CHAPTER 1
Regimes of Mobility in Times
of Accelerated Crisis
Leandros Fischer
Abstract This chapter elucidates the condition of capitalism’s current
organic crisis and its complex effects on mobility. With theoretical groundings in the mobility paradigm, it examines the intricate connections
between various aspects of this crisis—economic, political, biological, geopolitical—and their cumulative influence on human movement. The role
of migrant autonomy, solidarity, and citizenship in actively shaping and
even subverting regimes of mobility is highlighted. Rejecting methodological nationalism, this chapter delineates the European space as the
volume’s area of focus. ‘Europe’ is not understood as the end-point of
history, but as contested space, shaped not only by exclusion but by
hybridity and innovation as well.
Keywords Crisis-mobility nexus • Organic crisis • Europe • Mobility •
Solidarity • Citizenship
L. Fischer (*)
Institute of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
e-mail:
[email protected]
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
L. Fischer (ed.), The Crisis-Mobility Nexus, Mobility & Politics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44671-9_1
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IntroductIon
In the spring of 2020, an extraordinary occurrence unfolded. To curtail
the fresh SARS-CoV-2, or coronavirus pandemic, nations worldwide
imposed a succession of lockdown measures. These varied significantly
across diverse national and regional contexts in their breadth and intensity.
Nonetheless, their foundational premises were congruent: citizens were
required to remain indoors, put on hold quotidian activities such as commuting to their workplaces, socialising over a drink afterwards with friends,
or holidaying in a different city, country, or even continent. Movements
had to be drastically diminished and social interactions physically distanced, in response to an enigmatic virus, whose mechanism of action in
those initial days of the pandemic confounded the scientific community.
Moreover, in stark contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s renowned assertion
that “there is no such thing as society”, ‘social responsibility’ emerged as
the rallying call in the effort to control the virus.
The COVID-19 pandemic was both unanticipated and foreseeable, its
ramifications signifying a discontinuity as well as perpetuation of events in
the preceding decades. Whilst the virus inflicted pain and suffering on a
scale hitherto unprecedented, the circumstances leading to its emergence
were by no means indecipherable. Industrial livestock farming, catalysed
by surging demand, the intimate cohabitation of this farming adjacent to
natural ecosystems, and the ensuing phenomena of zoonosis, collectively
fabricated ideal conditions for a novel and lethal virus. The continuation
of these conditions implies that COVID-19 may not be the last deadly
coronavirus that humanity will encounter in the foreseeable future. Owing
to the highly indiscriminate movements emblematic of late capitalism, the
virus swiftly metamorphosed into a pandemic of global proportions. Not
the impoverished migrants from the tropics aspiring for a better life in the
Global North, but affluent cosmopolitans, those possessing “the class
consciousness of frequent travellers” (Calhoun, 2002), transpired to be
among the most notorious ‘super-spreaders’ during the pandemic’s
early stages.
Despite the drastic effects that lockdowns had on the social fabric of
most societies, it would be naïve to frame COVID-19 as a caesura, putting
an ignominious end to more than three decades of seemingly uninterrupted and expanding mobility. To begin with, being socially responsible
by staying at home in most of Europe, North America, and beyond relied
on an expanding army of often mobile workers—care workers, nurses,
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3
food delivery personnel, warehouse employees, supermarket cashiers, first
responders, and others deemed ‘essential’—whose composition more
often than not reflected racialised class hierarchies. And while having to
work from home—and in some cases allowed to leave the house only once
a day or not at all—was a new experience for millions, this restriction of
mobility was not exactly news for countless others. Deepening European
integration since the early 1990s has gone in tandem with an increasingly
restrictive migration policy that many detractors have labelled ‘Fortress
Europe’. As such, thousands of migrants are stranded at the borders of
Europe in a state of geographical, social, and existential immobility that
finds its clearest expressions today in the macabre spectacle of the
Mediterranean shipwreck and the liminality of the Greek camp. Meanwhile,
thousands of individuals in Europe live under the radar, enjoying only the
most rudimentary forms of mobility for fear of being deported.
Furthermore, despite the all too fashionable talk of a withering away of
the state in the aftermath of globalisation, states, and the various conflicts
among them have been instrumental in shaping various ‘regimes of mobility’ (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013). The attacks of 9/11 ushered in an era
of securitisation that gave us everything from externalised border controls,
heightened surveillance, and biometrical data collection to denationalisation for unwanted subjects and the ‘black sites’ of Guantanamo and other
localities beyond the ambit of any legal framework (Rygiel, 2010). Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has put another nail in the coffin of
the idea of a world where capital flows trump geopolitics, a phenomenon
increasingly talked about as ‘deglobalisation’ (D’Eramo, 2022). Massive
economic sanctions imposed on Russia—still the world’s largest country
by size and the ninth most populous—have drastically impacted the global
economy with unforeseen consequences as of the time of writing. It’s not
just that Russia has been largely cut off from Western physical transportation links and information circuits. Russian ‘oligarchs’ have been targeted
in both discourse and actual practice. Billionaires—the ultimate ‘global
citizens’—are finding themselves stripped of their residencies and assets.
The idea that enough money can buy everything from plane tickets to
permanent residency and even citizenship represents another holy cow of
globalisation sacrificed on the altar of renewed inter-state competition,
long regarded as a nineteenth century relic.
