Migration Discipline Hijacked: Distances and Interruptions of a Research Militancy

Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli

The Persistence of Contestedness

‘Critical’, ‘radical’, and ‘activist’ qualifiers are

increasingly featured within migration studies as

disciplinary postures, research platforms’ rationales, and

even funding lines’ qualifying criteria. In the Introduction to

this special issue, we look at the process of ‘becoming a

discipline’ that has been investing migration knolwedges and

its ‘disciplining effects’ on the terrain of knowledge

production. Now, this hardening of migration knowledges,

their cementing academic esteem, and their imbrications with

migration governance also invest those ‘critical’,

‘radical’, and/or ‘activist’ knowledge practices that, under

different rubrics and with different styles, have been

contributing to the conversation about the political stakes

in conducting research on migrations.

This paper speaks to the debate about the contested

politics of migrationsi reflecting on tools that – within a

practice of knowledge production and against its

disciplinary closure – may foster interventions towards a

“political epistemology of migrations”ii. In other words,

our aim is to reflect on some instruments that may

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destabilize the governmental map of migrations within which

we work as scholars, the regime of knowledge and truth this

map performs and the research agendas it mandates. We

understand ‘political epistemology’ as a genealogical

account which traces the emergence of a conceptual field

(e.g. migration governmentality or even migration studies)

and maps its conditions of stability, hence denaturalizing

the normative function of its categoriesiii. Building on this

approach within migration studies, we take knowledge

production as the struggle-field where the production of

migrants as objects of research programs and of government

policies is challengediv and where the ‘disciplining of

migrations’ arising from the academic and governmental

incorporation of migrations as objects is resisted and

turned-around.

To this aim, we ask: Which knowledge practices and

interventions account for the contestedness migrations

spark, and for the turbulence, excess, and upheavals

migrants trigger? Which research tools may foster an

analytical as well as political persistence on the spaces migrants put

in motion with their struggles? Which investigation modes

allow us to slip through the “governmentalization of

migration knowledge production”v from within the premises of

an investigation about migrations?

The paper discusses two of such paths which we pursue

building on the notions of ‘distance’ and ‘interruption’.

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First, we sketch an approach to research on migrants’

struggles that would work through the distances that perform and

define migration field-sites and their pristine subject

positions; second, we argue for the development and

deployment of interruptions against those unquestioned chains

of equivalences that are embedded in migration knowledge,

either pushed by the securitizing agenda of migration

governance and/or infiltrated via that methodological

Europeanism permeating the social sciences with its

recurrent mobilization of models of European polity “as the

contrasting point against which the rest becomes

meaningful”vi.

Building on our engagement – an engagement made

especially of displacements and diagnostic failures, as we

shall illustrate – with Libyan war refugees in Tunisia and

in Italy, we reflect on how these instruments somehow bring

scholarly knowledge to its limits while working within this

very knowledge. Inasmuch as our goal is to keep engaging

with and thinking through migrant struggles (and inasmuch as

we embrace the well-known criticism of migration knowledge

captures), we posit this frontier zone, this epistemic and

political struggle-camp, as the space where a political

epistemology of migrations may be pursued.

Working Through the Distance

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In line with other traditions of engaged research (e.g.

participant action research), also militant research

organizes its stake around the issue of positionality: on

the one hand, it situates research as a hetero-normed

practice, attending to issues pertaining to contested

political terrains of social struggles, terrains whereon the

research’s impact ought to be assessed; on the other hand,

it builds its approach on the need to overcome a deep-rooted

epistemic ‘distance’, that between the researcher and the

object of the research (understood both as the field-site

and the subject around which the research revolves). In this

sense, militant research is a practice of crafting

proximities: connecting the stakes of political struggles

and knowledge production on a common-ground. We acknowledge

the importance of such practice of nexuses and convergences

and we’ll come to its deployment in the conclusion of the

paper. But as we reflect on migration knowledge production –

its epistemology, its politics, and their imbrications – we

want to linger on this distance, which we see as

adversarial, and figure out what may be triggered when

“working through” its spaces. How can this distance be put to

work, this distance that grounds and engenders the position

of the researcher and that parts someone inquiring about a

social struggle from someone inquired as part of this

struggle?

