Women and Borders in the Mediterranean: The Wretched of the Sea 3031450973, 9783031450976

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MOBILITY & POLITICS SERIES EDITORS: MARTIN GEIGER · NICOLA PIPER · PARVATI RAGHURAM

Women and Borders in the Mediterranean The Wretched of the Sea Camille Schmoll

Mobility & Politics Series Editors

Martin Geiger Carleton University Ottawa, Canada Nicola Piper School of Law Queen Mary University of London London, UK Parvati Raghuram Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Editorial Board Members Tendayi Bloom University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK Michael Collyer University of Sussex Brighton, UK Charles Heller Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland

Elaine Ho National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore Shadia Husseini de Araújo University of Brasília Brasília, Brazil Alison Mountz Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Canada Linda Oucho African Migration and Development Policy Centre Nairobi, Kenya Marta Pachocka SGH Warsaw School of Economics Warsaw, Poland Antoine Pécoud Université Sorbonne Paris Nord Villetaneuse, France Shahamak Rezaei University of Roskilde Roskilde, Denmark Sergey Ryazantsev Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow, Russia Carlos Sandoval García University of Costa Rica San José, Costa Rica

Everita Silina The New School New York, NY, USA Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand William Walters, Carleton University Ottawa, Canada

Mobility & Politics Series Editors: Martin Geiger, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Nicola Piper, Queen Mary University of London, UK Parvati Raghuram, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Global Advisory Board: Tendayi Bloom, University of Birmingham, UK Michael Collyer, Sussex University, UK Charles Heller, Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland Elaine Ho, National University of Singapore Shadia Husseini de Araújo, University of Brasília, Brazil Alison Mountz, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Linda Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre, Nairobi, Kenya Marta Pachocka, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, Poland Antoine Pécoud, Sorbonne University Paris Nord, France Shahamak Rezaei, University of Roskilde, Denmark Sergey Ryazantsev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia Carlos Sandoval García, University of Costa Rica Everita Silina, The New School, New York, USA Rachel Simon-Kumar, University of Auckland, New Zealand William Walters, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Human mobility, whatever its scale, is often controversial. Hence it carries with it the potential for politics. A core feature of mobility politics is the tension between the desire to maximise the social and economic benefits of migration and pressures to restrict movement. Transnational communities, global instability, advances in transportation and communication, and concepts of ‘smart borders’ and ‘migration management’ are just a few of the phenomena transforming the landscape of migration today. The tension between openness and restriction raises important questions about how different types of policy and politics come to life and influence mobility. Mobility & Politics invites original, theoretically and empirically informed studies for academic and policy-oriented debates. Authors examine issues such as refugees and displacement, migration and citizenship, security and cross-border movements, (post-)colonialism and mobility, and transnational movements and cosmopolitics. This series is indexed in Scopus.

Camille Schmoll

Women and Borders in the Mediterranean The Wretched of the Sea

Camille Schmoll Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales CNRS/Géographie-cités Paris, France Institut Convergences Migrations Paris, France

ISSN 2731-3867     ISSN 2731-3875 (electronic) Mobility & Politics ISBN 978-3-031-45096-9    ISBN 978-3-031-45097-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 Original French edition published by Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2020 Translation from the French language edition: “Les damnées de la mer: Femmes et frontières en Méditerranée” by Camille Schmoll, © Éditions La Découverte 2020. Published by Éditions La Découverte. All Rights Reserved. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Foreword