At first, the interconnections between lockdown policies, migrant struggles for mobility, and contemporary geopolitics might seem vague or coincidental. However, a closer look reveals a common denominator: the
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ongoing systemic crisis of capitalism, a crisis whose present form has been
brewing since the financial crash of 2007–2009. Adopting an understanding of capitalism as a totality of social relations (Lukács, 1923 [1968]), this
edited volume perceives this crisis not as merely economic but as a deep
and protracted political, social, ideological, ecological, and biopolitical crisis as well. Systemic crises, both in their essence and in their discursive
articulation, bring forth and/or legitimise a reconfiguration of both mobility and immobility. The purpose of this book is to provide theoretical conceptualisations as well as concrete examples of the mechanisms through
which these reconfigurations take place. As such, the existence of a specific
crisis/mobility-nexus is posited. Rather than conceptualising a new theoretical paradigm, the aim is to contribute to a more holistic understanding of
mobility in contemporary capitalism, as well as of the myriad struggles
around it. While there is a rich body of work on the effects of crisis, migratory mobility, refugee struggles, social mobility, as well as an emerging literature on mobilities relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is—with
notable exceptions—a lack of literature bridging these different aspects
together under one framework. Taking a mobile ontology as well as their
research as a starting point, the authors of this edited volume not only wish
to provide examples of how different facets of crisis reconfigure mobility
regimes; they also aim at demonstrating how various aspects of crisis intersect with one another to both enable and constrain mobilities.
This is certainly not the first work exploring the entanglements of crisis
and mobility. In her book Mobility Justice, Mimi Sheller (2018) speaks of
a ‘triple mobility crisis’—a climate crisis, an urbanisation crisis, as well as a
refugee crisis. Sheller brings these different mobility-affecting crises into
conversation with each other to put forth a ‘mobility justice’ paradigm.
Such an approach not only recognises the unequal distribution of mobilities in today’s world, but also that “the management of mobilities under
post-slavery and postcolonial regimes in the West is fundamental to the
making of classed, racial, sexual, able-bodied, gendered, citizen and noncitizen subjects” (Sheller, 2018, p. 16). The authors share and adopt
Sheller’s invaluable contribution in demonstrating the co-constitutive and
power-permeated character of mobility and immobility. Our own work
differs primarily in our conceptualisation of crisis. Rather than a ‘triple
crisis’, we adopt as our frame of reference a very specific period: the
2007–09 financial crash and its ongoing aftermath. Furthermore, and
based on the aforementioned understanding of capitalism as a totality of
social relations, the authors perceive various events in their respective
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articulations—the so-called refugee crisis, the pandemic, or the war in
Ukraine—as sharing a common origin in the ongoing systemic crisis of
capitalism.
How does this crisis affect mobility? An obvious answer relates to the
ways in which economic slowdowns lead to a decrease in trade and investment flows, while spurring individuals to emigrate in search of a better life.
Conversely, economic crisis serves as a justification for restricting mobility.
It was the end of capitalism’s trente glorieuses with the oil shock in the
mid-1970s that ended many ‘guest worker’ programmes in Western
Europe, while establishing ‘immigration’ as contentious a subject of public debate. Nonetheless, there are many more ways in which a crisis can
reconfigure mobilities. Think about the ‘golden visa’ or ‘golden passport’
schemes concocted by states in the crisis-hit European periphery (Fischer
& Rakopoulos, 2020). Legitimised by economic meltdown, these schemes
have commodified European citizenship, with the purpose of facilitating
the mobility of non-European elites in a world still characterised by the
‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2007), the persistence of the colonial
mental construct of ‘race’ as an ordering principle that presides over contemporary global socioeconomic inequalities. As a chapter in this volume
demonstrates, educated but racialised Europeans of Muslim origin in
crisis-ridden Europe seek upward social mobility by emigrating to the cosmopolitan hub of Dubai. Even Europe’s so-called summer of migration in
2015 was only framed a ‘crisis’ due to its coexistence with the deep socioeconomic crisis affecting the continent, as numerous politicians pitted
downwardly mobile Europeans against non-Europeans fleeing war and
poverty. The handling of the pandemic in most states was torn between
locking down on the one hand and reopening on the other, to avert a
worsening of the economic contraction caused by COVID-19. The welcoming attitude of the European Union towards Ukrainian refugees in
early 2022 and its mobility-restricting sanctions against Russia are subordinated to an acute geopolitical struggle, itself a reflection of the crisis of
hegemony in the world system following the decline of the ‘unipolar
moment’ that emerged with the end of the Cold War. Finally, the everimpending climate catastrophe is throwing up critical questions about the
sustainability of a mobility paradigm largely dependent on the extraction
of fossil fuels. These are just some of the many ways in which the current
conjuncture of crisis reorders our perceptions of movement in the world.
This does not imply that questions of mobility and immobility play no part
in times of economic boom. They do, however, assume a more critical role
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in a crisis conjuncture that stands in marked contrast to the optimism
inherent in the post-1990 vision of a globalised world of an ever-expanding
movement of goods, services, and people, where the role of states and
their bordering practices is supposedly constantly diminishing.
Based on their own research, the volume contributors focus on the
geographical space of Europe as the primary unit of analysis. What is called
‘Europe’, of course, is a matter of contentious scholarly and public debate.