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Before expanding on this focus on ‘distance’ in a

discussion about migration research militancy, a couple of

words on what this focus is not. This is not an apology for

distance: the distance between us visiting the Mineo

processing center for asylum seekers in Sicilyvii as

researchers and the people we met there, the distance upon

which our encounter happened and that was re-staged every

time we parted ways (us getting in our car to go back to the

hotel in Catania, them stuck in suspension at the center or

stuck elsewhere while ‘in processing’ or afterwards) … this

is a produced distance our work aims to contest and displace.

Likewise, the distance that separates a young person from

Tunis needing (an almost impossible to obtain) visa approval

to travel to London and those of us who, just based on a

desire to do so, travel across the world as, say, conference

hoppers or even militant tourists, is a produced distance. It

is indeed this very production that our work aims to unpack

and contest. It is, more precisely, the imbrications of

scholarly research in the production and reproduction of

this distance as an instrument of government that our work

grapples with. The politics of parting subjects into fixed

positions and this politics’ enactment via policies (e.g.

immigration statuses and degrees of residency permits)

produce this distance by tracing differential borders and

partitioning migrations among various practices of mobility:

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it is the epistemological process involved in this

production that we address in this paper.

We take this ‘produced distance’ as our ‘struggle’-field

because we – as researchers, militants, militant researchers

... – are in this distance which we, nonetheless, aim at

countering. The challenge then becomes: How do we occupy and

‘squat’ this distance; how do we ‘work through’ its spaces\?

How does one inhabit this distance without making it one’s

home, actually pursuing a dispossession from its premises, a

dispossession from those political and analytical anchors

that profile and fix subject positions and result in

structural distances?

Visiting with Libyan war asylum seekers at Chouchaviii and

Mineo camps and following their struggles, our imagined role

as researchers has often been rerouted in the interaction

with them. We want to approach this discussion on a

‘research militancy’ by holding on to our displacements and

trying to catch up with the people we visited with at

Choucha and Mineo.

The simplest and most recursive of these redirections

targeted our role at the camp, our job and our motives for

being there and for being interested in their struggle.

Despite introducing ourselves as researchers working at the

university in London and in Chicago and as part of a

feminist group working with the families of missing Tunisian

migrantsix, our hosts at these refugee camps would interject

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at some point in our meetings with a kind of summing-up

profile: “so you are a journalists …” or “what is the name

of your association again?” cataloguing our visit as that of

the nth journalist or association representative

interviewing them. In one of the last occasions when a “so

you are journalists” was directed at us, at the end of

December 2012 in a meeting with national community

representatives of rejected refugees at Choucha camp, we

were actually already wondering who we were by being there,

and in which role we were visiting with them having already

met with them at other times, having followed their

struggles and talked with activists who were working with

themx. These were also the days when we were getting ready

for the London workshop that this special issue builds on,

wondering about the different modes of conducting research

on migrations; speculating about the differences between

researchers who study migrants and refugees and researchers

who are engaged in their struggles, and, among this last

category, the difference between those who belong to the

associative world, those who are activists, and those who

are militants … and so on and so forth, distinction after

distinction; and finally trying to figure out, as we were

going, what it meant to be in Tunisia at that moment and to

be trying to run a militant investigation at Choucha camp.

That “so you are …” gestured quite clearly towards what

our position and positioning in that situation was: we were

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not of them, neither migrants nor refugees, neither status nor

rejected residents of that camp. Any connection we may have

wanted to try to establish with them was to be built within

this distance from them. So this produced distance (produced

by immigration policy – but also economic, ‘humanitarian’,

‘security’ policies – and peremptorily reinforced and re-

enacted by social behaviors) was finally pushed back by

them, Choucha rejected refugees, whose distance from us and

from our privilege of not being a migrant, an asylum seeker,

and a rejected refugee kept being reinstated time and again

in the relationship.