1. The Wretched of the Earth is the title of the famous anti-colonial manifesto written by Frantz Fanon at the height of the liberation war in Algeria and published shortly after his untimely death in 1961. It is an evocative title, which has been lucky even independently of the book. Echoing that title, Camille Schmoll also makes a double displacement: from the land our gaze is invited to move on the sea, on the Mediterranean, while we are warned that at the centre of the analysis are women—the African migrant women who cross that sea every day at very high risks. Not that in the usual representations of the tragedies that have made the Mediterranean “the most dangerous migratory route in the world” female faces are missing. But migrant women are usually presented as helpless subjects, as well as victims portrayed in the moment of pain and loss (of a child, of a companion, of a “home”). The picture outlined by Schmoll in this book is quite different: by focusing on female migration across the Mediterranean, she certainly does not deny the processes of deprivation, of expropriation that constitute its daily reality. On the contrary, she highlights the violence of the border. At the same time, however, she brings out the plot—often fragmentary and torn yet tenacious—of desires and imaginary, behaviours, and actions that support African women’s movements. The Wretched of the Sea is a feminist book about female migration across the Mediterranean. The feminisation of the gaze that is proposed here offers in any case an essential contribution to the studies on migration as a whole. The combination of constraint and autonomy that emerges from the study of the condition and movements of African migrant women challenges and displaces in fact the alternative, still too often re-proposed, vii

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between forced and voluntary migration. On the other hand, Schmoll’s book aims to “repoliticise the gender issue,” and thus intervenes within feminist studies. What is being called into question is not only a migration policy (but the reference could be extended to other areas) that is legitimised through the declared objective of “saving women” (from traffickers, for example). For Schmoll, politicising gender means, in the first place, putting migrant women’s capacity to act at the centre of the analysis, and therefore taking leave of the image of the “minority” woman as inevitably submissive to the patriarchal relationships that prevail in her community. The refusal, the “no” to an arranged marriage opens the story of Julienne, who presents in the first chapter the set of themes addressed in the book: the complex reasons for the departure of migrants, the continuum between the different forms of gender violence, which are intertwined with European control policies and border violence, the crossing of borders, the encounter with the “host society” and with the multiple places of detention of migrants, the continuous redefinition and negotiation of the migratory project. On each of these passages, the force of the original “no” is reproduced, amplified, comes to terms with the conditions given from time to time but never goes out. Schmoll shows this with great force: what results is a compelling story, an exemplary ethnography of a field of tension in which life and death, freedom and the search for a dignified life are at stake. What is too often represented as an indistinct mass, crammed on boats or ships, but also in detention centres in Libya or Italy, thus reveals an extraordinary composition of singularities, interwoven with vital tensions, equally singular needs and desires. A “politics of resistant  life,” writes Schmoll, quoting Michel Agier. And again: “by becoming a migrant one becomes another.” This becoming is at the centre of the book, even in a context in which, to take up an image of Fanon, violence is “atmospheric,” pervasive, and multifaceted. 2. Camille Schmoll is a geographer, as well as an ethnographer, and the analysis of the spaces within which African female migration takes place is one of the strengths of this book—as emerges for example from the pages dedicated to the “Lampedusa model” and the “Maltese model,” and more generally to the role of laboratories and places of political engineering assigned to the islands in the management of flows in the Mediterranean. A classic theme of geographical analysis is also that of the border, to whose critical study The Damned of the Sea makes a contribution of great importance. For many years engaged in research on migration, Schmoll recalls that at the beginning of her work, in the nineties, the theme of the border

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was not assigned particular importance in the training of scholars of migratory movements. It seems to me a non-trivial point: it was the change that took place in the second half of that decade in European migration policies, which had become both more restrictive and more selective, that brought the role and violence of the border to the fore. Since then, the critical study of borders, long undertaken in other parts of the world (from the United States to India to Australia) has also become central in Europe. And at the same time, different forms of activism have begun to take shape along and against Europe’s borders. Schmoll takes up the most relevant aspects and themes of this now long season of studies on borders in Europe. The feminist perspective is also decisive here. Boundaries are first analysed as devices that are inscribed on bodies (female, in the first place), playing a fundamental role in the reorganisation—and in the actual production—of race and gender. Hence the need for an “intersectional” look at border operations, which prolong their action well beyond the moment of crossing by migrants, marking their biography for quite a long time (for example through the condition of “deportability”). From the work of Étienne Balibar, who since the early nineties has been an essential point of reference for those interested in border transformations, Schmoll takes up the concept of borderland, of “frontier land,” to define Europe. What is at stake here is an analysis capable of holding together the processes of strengthening borders in the face of migration and their non-paradoxical mobility, that is, the fact that, far from limiting themselves to marking the margin of the European space, borders today creep into its many centres, disseminating violence and processes of construction of otherness. On the other hand, the African migrant women protagonists of this book certainly suffer the violence of the border (which also takes the form of rape, particularly in Libya after 2011 and the war). And yet they invent daily strategies for negotiating and dealing with this violence, which Schmoll effectively describes through micro-ethnographic exercises. Central, from this point of view, is the work on the digital space, which integrates the observation of “border-places,” the collection of migratory stories and the monitoring of the successive paths of female migrants. The border is certainly not foreign to the digital space, nor are the wounds, the lacerations that the experience of the border determines. But the digital space is first of all for many African women “an emotional resource, an affective experience” that in particular in the contexts of forced immobility that dot the migration routes allows them to get involved and find refuge