Nicholas De Genova (2016a) has aptly shown how migrant mobility in
light of the crisis of the European border regime has thrown up fundamental questions about who and what European is. In line with rejecting
an essentialist ‘methodological Europeanism’ (Garelli & Tazzioli, 2013),
this work finds itself in agreement with De Genova’s conception of Europe
as defined by what it isn’t, namely by a negatively constructed Other
reflecting colonial legacies and used to obscure the numerous differences
within that same European space. ‘Provincialising Europe’ (Chakrabarty,
2000) by rejecting the notion implicit in much of social science of ‘Europe’
as lying at the top of an evolutionary pyramid of capitalist transition, this
book also adopts Etienne Balibar’s (2009, p. 200) concept of each region
of Europe being a ‘centre’ in its own right, “because it is made of overlapping peripheries, each of them open […] to influences from all other parts
of Europe, and from the whole world”. According to Balibar, “this creates
a potential for ethnic and religious conflicts, but also for hybridity and
cultural invention”. In other words, we take note of the discrepancy
between ‘Europe’ as a fluid and internally asymmetric institutionalised
mobility regime permeated by ideologies of cultural or civilisational difference on the one hand and a lived reality characterised by various shades of
hybridity and innovation on the other.
What follows is a theorisation of three key components of our problematic. First, an understanding of crisis as an organic crisis of capitalism is
presented. An overview of useful theoretical concepts from mobility and
migration studies is then provided. Finally, the crisis/mobility nexus’s
social effects are taken into consideration, by presenting conceptualisations of citizenship, as well as solidarity and de-solidarisation.
understandIng the Present conjuncture of crIsIs
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new
cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms
appear”. This famous quote by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci
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(1971, pp. 275–276) from his Prison Notebooks adequately sums up the
predicament of the world in the third decade of the new millennium.
Gramsci was writing the Notebooks at the onset of the Great Depression,
capitalism’s greatest crisis prior to the 2007–09 crash. For Gramsci, this
crisis was an organic crisis. It did not merely represent a temporary economic disequilibrium like the numerous recessions, the bursting of speculative bubbles, or crises of overproduction that regularly take place under
capitalism, but it threatened the very foundation of capitalist rule. The
ideology of the liberal capitalist order that collapsed in 1929—unfettered
trade and minimal state intervention—was replaced by crisis of hegemony
of the global capitalist system.
By ‘hegemony’, Gramsci meant the ability of the capitalist ruling class
to portray its particular economic and political goals as universal interests
shared by society as a whole. Hegemony allows capital to rule not just by
coercion but by consent as well, that is by convincing the subaltern classes
like the proletariat that they have something to gain from the capitalist
class’s pursuit of its own interests. The 1930s witnessed conflicting
attempts to fill the vacuum created by this crisis of hegemony. On the one
hand, the labour movement in key countries like France, the United
States, Sweden, Germany, or Spain was on the offensive, propagating
socialism as an alternative to crisis-ridden capitalism. At the same time,
revolts were shaking the colonial world in India, the Caribbean, Africa,
and the Middle East. On the other hand, however, stood attempts that
moved in the opposite direction. Numerous dictatorial strongman regimes
of various fascist varieties emerged in Europe, most notably in Italy and
Germany. The heightening economic, ideological, and geopolitical contradictions brought forth by the crisis were played out in a global fully
mechanised conflict that resulted in the horrors of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima.
Today, a similar organic crisis with comparable ‘morbid symptoms’
engulfs the globe. An organic crisis cannot be understood as an isolated
moment in time but must be seen as a protracted condition composed of
numerous stages and dimensions and played out across different scales
that interact with each other. The present crisis has its starting point in the
collapse of the housing market in the United States that in a domino-like
sequence engulfed the global financial system. Far from being an accident,
this was the result of a decades-long pursuit of profitability characterised
by a financialisation (Lapavitsas, 2012) of the economy at the expense of
productive sectors. The general framework of financialisation was the
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advent of neoliberalism, a political-ideological project to restore capital’s
stagnating profitability in the early 1970s and roll back the power of labour
(Harvey, 2007). Neoliberal policies included, among others, the wholesale privatisation of public assets, the deregulation of financial markets, a
weakening of organised labour, the abandonment of import-substitution
development in the Global South in favour of low-wage export-led strategies, and the opening up of new markets for capital in Asia, Latin America,
and the former Eastern bloc. It is important to note that the dislocations
caused by neoliberal structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the
Global South or in Eastern Europe have in many ways prefigured the current crisis. SAPs and other neoliberal measures have been instrumental in
provoking a mass migration to the cities of the Global South, leading to
the creation of what Mike Davis (2005) famously described as a ‘planet
of slums’.
States responded to the banking collapse by injecting billions into the
financial sector. However, this had the effect of transforming a crisis of the
banking sector into a broader fiscal debt crisis. In Europe, the financial
meltdown evolved into the Eurozone crisis, as countries in the European
South, particularly Greece, came under the direct supervision of European
financial institutions. Their states went bankrupt due to excessive borrowing from banks that now demanded repayment. The political ramifications
of the crisis were as significant as its economic consequences. The ruling
parties of the centre-right and centre-left, both adhering to the neoliberal
consensus, saw their share of the vote diminish drastically as they imposed
harsh austerity measures. They were left ‘ruling the void’ (Mair, 2013).