Why was it so important to make this distance explicit in

order to start figuring out a possible way to work on it and

to start identifying this as one of the key struggle-fields

of a militant research on migrations? Because it is a

“spectacle of proximity” which has been booming in migration

studies: not only in the sense of the dramatization of the

invasion (i.e. the proximity of migrants to ‘our’ premises)

as many scholars have underlinedxi, but also in the sense of

staging the ‘being there’ of researcher activists and the

spectacle of their breaking through a ‘distance’, the

enactment at locality of their closeness to the struggle(-site),

obsessively staged as the site of border crossingxii. For

instance: at Lampedusa Island in July 2011 one could

certainly “study” the mobility governance apparatus put in

place by security forces, humanitarian agencies, and various

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migrants’ organizations – with direct observation, taking

pictures, interviewing, even accessing security forces’

archives. And one could certainly ‘engage’ in conversation

on whatever aspect of migration one may have fancied: the

island was indeed ‘invaded’; but not by migrants (who at

that time were being illegally segregated in the island’s

centers). Instead, the island was invaded by ‘us’ scholars,

students, film-makers, migrants’ rights activists,

associations’ representatives, aspiring counter-mappers,

radical photographers … and so on and so forth. In the

aftermath of the Arab Uprisings, Lampedusa became (again)

the borderline for militant engagement with migrations. So

this became a double dislocation: a dislocation from the

comfort zone of one’s own critical distance as researcherxiii

and a dislocation from one’s own stages of proximity to a

struggle.

But it is when these displacements become invested in

the process of knowledge production and deployment that they

become powerful instruments of “research militancy”xiv ,

tools towards that political epistemology of migration. For

instance, after our first visits at Mineo and Choucha, every

time we went back we kept finding ourselves in a sort of

unintended boycott of the research field-site. Entering the

camps as researchers with questions to ask and stories to

gather from asylum seekers, we soon found ourselves in the

role of those to whom questions were addressed and from whom

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data and information were requested: Does one need a lawyer

to file an appeal after his asylum claim is rejected? Who is

the head of UNHCR in Europe and the US to whom a complaint

could be addressed about the behavior of the staff at

Choucha? How long does it take for an appeal to be

adjudicated? Can one leave Mineo for some time to go look

for a job and then come back, while in processing? How does

one cash the arrears ‘pocket money’xv that was not dispersed

for the first few months of one’s residency at Mineo? And

so on and so forth, question after question on our supposed

topic of expertise, these two very refugee camps, the

policies and the legal frameworks regulating their

existence. So we found ourselves in a situation of reversal

of the interviewer / interviewee dynamic, being pushed into

the role of those who had to answer. And, in this reversal,

we performed quite poorly most of the time, not knowing the

answer, actually most often not even having a clue. Despite

our studying refugee and migration issues, policies,

intricacies, and case studies, our knowledge proved quite

ignorant faced with these requests, and faced with the

frictions as well as the stakes that they brought to our

understanding of the functioning of the technologies (and

the accidents) of mobility government. What this situation

produced was a re-routing of the knowledge to be produced

from that interaction. And this is where the research

actually started for us, leaving the camp with questions to

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answer, being made object of a knowledge practice, being

asked to live up to that role, and trying to figure out how

it all fit within our understanding of the spaces we were in

– the camps, the field-site, the struggle-field. In a sense,

the ‘militant research’ started with this acknowledgement of

our ignorant knowledges and with the interest in having them

re-routed and diverted along the paths of a struggle (a

struggle for existence as well as a struggle of articulated

claims).

But it is not just a matter of the small range of any

knowledge on migration control technologies one may acquire

‘on the page’ (of a book, report, policy paper) or from

interviews in formalized research field-sites. A research

militancy also grapples with the massive infrastracture of

migration knowledge (its many venues, funders, outlets,

epistemologies, mandates, …) and with the massive effort

mobilized towards the reproduction of its disciplinary

anchors and the powerful resources enlisted against these

anchors’ displacements. While this probably applies in any

established knowledge field, we argue that a militancy on

this terrain is critical in the field of migration studies

where the production of knowledge is deeply imbricated with

its governmental deployment; a field where critical

scholarship tends to be reabsorbed by the “deportation

regime”xvi which underpins migration governance and ends up

perfecting it; a field where countermapping epistemologies

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contribute also to the governmental map of migrationsxvii;

finally, a field where radical criticism of power’s

functioning as well as counter-narratives of mobility are

deployed as one of the modes of operation of migration

management in its progressive iteration.

Doing research in such a governmentalized mode, this

being stuck in the consolidation of the discipline, is most

often unintended among critical scholars, receives little

epistemic scrutiny, and reinforces those distances that we

posited as our struggle-field. At the end of December 2012,

at Choucha camp, some of the distances we have been talking

about in this paper felt peremptory and with no way through.