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by performing a gender identity online. Far from being ethereal and immaterial, digital space becomes above all, writes Schmoll, “a place of staging, reconfiguration and exaltation” of the body, taken within a network of powers and yet always able to escape it and affirm its autonomy. 3. It is precisely on the question of autonomy that I would like to conclude this preface. This is a central issue in the book, and more generally there are different uses today in reference to migration. Schmoll focuses her critical attention, first of all, on the notion of “autonomous migration,” often used to refer to “women who leave alone,” i.e. outside the framework of family reunification and not accompanied by their husband or a male family member. It is evidently a category that draws attention to figures and experiences of migration that are often overlooked, but which at the same time poses a series of problems: in particular, it limits the search for autonomy and emancipation to a single category of migrant women, also presenting their migratory path as “isolated,” completely separated from the family and community fabric within which, on the contrary, it takes shape. Secondly, the category of autonomy is often used in the theories and rhetoric of “migration management” in a purely neoliberal inflection, which configures the migrant as the bearer of a “human capital” to be valued in view of the full achievement of autonomy. Thirdly, and in a radically different perspective, the critical approach that defines itself as the “autonomy of migration” (in whose development I have participated in recent years) affirms the irreducibility of migration to all the “structural” causes that are at its origin, putting the subjectivity of migrants in the foreground. Schmoll’s contribution to this set of debates (and in particular to the last one I mentioned) seems to me to be very important indeed. A double conceptual movement leads to the formulation of a feminist concept of autonomy that allows us to grasp substantial—and often obscured— aspects of female migrations analysed in the book: on the one hand, autonomy is detached from the primacy of reason that has distinguished its liberal definition, it is immersed in the fabric of desires, feelings, passions and bonds, assuming a relational character; on the other hand, and consequently, the reflection on autonomy is shifted from the sphere of the self to the world of social relations. This is a moment of feminist political philosophy fundamental in the book, because it allows to formulate the notion of “autonomy in tension” that Schmoll applies on different scales to account for the peculiar combination of constraint and search for freedom, violence and resistance, which constitutes the distinctive feature of

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the experiences of African migrant women reconstructed in this book. Thus redefined, the category of autonomy evidently avoids the risk of “romanticising” migration that has often been critically pointed out with respect to theories of the autonomy of migration—and deepens the most important aspect of the latter, namely the insistence on the conflictual character of the migratory experience. These are just some suggestions about what you can find in The Wretched of the Sea. Each reader will identify their own and build their own reading strategy around them. It seems to me, however, that Camille Schmoll’s book is an essential book today. It is a book by a feminist, a geographer, an ethnographer who knows how to combine the rigour of research with the passion of political commitment. It is a book that shows what is at stake in the Mediterranean, beyond the shocks caused in public opinion by particularly tragic events—shocks that are immediately followed by “a saturation effect.” It is a book that calls for the construction of a discourse and a practice different from those generically “humanitarian,” and rather hinged on the set of contradictions, clashes, differences in power levels that in the Mediterranean are reflected in a particular light, but whose geographies are much wider. The African women whose stories and practices populate the pages that follow will certainly not be the last to reach European shores. “Surely,” as the last words of the book say, “women will not stop moving…”. Dipartimento delle Arti Università di Bologna Complesso di Santa Cristina Piazzetta Morandi 2, 40125 Bologna

Sandro Mezzadra

Methodological Appendix: Ethnography in the Age of Borders

What could the ethnography of borders look like given that the current period is one of walls, shifting obstacles, and the suspended time of endless journeys? I started the fieldwork that led to this book in 2009, and stopped in 2018. I used three interconnected research methods to conduct this long-term research, which can be seen both as a study “on” and “about” the border: observing “border sites,” collecting first-person accounts of the journeys of female migrants, and trying to figure out what happened to them, after they passed through the border site.

