democratic renewal in several countries. What singles out the Italian “laboratory” of urban commons in recent years is the coalescence of pro-commons lawyers with activists, movements, and grassroots collectives. The central role played by law in the Italian commons network must be read in the light of the distinctive forms that regulations and rules assume in specific contexts. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2019, this article focuses on the case of Naples and the reinvention of the legal tradition of “civic use.” Our account of the daily practices pursued by a Neapolitan community of commoners—L'Asilo—delves into the role played by the law and its representatives in a political context that has always been the subject of stigmatization.

As that which troubles simplistic binaries, ruins provide an entry point for scholars to conceptualize time, space, and identity as multiple, fragmented, and mutable. This article contributes to these studies by interrogating Australian settler-colonial time-space narratives (chronotopes) of White dominance through engagement with counter-narratives of mutable materialities and identities. Through ethnography of a commemorative event in a rural Australian town, I show how peoples of mixed Aboriginal and Asian descent negotiated racialized ruins to reassert narrative agency. I argue narratives of identity—when re-remembered through spatial understandings of multiple community membership, re-lived through embodied experiences, and re-collected through affective engagement with ruins—create a mutable space to disrupt settler-colonial chronotopes, revealing narratives of hybrid, polyethnic, and polyracial belongings in Australia.

This article is a “thought experiment” that takes recourse to Lucien Freud's youthful portrait of himself as Acteon—the hunter whom the goddess Diana turned into a stag, as famously narrated by Ovid. In his drawing, Freud's crisis of presence is mobilized by a play on gender differentiation. More broadly, the piece is an exploration of what it involves being present as a person and of how personal transcendence opens up a propositional ontology that differs from the intentionality of life. The possibility of loss of personal transcendence is an ever-present preoccupation of humans wherever they are.