Maurice Pw Stierl is Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Border Studies at the University of California, Davis and is associated with Cultural Studies and African American/African Studies. His research focuses on migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and is broadly situated in the disciplines of International Relations, International Political Sociology, and Migration, Citizenship & Border Studies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals Globalizations, Citizenship Studies, Movements, Global Society, Antipode, and elsewhere. Dr Stierl is a member of the activist project WatchTheMed Alarm Phone and the research collectives Kritnet, MobLab, and Authority & Political Technologies.

Abstract:
Resistance and Solidarity in Contemporary Migration Struggles

In light of widespread human rights violations and the ever-growing death toll resulting from the governance and violent deterrence of precarious migrations, especially along borderlines separating the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’, we have seen the emergence of political struggles that seek to challenge contemporary border regimes. Besides the mobilities of people on the move that disobediently traverse borders, a range of actors and activists have begun to directly intervene into borderzones such as the Mediterranean Sea, seeking to counter its necropolitical condition. Long thought to lie beyond the reach of non-state and non-security forces, these actors and activists have entered the deadliest borderzone of all and take part in the political contestations that play out at sea. While some portray their engagement primarily as humanitarian, aiming to save lives at risk, others understand their practices as enactments of civil disobedience, solidarity, and global justice. At the same time, in the context of Europe, we have witnessed dramatic re-bordering practices in 2016 and early 2017, as responses to the unauthorised mass movements of 2015, when more than one million people crossed the Mediterranean and entered EU territories. Also here in the US, the new administration has lost no time to introduce and/or reinforce stringent border control efforts, including an executive order halting all refugee admissions and barring entry to nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries. What, then, in this bordered state of the world, are the possibilities for a freedom of movement politics?