We were talking with the representatives of the group of

Libyan war displacees whose request for asylum was rejected

by UNHCR at the camp the agency was also running. The camp

was due to close in a few months, the group had been left

with no water and food since October 2012, medical aid had

been denied to those in need both at the camp and at local

hospitals, their passports were confiscated at the camp’s

office, they had no legal status in Tunisia at that point

and, as a UNHCR employee put it, “they are not people of our

concern”. Instead, the displacees were determined to be “of

concern”. This is how their representatives put it: they

were all Libyan war refugees; the adjudication process

failed as it overlooked this basic fact, hence the process

had to be reopened and their claims re-examined. The fact of

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being all Libyan war refugees had been their persistent

struggle in the past two years and this had been and was

continuing to be their political argument. They kept siding

with this struggle-line despite their first-hand experience

of what the humanitarian government entailed, what they had

been experiencing for almost two years while stranded at

Choucha and despite having been clearly exposed also to an

open ‘humanitarian discharge’ after their denials, and the

politics of “not concern” that the UNHCR employee so clearly

summarized. But before delving into what this request

entailed (and what it in fact accomplished) we want to pause

on the distance at which we placed ourselves at the moment

they kept insisting on this institutional struggle-line, a

distance rooted in our knowledges which, as it will turn

out, failed us, both in analysis and vision of the political

situation they were in.

We had knowledge of the “rules of the game” – as the

refugees put it as they were asking us which UNHCR office

they had to write to. And these “rules”, these knowledges,

indicated clearly for us that their plan to appeal for a re-

examination of their cases for international protection was

a losing one. Some of the “rules of the game” we had in mind

are: the rule of citizenship and country of birth on which

the normative framework for international protection is

rooted; the streamlining of forced mobility paths which

tends to strip countries of residence out of the picture of

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asylum claims; the absence of refugees regulations in

Tunisia; UNHCR protocols of internal peer-reviewing and

checks on each case to, among other things, avoid appeals as

a UNHCR employee explained to us; the multiple scales of

refugees’ governance not playing in favor of the rejected

refugees’ cause (why would UNHCR Geneva overrule the

decision of its delegation at Choucha? Or would any country

accept the resettlement of people whose right to

international protection had not been acknowledged by the

United Nations Refugee Agency or why would any country grant

a resettlemenet program or even a temporary protection to

far away people whose asylum claims files bore a United

Nations’ rejection?).

But they kept pursing their struggle-line, persisting in

‘being of concern’ for a political community: their requests

continued to be outside the rules of the game, they

continued to act on their displacement, and they continued

to keep the necessarily radical political struggle-line that

this position entailed. They persisted so much that finally

something broke through the layers and scales of that

‘humanitarian’ mechanism that suspended their lives for two

years: on July 17, 2013, the Tunisian government granted a

one year humanitarian protection to all Choucha camp

residents, i.e. the non-resettled refugees and them, the

UNHCR rejected refugees, issuing them a residence permit,

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providing some accommodations in the cities of Medenine and

Ben Guerdane, and promising paths to employment.

This decision does, in fact, break through the “rules of

the game” in many ways: it grants formal recognition (albeit

temporary) – not just a de facto “differential inclusion”xviii –

to people the humanitarian regime had already left over or

left behind, being ready to close Choucha as a success

story; it recognizes status to all people still at Choucha

camp, with no distinction of UNHCR recognized or denied

refugee status, overruling UNHCR partitions and internal

divisions among Libyan war evacuees and indirectly also

acknowledging the precarization of their lives resulting

from their two years at the camp, from their two years under

‘humanitarian’ care.

Still, this was a partial victory for those who wanted

their asylum files reopened. And it was certainly a

resolution where all institutional parties had their

interest: Tunisia raising its democratic profile with the

international community, UNHCR closing the camp efficiently

without having to confront riots or radical protests. Yet,

it provided a one year break from daily struggles for about

350 former Choucha residents, the possibility to leave the

camp for a city, a place to stay, and the promise of a job.

And it forced a reconfiguration of the “rules of the game”

pursued by those who had been ruled out but whose

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persistence in playing the game against its rules brought them back

in.