This collapse of liberal hegemony and the subsequent political polarisation
paved the way for different types of challenges. On the left, ‘movements of
the squares’ like Occupy and the Spanish Indignados, as well as antiausterity ‘left populist’ parties like the Spanish Podemos and the Greek
Syriza (Della Porta et al., 2017), called for ‘real democracy’. On the right,
‘right populist’ and openly neo-fascist forces blamed migrants, Muslims,
and other minorities for society’s problems, while promoting conspiracist
worldviews that echoed the anti-Semitism of the inter-war period. ‘Illiberal
democracies’ have become firmly entrenched from Russia, Turkey, Greece,
and Hungary to India, Brazil, and Israel. Brexit and the election of Donald
Trump signalled a growing appeal of nationalist isolationism, in which
Eastern European and Mexican mobilities, respectively, have been portrayed as the primary adversaries.
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Another shock of the crisis was experienced in the Global South, in the
form of escalating food prices in the Middle East, which served as the catalyst for the so-called Arab Spring that erupted in 2011 (Hanieh, 2012).
The contradictory nature of the Arab uprisings, the absence of clear leadership, the active interference of numerous geopolitical rivals, as well as
the intertwining of socioeconomic grievances with ethnic and sectarian
tensions, have resulted in the reestablishment of dictatorships in countries
like Egypt and bloody civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. These circumstances have led to an increasing exodus from these nations (as well as
from countries at the epicentre of the previous ‘war on terror’, such as
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia) towards Europe, commonly referred to as
the ‘refugee crisis’. The autonomous mobility of migrants has become a
contentious issue within Europe’s already polarised political climate, giving rise to a ‘migration dissensus’ (Trimikliniotis, 2019), various civil society alliances with migrants (Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019), and ‘misplaced
alliances’ (Mayo, 2016) against them. Meanwhile, far from serving as a
bulwark against resurgent racism, liberal transnational institutions such as
the European Union have been legitimising far-right talking points for
years. They have imposed restrictions on non-European migration to curb
‘asylum tourism’, escalated anti-Muslim racism by creating a position to
‘promote the European way of life’, engaged in lethal pushbacks of
migrants in the Mediterranean, and outsourced border responsibilities to
authoritarian states like Turkey (Fekete, 2018), all the while projecting a
misleading image of openness and cosmopolitanism.
Then, in early 2020, COVID-19 emerged, leading not so much to an
entirely new crisis but a new stage of a pre-existing one. The pandemic has
dashed hopes of an economic stabilisation or the withering away of challenges to the political status quo, laying bare the effects of decades of
underfunded public health and other social services. Private pharmaceutical companies, the prime recipients of billions invested by states for the
development of COVID-19 vaccines, have become richer on the backs of
a ‘vaccine apartheid’ that prioritises developed countries at the expense of
the Global South. The economic dislocation caused by lockdowns has led
to the emergence of new billionaires and the astronomical enrichment of
existing ones, while leading to the further impoverishment of millions.
Some authors have claimed that the new discourse of protection and social
responsibility employed by states during the pandemic might signal the
emergence of a ‘post-neoliberal’ era (Gerbaudo, 2021). While this is an
interesting hypothesis, little indicates that key countries in the core of the
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world system are breaking with the old orthodoxies in a meaningful way
that would necessarily have to include reining in the financial sector by
bringing it under public ownership on the one hand and strengthening
workers’ rights on the other.
And if the state might be experiencing a comeback, it might not always
be in a good way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 seemingly signalled the violent return of great power politics. While clearly
odious, the invasion cannot be explained away as an irrational outburst of
Vladimir Putin, but as a foreseeable response to two decades of NATO
expansion eastwards, not to mention the precedents of violating international law established by the United States and its allies in the name of a
‘responsibility to protect’ or protecting the world from non-existent
weapons of mass destruction during the past three decades. Governments
are increasing their military budgets in a new Cold War, where even the
use of tactical nuclear weapons is being dangerously normalised in public
discourse.
The combination of multiple emergencies—a stagnating world economy, inflation, the pandemic, supply chain shortages, impending environmental doom, geopolitical sabre-rattling—has created a novel condition
of accelerated crisis, a ‘new age of catastrophe’ (Callinicos, 2023), which
economic historian Adam Tooze (2021, p. 6) has labelled a ‘polycrisis’.
Like the works of Tooze, Callinicos, and others, this book is a modest
attempt to decipher the specificity of this accelerated condition of multiple
crises, by focusing on its manifold and contradictory effects on the mobility of human beings. It does not understand the various aspects of this
crisis as separate fields in need of ad-hoc management. Applying an understanding of capitalism as a totality of social relations, the contributors view
the various crises not only as interconnected but also as sharing the same
root cause—an ongoing organic crisis of capitalism since 2007–09, the
kind Gramsci talked about in his Prison Notebooks.
Yet, how exactly does this organic crisis affect aspects like the handling
of the pandemic, the ongoing crisis of political representation giving rise
to the far right, the dangerous escalation over Ukraine, and other aspects?
How does this crisis differ from the previous organic crisis of capitalism in
the 1930s, and why, after decades of seemingly managed and peaceful
‘globalisation’, is there an entrenched inability to think beyond the
destructive confines of the present system? Or—in the words of the late
cultural theorist Mark Fisher (2009)—why is it “easier to imagine the end
of the world than the end of capitalism?” Here, we draw on Neil Davidson’s
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(2017) theorisation of the post-2008 period as a ‘crisis regime of permanent exception’. According to Davidson, the 2008 crisis marks the first
time an organic crisis of capitalism has not been succeeded by a radical
restructuring of the entire capitalist mode of production. The 1929 Wall
Street crash signalled the failure of laissez-faire economics, giving rise to
various degrees of state interventionism across the world in the following
four decades. Whether in the Western world, the Eastern Bloc, or in the
different postcolonial regimes of the Global South, states actively assumed
a regulatory role in the workings of the market, while welfare states secured
the legitimacy of the political systems involved. When the 1973 oil crisis
revealed the limits of this arrangement, governments gradually shifted to
the ideas of neoliberalism. Davidson (2017, pp. 618–625) distinguishes
between two historical phases of neoliberalism in the Western world.
