Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/315684 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of International Migration and Integration [ISSN:] 1874-6365 [Volume:] 25 [Issue:] 3 [Publisher:] Springer Netherlands [Place:] Dordrecht [Year:] 2024 [Pages:] 1105-1131
Publisher: 
Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht
Abstract: 
Temporalities of control are a key element of the migration reception regime: deadlines, waiting times, and limited durations of stay link safe housing to temporal and normative prerequisites. As a result, those who are unable to cross these temporal borders are stuck outside of reception and beyond the temporal nomos of the asylum system, in heightened im-mobility, cut off from protection mechanisms, and in a vicious circle of illegalisation. Based on a literature review and on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Italy between 2018 and 2023, and from the analytical vantage point on migrant practices of appropriation, this article aims to explore informal camps as ambiguous spaces between coercion and subversion. While informality is used by state authorities to disrupt migrant multiplicities, mobilities, and temporalities, it can at the same time become a loophole for migrants to evade control, deportation, and detention and to pursue their migration projects. Through practices of appropriation, migrants regain not only time and space but also rights that have been denied to them. In doing so, they contest the temporalities of control, demonstrating that time can be “taken” through endured limbo, but that it is still relative and can thus be recoded. Despite presenting informality as an arena of collective renegotiation, the article concludes arguing against a romanticisation of informal encampments, showing that they are subject to politics of violence and abandonment.
Subjects: 
Appropriation
Informal camps
Temporality
Temporal borders
Migrants
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.