Observing Border Sites I first considered the border through its sites, namely the many reception and accommodation centres where migrant women are sorted, housed, and confined. These places act as “sites of condensation” (Debarbieux, 1995) of several dynamics specific to borders and the margins, relating to the deprivation or limitation of mobility and the moral and legal geography of women’s mobilities and activities. I tried to uncover these dynamics by observing women’s daily lives, their interactions with facility staff, and the rules of communal living, considering these places as both institutional contexts and interfaces between local societies and migrant presences. My position as a foreigner who spoke English and French was a real asset because it distanced me from the employees of the centres, which was important to help me form relationships with the women. At the same time, speaking Italian and English and having studied the same subjects as many staff members (the humanities and social sciences) made it easier to xiii

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establish a certain proximity with employees of Italian and Maltese centres. I nonetheless repeatedly had to clarify what my position was. Reading this book, it will be clear that I mainly spoke with migrant women and that my observations concerning staff are definitely more limited and partial. I also met with various managers of the facilities (from the non-profit sector up to the Maltese and Italian Ministries of the Interior) and with more occasional contributors, such as the staff of partner organisations and NGOs (Doctors Without Borders, Médecins du Monde, MEdici per i Diritti Umani, and other charities,). I also met activists from “no border” collectives and other groups fighting for the closure of detention centres. I participated in many meetings of all kinds, which provided me with an overview of the controversies and issues related to the reception and detention of migrants and asylum seekers. More generally, I tried to take advantage of the frenzied migratory and political context of Malta and Italy in the 2010s as I conducted my observations. I saw the constant shifting and reconfiguring of political stakes and emergencies, from detention to asylum, from land to sea. Such a highly unstable context can be heuristic provided that the researcher avoids getting too caught up in the trend of the moment and manages to maintain an overarching and longue durée view of the whole context. I tried to stick to it as best I could. Rather than limiting myself to the ethnography of one of these border sites, I chose to observe several (see Chap. 5). This helped me to consider the role of each of these sites in migratory trajectories and propose a typology of reception and accommodation centres (see Chap. 5). This multi-­ sited approach allowed me to avoid methodological localism by using comparison and contrasting examples to expose the specificities and similarities of each setting. More pragmatically, this multi-sited approach allowed me to continue fieldwork even when access to one of these centres proved impossible, due to the vagaries of authorisations. Indeed, for each of these sites, my presence was constantly subject to negotiations with their directors or managers. But the toughest negotiations took place with Ministries of the Interior, who are the ultimate arbiters of access to detention facilities in Italy and some reception centres in Malta. I was refused authorisation on several occasions: in these cases, I had to conduct my interviews off-site, either outside the facility or after people been released. My position in the different border sites was variable. In the reception centres, I participated in many activities: I cooked, did the shopping, changed children’s diapers and told them stories, danced, and organised