Socially conservative ‘vanguard regimes of reorientation’ that defeated
organised labour were succeeded in the 1990s and 2000s by ‘social
regimes of consolidation’, which secured the allegiance of millions through
cheap credit, promises of individual self-fulfilment, and reforms in the
sphere of social rights. The 2008 crash has discredited the ideology of
unfettered markets; however, no strategic change of course has been registered so far, a condition Colin Crouch (2011) has described as the
‘strange non-death of neoliberalism’.
In the regime of permanent exception, a radical rethinking within the
system is impossible, according to Davidson, since neoliberalism, with its
depoliticisation of the economic sphere and its politicisation of state management, has undermined such capacity. This enables the dominance of
short-term interests over any grand design to restore both the profitability
of capitalism and secure popular consent. The liminal condition, where
“the old is dying and the new cannot be born”, describes the current condition of crisis of neoliberalism. While there is, for example, an overwhelming consensus on the imminent danger that fossil fuels pose to the
existence of human life on Earth, little is actually being done to address
this urgent issue. Establishment of self-perceptions of openness and tolerance coexist next to the reality of a ‘departheid’ (Kalir, 2019), record
numbers of imprisonment among minorities such as in the United States,
and murderous migration policies. At the same time, the period is characterised by a ‘return of irrational beliefs’ (Davidson, 2017, p. 631), exemplified in the rise and normalisation of racism and the far right. Other
‘morbid symptoms’ include environmentally harmful amounts of energy
used in the production of Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, various
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conspiracy theories in the context of the pandemic and beyond, a social
media-induced collapse of meaningful political discourse, the trivialisation
of the dangers of nuclear war, and the increasing hold of unaccountable
billionaires over logistics and big tech, to name just a few. It is within this
evolving context of crisis regimes of permanent exception that we identify
the main social parameters of mobility and immobility in the world today.
regImes of mobIlIty and mIgrant autonomy
The concept of ‘mobility’ has undergone significant re-evaluations and
reappraisals since the emergence of a ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller &
Urry, 2006). This paradigm challenged the sedentarist bias in the social
sciences, which viewed social processes unfolding within fixed terrains as
the norm, while treating movement as an anomaly (ibid., pp. 208–209).
Similar to Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) theorisation of ‘flows’, such as ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘ideoscapes’, and others, this ‘mobile turn’ was in line with a
global perspective in the social sciences, reflecting the spirit of globalisation, which implicitly celebrated an increasingly mobile world. However,
in their conceptualisation of ‘regimes of mobility’, Nina Glick Schiller and
Noel Salazar (2013, p. 184) note how the “current global economic crisis
seems to be accompanied by a normalisation […] of national borders and
ethnic boundaries […]”. Even before the outbreak of the financial crisis,
some had already identified a downside to globalisation, highlighting a
‘single global mobility regime’ (Shamir, 2005) designed to maintain a
high degree of social inequality across the globe, expanding the mobility
of some while restricting that of many others. Schiller and Salazar adopt
the notion of a ‘mobility regime’ to speak of the many, vastly unequal
mobility regimes across the globe today.
The term ‘regime’ in turn originates from the field of international relations. Unlike realist and neo-realist assumptions, regime theorists do not
view outcomes in international politics as solely the result of competition
between different states. Regime theory emerged in the mid-1970s to
emphasise the growing role of international organisations, transnational
NGOs, multinational corporations, norms and values, international treaties, social movements, and others in shaping political outcomes on the
international stage (Keohane, 1984). When discussing the intersections of
migratory and urban regimes in the Sankt Georg neighbourhood of
Hamburg, Andreas Pott and Vassilis Tsianos (2015, p. 124) describe
regimes as comprising an ensemble of “heterogeneous actors, practices,
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norms, or discourses and images”. These are subject to (re)negotiations,
which manifest spatially within ‘zones of negotiation’ defined by asymmetric power relations. Regimes are scaled across multiple levels—neighbourhoods, cities, regions, states, continents—reflecting vertical social
hierarchies. Pott and Tsianos emphasise that regimes are not entirely
autonomous and should not be confused with the social fields that shape
them. A well-known example of a mobility regime is the European border
regime. This regime is codified in international treaties (the Dublin regulations), which have been agreed upon and enforced by sovereign nation
states (the EU’s members). It is also premised upon a set of interconnected discourses: the EU’s claim of being a humane ‘normative power’;
the socially entrenched idea that welfare and migration are somehow
mutually exclusive and have to be balanced by giving asylum to some
migrants and deporting others; racialising discourses of cultural incompatibility that frame some groups of migrants in securitised terms of a threat
(e.g., Muslims) while welcoming others, either due to perceived cultural
similarities (e.g., Ukrainian refugees) or to fill labour shortages in highskill sectors (e.g., tech workers from the Indian subcontinent, Greek doctors in Germany).