Our knowledges did not see that far. More precisely we

let the knowledges of the “rules of the game” overpower our

political imagination: we abided by these knowledges’

discipline and we kept to these rules’ epistemic and

normative boundaries. In so doing, there was certainly no

research militancy and maybe not even solid research

practice. What was at play, instead, was simply a

discipline’s reproduction: the re-instantiations of its

anchors’ jurisdiction, of its rules’ grounding as well as of

their disciplinary effects. Such disciplinary reproduction

is quite a shortcoming in light of a political epistemology

of migrations: maybe methodologically sound and

disciplinarily legit, but quite a blatant shortcoming. They,

instead, did not proceed with discipline: persisting in

their request beyond the rules of the game, they hijacked the

game itself, they rerouted the game they had ended up

scripted in as ‘rejected’ and, with this, forced a concern

(and prompted the provision of aid) for those who had been

ruled out by the international humanitarian machine.

Interruptions and the Direction of Translation

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How does this work through distances and displacements,

this hijacking of the discipline of migrations, actually

produce interventions towards a political epistemology of

migrations? One of such interventions, we argue, is the

interruption of what we call a one-way politics of translation

permeating critical migration studies, the scripting of

migrant politics into the staple of citizenship – be it, for

instance, the performative mode of migrants’ ‘acts of

citizenship’, or the codes of visibility and public space

that root the citizen’s political engagement and that are

deployed to sift through migrant practices to select those

that may count as ‘political languages’ or ‘democratic

claims’ or ‘transnational movements’ … We are not arguing

against translation as an analytical posture wherefrom to

approach the study of heterogeneous migrant spaces,

practices, and politicsxix; we argue against the encoding of

migrant struggle-fields into the discipline of the citizen,

against the uncontested script for what counts as political

that is embedded in such one-way translation.

Talking about the Arab Uprisings Iain Chambers comments

on the surprise that took commentators at first and

illustrates in simple terms the process of this one way

translation:

“When mass protests and regime changes swept acrossNorth Africa in the Spring of 2011 […] Occidentaljournalism and political commentary was initially takenby surprise. The situation was eventually brought intoperspective and under Western eyes through a series of

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explanatory frames – educated unemployed youth, the newsocial media, state oppression and the lack ofdemocracy – that responded to Occidental criteria ofanalysis”xx

The same rushing away from the reconfigurations of what counts as

political, its geographies, and its imaginary is at play

also when scholars try to make sense of migrant struggles.

And a similar rushing of “explanatory frames” and blueprints

from the politics of the citizen permeates migration and

critical migration studies. Let us take the example of

Choucha denied refugees once again: what interests us is not

so much how their struggle is staging a known political

claim across the Mediterranean; what interests us is how

their struggle eventually challenges our codes of the

political (and of resistances and conflicts) that are

patrolled as disciplinary boundaries of a Euro-Atlantic

canon as well as of its spread-out reinstantiations within

academic, political, and policy debates around the globe in

their mainstream as well as critical versions. Chouhca’s

rejected refugees’ persistent request for recognitions, for

instance, forces a reconsideration of the radical politics’

dismissal of the institutional scale and human rights

normativity as camps worth negotiations. In fact, as

Choucha’s rejected refugees (partial) victory showed, an

address to a governmental regime (the humanitarian regime,

in this case), while it of course reinstates its legitimacy

and its exclusionary logic by addressing it as the source of

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recognition, it also forces this very regime within the

address of those it had rejected, re-opening a struggle-camp

where this regime’s very intasbilities can be turned against

their camp of force. Choucha’s ‘rejected’ refugees deployed

their being at the border (a geographical border of course

but also the “humanitarian” border at which their lives had

been stranded at Choucha, and the boundaries that its non-

concerns, partitions, discharges instantiated among war

displacees) “within and against”xxi the camp of their

humanitarian capture.

So the notion of a translation that goes both ways

gestures towards this lingering on the terrain of the

heterogeneous practices of the political and instable

practices of the social that form the ‘struggle’-fields of

mobility. Evoking a translation that goes both ways we

gesture towards a lingering on the terrain of heterogeneous

practices of the political characterizing struggle-fields of

mobility and a lingering, analytically and politically, in

the instabilities these struggle-fields effect on migration

knowledges. In other words, the idea of resisting univocal

translations – where both the direction and the codes of

translation are pre-established – refers to the aim to

create conflicting convergences in the political domain of

knowledge, instead of disciplining knowledges themeselves.