Finally, this regime is also shaped by the different political subjectivities
that affirm or reject its premises. Solidarity movements with refugees, for
example, negotiate the European border regime by enabling migrant
mobilities, either by clandestinely assisting migrants to cross borders, or by
creating safe spaces for illegalised migrants, thus challenging both restrictive practices and securitising discourses. The threat of organised racist
violence, on the other hand, might restrict migrant mobilities, even when
migrants do reach their destination and receive asylum. Whether or not an
individual fleeing war, persecution or poverty can make it safely to his or
her preferred point of destination does not ultimately depend exclusively
on legal technicalities but on a specific configuration of several factors.
Within the context of migrant mobilities, we would also like to draw
attention to the concept of the ‘autonomy of migration’ (AoM) (Bojadžijev
& Karakayali, 2010; Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013; et al.), a clear break
from overtly structuralist explanations of human migration as conditioned
exclusively by economic considerations. Influenced by Italian autonomist
Marxism (e.g., Tronti, 1966 [2019])—which emphasises the centrality of
labour resistance to capital rather than structural factors such as crises in
the development of capitalism—AoM sees migrant practices as generative
of their own autonomous logic. Accordingly, restrictive bordering
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practices must be seen as responses to migrant agency rather than the
other way around. States are one step behind migrants in adjusting their
policies to cope with the autonomous flow of migrations not entirely
reducible to economic factors. In drawing on AoM, we also employ two
further concepts associated with it, the concept of ‘differential inclusion’
(Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), as well as that of the ‘mobile commons’
(Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013; Trimikliniotis et al., 2016). Differential
inclusion refers to the process whereby “the boundaries between the
dynamics of filtering […] that once occurred at the international border
and those that take place within the bounded spaces of national societies
have been blurred” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 159). This idea contrasts with notions, such as ‘Fortress Europe’, that view harsh bordering
practices as intended to restrict migration in its entirety. On the contrary,
such practices employ a filtering logic that allows some migrants to enter
borders both legally and illegally, leading to the creation of highly segmented labour markets premised on separating native workers, those ‘with
papers’, as well as those ‘without’. Think, for instance, of the heavy reliance of the US food and beverage industry on undocumented labour from
Mexico and Central America, a condition that allows for heightened overexploitation in that sector, thus maintaining employer profitability. The
EU’s asylum system also creates an array of legal categories (‘applicant’,
‘subsidiary protection’, ‘refugee status’), which in many member states
leads to a differential access to the labour market premised on the needs of
local economies for cheap and unskilled labour (Demetriou, 2022). Such
regimes of differential inclusion need not be solely applicable to conditions of labour precarity and overexploitation. Neha Vora (2014) shows
how processes of labour segmentation and segregation can also be applied
to high-skilled workers, such as university teachers in rich rentier states like
Qatar. The main idea here is that there is no inherent interest of states to
end migration once and for all. However, by employing a wide array of
legal categories—from irregularisation to granting full citizenship—states,
as regulators of capitalist organisation, are actively trying to shape migrant
flows existing independently of them to the benefit of capital
profitability.
The concept of the mobile commons, on the other hand, refers to those
elements shareable among migrants on the move that are conducive to the
migration process. These include the ‘knowledge of mobility’ shared by
people on the move, such as knowing which route is safe; an ‘infrastructure of connectivity’ by which information on mobility is circulated, such
1 REGIMES OF MOBILITY IN TIMES OF ACCELERATED CRISIS
15
as online forums and information and communication technologies (ICTs)
like smartphones; a ‘multiplicity of informal economies’, such as those
found in borderland regions; ‘communities of justice’ through the formation of solidarities with others, such as migrant solidarity movements; as
well as the ‘politics of care’, aspects of mutual and altruistic cooperation
(Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013, pp. 191–192). Central to the mobile
commons is the idea of migration not as a simple transitory state from one
sedentary position to another, but as an entire system of autonomous
social organisation that escapes the gaze of territorialised sovereign states.
Consistent with the autonomy of migration approach is the mobility
regime paradigm’s implicit rejection of methodological nationalism, an
attitude that insists on viewing social processes as contained within national
boundaries (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2003; Hanieh, 2014). Migration
studies have traditionally viewed migration from the vantage point of
states and their economic needs. Neoclassical ‘push and pull’ theories of a
win-win game for both sending and receiving states (Lee, 1966) have long
dominated migration studies, rendering invisible the variety of motivations behind migrant mobility, as well as the affective ties of place-making
that migrants make, even in extremely exploitative environments such as
the Gulf. Even the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences has come
under criticism for reproducing certain assumptions about mobility as an
inherently transnational process, where geographical mobility automatically equals upward socioeconomic mobility. In the case of Chinese
migrant workers to Israel, for example, Barak Kalir (2013) has demonstrated how transnational migration can simply be an exception to a trajectory of internal migration, a kind of compensation for not being able to
migrate to a preferred destination within one’s own country.
Rejecting methodological nationalism, however, does not mean denying the stark correlation between transnational geographical mobility on
the one hand and social mobility within bounded societies on the other.