Situated “within and against” the academic discipline of

migrations, a militant research practice pursues these

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turbulent directions of translation, coming out of

heterogeneous orders of claims and practices. In this sense,

militant research seeks to contribute to forging other

languages to ‘speak of” migrations and to speak ‘starting

from’ migrations: languages whose articulation path is not the

streamlining of discordant and heterogeneous practices into

a code; languages, instead, which pursue the migration of

the code across these practices, its displacments, and the

analytical power and political relevance that a knowledge of

migrations thus gains. So not a path of rushing convergences

across different struggles and geographies based on the

commonalities and affinities of a bird’s-eye-view but the

path of exposing dominant political languages – in academic

as well as activist contexts - to these struggles and

geographies.

The notion of ‘interruption’ we mentioned above becomes

one of the tools for such language practice, such writing,

that we call militant research: interrupting the order of

migration discourse (those chains of equivalence it posits

reifying migrations as objects of security concerns and

objects of government) but also its expected use and its

disciplined space of intervention. We talk of a language

practice to underline that it is not a pluralization of

languages we aim to, that it is not a ‘democratic’ expansion

of the boundaries of disciplined knowledge that we refer to.

What we are thinking about is an “oblique politics”xxii of

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migration knowledge that would interrupt the monolingual

order of citizenship wherein migration studies script

migrants’ politics. A militant research on migrations works

on the versatility of migration knowledge’s and mobilizes

against its codification as discipline, both in the sense of

disciplined knowledge and in the sense of its disciplining

deployment in migration management.

(August 2013)

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iNotes

Key contributions to this debate: Andrijasevic, Rutvica, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking, London: Palgrave, 2010; Collective Project, “New Keywords – Migration” Cultural Studies, forthcoming 2013; De Genova, Nicholas, Peutz, Nathalie (eds), The Deportation Regime. Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010; Hess, Sabine, Karakayali, Serhat, and Tsianos, Vassilis, Transnational migration theory and method of an ethnographic analysis of border regimes, Working Paper, Sussex Centre for Migration Research, 2009; Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013; Papadopolous, Dimitris, Stephenson, Niamh, Tsianos, Vassilis, Escape Routes. Control and Subversion in the 21st century, London: Pluto Press, 2008; Sossi, Federica, “Here andThere are the Same” in Garelli, Glenda, Sossi, Federica, and Tazzioli, Martina (eds). Spaces in Migration. Postcards of a Revolution, London: Pavement Books, London, 2013; Squire, Vicky, The Contested Politics of Mobility. Borderzones and Irregularity, Routledge, 2011.ii Collective Project, “New Keywords – Migration”, Cultural Studies, 2013; Mezzadra, Sandro and Ricciardi, Maurizio, Movimenti indisciplinati. Migrazioni, migranti e discipline scientifiche, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2013; Garelli, Glenda and Tazzioli, Martina, “Arab Uprisings Making Space: Territoriality and Moral Geographies for Asylum Seekers in Italy”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, forthcoming. iii Davidson, Arnold, “Des jeux linguistiques à l’epistemologie politique”, in A. Gargani, Le savoir sans fondements, Paris: Vrin, 2013; Davidson, Arnold, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Cambridge-MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; Hacking Ian, Historical Ontology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. iv De Genova, “We are of the Connections”: Migration, Methodological Nationalism, and “Militant Research” in Postcolonial Studies, 2013. v Collective Project, “New Keywords – Migration” Cultural Studies, forthcoming 2013.vi Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method. Towards Deimperialization, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 104.vii The Mineo processing center for asylum seekers is located close to Catania in Italy, in the north-east of Sicily. It opened on March 18, 2011,in the wake of the Arab Uprisings. It hosted 5,000 people at its peak and is still operating. It was managed by the Red Cross at first and by the Cooperative Sisifo then, appointed by the Italian government. (See: DoctorsWithout Borders, 2012, “Trapped in Transit: The Neglected Victims of the War in Libya”, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/article.cfm?id=5410; Garelli, Glenda and Tazzioli, Martina, Mineo Report (in Italian), 2012,