Oliver Nachtwey (2016), for instance, has shown clear links between
Germany’s polarised climate around migration after 2015 on the one hand
and local anxieties about downward social mobility in the context of a
‘society of descent’ (Abstiegsgesellschaft) and a zero-growth ‘secular stagnation’ capitalism. Social and geographical mobility thus interact in ways
that transcend a simple identification between both movements. According
to Ghassan Hage (2009, p. 97), “the social and historical conditions of
permanent crisis we live in have led to a proliferation and intensification of
[a] sense of stuckedness”, conceptualised as the opposite of ‘existential
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L. FISCHER
mobility’, the feeling that someone is ‘going somewhere’ (ibid.). As such,
challenging restrictive bordering and citizenship regimes might not just be
about the right to seek better fortunes in another country; it might also be
about an assertion of a right to mobility as a right in itself, a marker of
being ‘normal’ by being able to travel to other countries, as the experience
of Palestinian and Kurdish migrants who want to remain in Cyprus but
feel ‘stuck’ in it shows (Fischer, 2021).
Finally, while mobility in recent years has been conceived mostly in relation to migratory processes, a new dimension has entered the fray in early
2020 centred on the pandemic. ‘Pandemic (im)mobilities’ (Adey et al.,
2021) have come to describe the dynamics of mobility and stasis unleashed
by the pandemic, with lockdowns restricting to various degrees the movements of millions around the globe. The global stasis caused by the pandemic, even if temporary, has had in many instances a detrimental effect
on other mobilities, such as those of migrants, pushed away for ‘hygiene
reasons’ (Tazzioli & Stierl, 2021), while leading to an exponential growth
of mostly precarious and racialised mobile labour sectors associated with
the ‘gig economy’—food delivery drivers, logistics, seasonal farm workers,
and others. Overall, the outbreak of COVID-19 demonstrated the precarious nature of global mobility—already experienced by the vast majority of humanity lacking the ‘right’ passport and financial resources to travel
freely around the world—while demonstrating that while unrestricted
mobility has been globalised, so too have risks such as diseases that
undermine it.
concePtualIsIng solIdarIty and cItIzenshIP
The effects of the previously described and multifaceted organic crisis of
capitalism could not but leave their mark on societies the world over. As
mentioned earlier, economic crises are characterised by a corresponding
crisis of political hegemony, in which social and political forces of differing
persuasions attempt to fill the void. To better illuminate the way in which
the crisis/mobility nexus interacts with processes of social and political
contestation, we turn our attention to two concepts that we regard as
central to our analysis: solidarity and citizenship.
‘Solidarity’ as a concept has been subject to countless interpretations,
such as Émile Durkheim’s (1893 [2013]) categorisation of ‘mechanical’
solidarity in small societies and its ‘organic’ equivalent in modern, more
differentiated societies. In both cases, ‘solidarity’ assumes the function of
1 REGIMES OF MOBILITY IN TIMES OF ACCELERATED CRISIS
17
ensuring ‘social cohesion’, a meaning of solidarity to which governments
still subscribe when, for instance, proposing welfare measures to ameliorate the effects of economic crisis. More recently, in the context of crisis
and austerity, solidarity has been described as a ‘bridge concept’
(Rakopoulos, 2016, p. 142), linking together different “diverse modes of
practice, forms of sociality, and mechanisms of envisioning future prospects for people’s lives”. Thus, solidarity should not be understood merely
as a vacuum-filler amidst the collapse of the welfare state, but also as a
reactivation of long-dormant traditions, such as traditional forms of ‘village solidarity’ (Loizos, 1975 [2009]), as well as a mode of prefiguring a
different kind of future.
We do not deny the usefulness of these and many other conceptualisations of solidarity. However, we believe that a contentious definition of
solidarity is more appropriate to the subject matter of our book. Following
David Featherstone (2012), we understand solidarity as both a relational
and contentious practice, one that clearly posits a political antagonism. It
emerges in certain conjunctures, generating political subjectivities and
new collective identities, while engendering alliances between different
civil society actors. In the context of the so-called refugee crisis in the
mid-2010s, different forms of contentious solidarity were visible throughout Europe, ranging from the ‘autonomous solidarity’ practiced by horizontal movements and self-managed social spaces, to ‘civic solidarity’
composed of citizens concerned with providing logistical support to refugees, all the way up to the ‘municipal solidarity’ exhibited by elected local
officials, such as former mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau and mayors of
southern Italian cities refusing to obey the restrictive migration policies of
the national government (Agustín & Jørgensen, 2019).
There are many cases where ‘solidarity’ and ‘mobility’ as concepts intersect, but we will focus here on two examples. During the ‘long summer of
migration’ of 2015, when the European border regime was temporarily
breached by the movement of thousands of migrants from the Middle
East and Africa, countries of the more prosperous European North, such
as Germany and the Scandinavian states, were the preferred destinations
for many of those on the move. However, in order to reach those countries, migrants had to transit through peripheral, crisis-hit countries such
as Greece. Arrival and transit represent two types of mobility with different effects on solidarity efforts in both cities. While those arriving in the
North made claims to being citizens but without papers—for instance, by
enacting a form of ‘urban citizenship’ in cities like Hamburg—those
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L. FISCHER
transiting, as well as those in solidarity with them in places like Athens,
were unable to establish sustainable forms of community (Fischer &
Jørgensen, 2021). While in the latter case, the form of solidarity corresponds more to the conceptual framework of the ‘mobile commons’—an
autonomous form of social organisation on the move with no fixed territorial point of reference—the former case aligns more with so-called activist citizenship or acts of citizenship (Isin & Nielsen, 2008; Isin, 2009), a
practice undertaken by those without papers but who nevertheless emphasise their belonging to a certain place through contentious politics.