http://www.storiemigranti.org/spip.php?article1024; Garelli, Glenda and Tazzioli, Martina, “Arab Uprisings Making Space: Territoriality and Moral Geographies for Asylum Seekers in Italy”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, forthcoming; Mazzeo, Antonio, “Mineo. Profughi spa”, 2011a; “Il Caradi Mineo, vergogna italiana”, 2011b; “L’eterno e immobile limbo del Cara di Mineo”, 2012; (in Italian)http://antoniomazzeoblog.blogspot.com viii The Choucha refugee camp, located close to Zarzis in Tunisia, along the southern frontier with Libya opened in February 2011, was managed by UNHCR,hosted 22,000 people at its peak, and officially closed on June 30th, 2013 with still about 350 people living on its premises as non-resettled and rejected refugees. See: Storiemigranti, Ridateci le nostre vite. Choucha, manifestazioni dei rigugiati, 2013 http://www.storiemigranti.org/spip.php?article1049; Tazzioli, Martina, “Migration (in) crisis and “people not of concern”, in Garelli, Glenda, Sossi, Federica, Tazzoli, Martina (eds). Spaces in Migraiton. Postcards of a Revolution, London: Pavement Books, 2013; Tazzioli, Martina, Garelli, Glenda, “The Crisis as Border: Choucha Refugee Camp and its “People not of Concern”, Etnografia Qualitiativa, forthcoming.ix On the families’ struggle, see: Federica Sossi’s articles (“Here and

There are the Same” inGarelli, Glenda, Sossi, Federica, Tazzioli, Martina (eds). Spaces in Migration.

Postcards of aRevolution, London: Pavement Books; “Ce que nous devons aux migrants

tunisiens”, inLefeuvre-Déotte M (ed), Des corps subalternes. Migrations, expériences, récits, Paris:L’Harmattan, 2012; “Luttes en migrations. Les phantasmes des “vérités”.

Paper to Journéesd'études internationales: La copie du monde à revoir. Démocratiser la

démocratie est-il illusoire? Paris, October 18-19) and the section “Da una sponda all’altra : vite che

contano” on LeVenticinqueundici blog (http://leventicinqueundici.noblogs.org/?page_id=354) and the petitions published on the website Storie Migranti (http://www.storiemigranti.org/) - see, in particular: Petition for missing Tunisian migrants and We demand your knowledges.x See “Afrique-Europe Interact” and “Solidarity with Fighting Refugees in Choucha” at: http://www.afrique-europe-interact.net/index.php?article_id=486&clang=1 and http://chouchaprotest.noblogs.org/xi See, in particular: De Genova, Nicholas, “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(7), 2013, pp.1180-1198; Federica Sossi’s contribution to thisspecial issue and her essay “Theaters of the South”, in Federica Sossi, Migrare. Spazi di confinamento e strategie di esistenza, Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2006, pp.

51-108. xii Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. xiii Colectivo Situaciones, On the Reseacher-Militant, 2003. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.xiv Colectivo Situaciones, 2007, “Something More on Research Militancy. Footnotes on Procedures and (In)Decisions", in Constituent Imagination in Shukaitis, Stevphen & Greaber, David (eds), Oakland:AK Press, Oakland, pp. 73 – 93.xv A 3.5 Euros a day governmental stipend for Libyan war asylum seekers’ personal expensesxvi De Genova, Nicholas and Peutz, Nathalie, The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.xvii Counter Cartographies Collective, 2012 “Counter (Mapping) Actions: Mapping as Militant Research” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11(3), 439-466; Papadopoulos, Tsianos, 2013); Papadopoulos, Dimitris, and Tsianos, Vassilis, “After citizenship: Autonomy of migration, organisational ontology and mobile commons”, Citizenship Studies, 17(2), 2013, pp. 178-196.xviii Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett, “Borderscapes of Differential Inclusion: Subjectivity and Struggles on the Threshold of Justice’s Excess”, in É. Balibar, S. Mezzadra and R. Samaddar (eds), The Borders of Justice,Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011, pp. 181-203.xix Mezzadra, Sandro, “Living in Transition. Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude”, in Calichman, Richard – John Namjun Kim (eds), The Politics of Culture. Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 121-137. Sakai, Naoki, and Solomon Jon, “Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference” Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation, Vol. 4, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. xx Chambers, Iain, “Lessons from the South”, Uninomade, 2012.http://www.uninomade.org/lessons-from-the-south/xxi Tronti, Mario, Operai e capitale, Tornio: Einaudi, 1996.xxii Potte-Bonneville, Mathieu, “Politique des usages”, Vacarme,(29), 2004.