Citizenship is generally understood to be a form of legal status attaching an individual to a nation-state, while conferring certain rights and
obligations. Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS), however, has redefined
citizenship as a more relational concept liberated from the constraints of
the state. Instrumental here was the thought of Michel Foucault and his
concept of ‘governmentality’, which emphasises the governing of people’s
actions through positive means rather than the coercion associated with
the law emanating from sovereign states. In a famous speech, Foucault
(1981) pointed to the existence of a global citizenship, one engendered by
a condition of common governance and based on solidarity and a striving
for justice. Citizenship today is enacted by different actors, on multiple
sites, across various scales, and through various acts, redefining our idea of
the political by creating “new sites of contestation, belonging, identification, and struggle” (Isin, 2009, p. 371).
‘Autonomists’ are generally sceptical towards the concept of citizenship
in its entirety, highlighting its exclusionary capacity (e.g., Mezzadra, 2015;
Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013). Another argument concerns the fact that
concepts of ‘urban citizenship’ (e.g., Kandylis, 2017; Vaiou & Kalandides,
2017), while escaping the gaze of sovereign power, nonetheless require a
defined spatial organisation, precluded by the highly mobile conditions of
contemporary workforces under late capitalism, such as those engaged in
logistics (Cuppini, 2016). We do not wish to prioritise one approach—
autonomy or citizenship—over the other. What we do emphasise, however, is that mobility does not unfold evenly across the globe but is still
determined by vast asymmetries in the distribution of wealth and power in
the world today, not to mention the various attributions of race and ‘cultural compatibility’ that determine the right of movement of millions of
people. As such, we deem both approaches appropriate, depending on the
specific context.
1 REGIMES OF MOBILITY IN TIMES OF ACCELERATED CRISIS
19
Another intersection of mobility and solidarity concerns the phenomenon of social mobilisation around the pandemic. If we look at the public
discourse, we can easily reach the conclusion that the main antagonism is
between those who support a more active intervention by the state and
those who oppose this as an infringement on ‘individual liberties’. On the
one hand, there are those who prioritise science and rationality, advocate
for state-mandated lockdowns, and are willing to vaccinate themselves.
On the other hand, there are those who embrace far-right conspiracy theories, exhibit irrational superstition, and choose to remain unvaccinated
(e.g., Flesher Fominaya, 2022). While these antagonisms undoubtedly
exist, the reality is much more complex. State measures to curb the pandemic have arguably saved lives but have, in many cases, been used to
infringe upon the rights of migrants and refugees. On the other hand, it
would be a mistake to equate all forms of vaccine scepticism with outright
COVID-19 denialism, as there are legitimate concerns and mistrust
towards pharmaceutical companies driven by profit motives. In this context, employing the framework of ‘contentious solidarity’ as offered by
Featherstone (2012) can be useful in understanding the underlying antagonisms. Those who practice physical distancing to protect the vulnerable,
demand the release of vaccine patents to ensure broader access in the
Global South, and oppose authoritarian lockdown policies that disproportionately restrict the mobility of the most vulnerable are all engaged in a
practice of contentious solidarity aimed at transforming social relations.
On the other hand, those protesting lockdown measures driven by extreme
individualism, as well as governments that prioritise profit considerations
over public health by withholding vaccine patents or implementing harsh
lockdowns and reckless reopenings, contribute to what we define as desolidarisation, ultimately serving to maintain the current status quo.
book structure
The remainder of this book comprises six chapters. In Chap. 2, Martin
Bak Jørgensen addresses the European deportation regime, exploring the
aftermath of the ‘summer of migration’ and its impact on the movements
of legally vulnerable migrants within Europe. Deportability is conceptualised as a non-linear condition, as well as category whose entanglement
with a crisis of political legitimacy leads to an expansion that can also
include racialised citizens or those with a precarious residency status.
Together with Martin Bak Jørgensen in Chap. 3, we examine the
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L. FISCHER
possibilities and limitations of so-called solidarity cities, institutional
arrangements based on infrastructures of solidarities with newcomers and
counterpoised to restrictive national migration policies. Using an autonomy of migration approach, we emphasise the crucial role of migrant
mobility—arrival or transit—in determining the prospects of inclusive
mobility regimes on the local scale. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of
the habitus, Chap. 4 examines the entanglements of social and geographical mobility. With Jaafar Alloul, we draw on our respective ethnographic
research with two groups—upwardly mobile European citizens of
Maghrebi origin in Dubai and middle-class Lebanese in Cyprus seeking
refuge from societal collapse in their home country—that demonstrate the
influence of classed and racialised mobility regimes on migration strategies
at the microlevel. Chapter 5 provides a brief theoretical summary of the
effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on social mobilisation. Instead of
viewing coronavirus-related social movements through the binary opposition of ‘state’ versus ‘anti-state’, the chapter makes the case of classifying
movements as either generative of solidarity or de-solidarisation. In Chap.
6, Mark Bergfeld and Martin Bak Jørgensen look at the effects of pandemic on precarious migrant labour, given the proliferation of discourses
on ‘essential workers’, as well as the contradictory role of trade unions.
Finally, Chap. 7 looks at two important aspects of the current ‘polycrisis’—impending climate disaster and the war in Ukraine—and their effects
on mobility. The chapter argues for an awareness of the interconnectedness of the various facets of crisis and the (im)mobilities they engender, as
well as for a contentious approach to the question of solidarity.
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