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games. I accompanied women to doctor’s appointments and the police headquarters. In the detention facilities, my position was much more distant, because my visits were extremely limited in terms of hours and due to the temporary situation of internees, and the total lack of freedom to which the women found themselves subjected did not allow for in-depth and long-term conversation. My occasional visits rarely exceeded five or six hours and were so spaced out in time that I never saw the same woman twice. The only way to have more time with them would have been to go through a non-profit, which would have required full-time investment: I would certainly have been able to go much deeper into life in detention, but I would not have been able to contrast different situations as I could so by being able to study a variety of facilities. I must also explain my choices regarding the names of border sites: some fieldsites are mentioned by name in the book. They include the family and single women’s reception centres in Hal Far and Balzan in Malta, the CARA in Castelnuovo di Porto in Italy, and the women’s detention facility in Ponte Galeria. I chose to mention them because they have all been under media fire and I don’t ultimately reveal anything that isn’t already known: rather than giving new information, I aim to provide analysis of certain situations, comparing and interpreting what happens there. However, I have withheld the names and precise locations of other centres, usually of more modest size, located in Lazio and rural Sicily. These are lesser-known places, so to protect those who spoke to me, I sometimes “muddied the waters” so they wouldn’t be recognised. I returned to the same places several times over the eight years of research. This allowed me to see how some of them (especially detention facilities) could be described as “critical” at certain times but empty places or “model places” at others, when they gladly gave tours to visiting journalists and academics once the crisis (and terrible living conditions) had moved elsewhere. It also allowed me to observe the plasticity of these places, to see how they could be converted and change purposes in a few days, much like the lability of borders that is described in this book. This is the case, for example, of the Castelnuovo di Porto centre, which has alternately been a reception centre and a “hub” for relocating asylum seekers. Likewise for the Hal Far centre in Malta, which, although unsuitable to accommodation, went from serving as a reception centre for single men (in 2009), filled with dozens of bunk beds, to a sorting centre for families clustered in Red Cross tents (in 2011), with all the health

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consequences I cite in Chap. 4. This centre was closed in 2012, but has since been reopened due to overcrowding at the Initial Reception Centre.

The Border as an Ordeal: First-Person Accounts of Migrations Journeys My telling of women’s journeys is inspired by the pioneering work of Abdelmalek Sayad (2018) on migrants’ life stories and the work of the geographer Dina Vaiou (2012), who immersed herself in the experiential dimension of women migrants’ journeys to account for them in all their complexity. I collected the stories of about eighty women of many nationalities and often incomparable legal situations (deportable or undeportable, seeking asylum, irregular). The only thing they had in common was that they had, as Frontex puts it, “irregularly” crossed the Mediterranean. This common denominator may seem a priori insignificant or arbitrary, but this book shows that the ordeal of the Mediterranean is a liminal experience that unites these women, making their journeys coalesce in a common singularity. In fact, the women I met had experienced the ordeal of the border many times in their journeys, and were still experiencing it when they were being interviewed. Consequently, the interviews focused on the specific experience of living “on” and “in” the border (see Chap. 1) while still being broadly biographical. The lives of these women can be described in terms of “socio-spatial trajectories,” a useful expression in that it refers to both a multi-stage spatial journey from one point to another and a passage from one social position to another in its tangible and subjective dimensions, viewed through individual and collective practices. There are several advantages to taking a biographical approach to socio-spatial trajectories: it makes it possible to capture the complexity and richness of the migratory experience, invest in spaces lived and crossed, sensations and emotions, and the memory and hierarchy of places that emerge from the narrative, and consider the complexity of women’s motivations and how they change throughout the stages of their long journey (the constant redefinition of migration plans discussed in Chap. 3) (Jolivet, 2007; Schapendonk et al. 2020). Working on trajectories also makes it possible to bring particularly significant times and places to the fore, specific space-times of the migration process. This applies to the crossing of Libya or the Mediterranean, and to the experience of administrative detention or emergency accommodation:

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these are specific times when we see the space-time of the border expand and leave its mark on women’s bodies. The analysis of trajectories ultimately reveals the institutional and spatial roughness of displacement. Research in Malta and Italy have shown the remarkable impact that European asylum policies have had on bodies, imaginaries, migratory plans, and journeys of migrant women. What remains is reconstructing the invisible nodes and paths of their journeys, composed of places desired and hated, authorised and forbidden, in a dialectic of constraint and autonomy. I chose to reproduce as best I could the women’s place as actors in their own trajectories, despite the many obstacles and violence they had to face: more than an analytical tool, “autonomy in tension” is also a strong methodological and theoretical stance motivated by a desire to highlight the spatial dimension of migrant “agency,” migration projects, and changes in those projects from a micro-political perspective attentive to the tactics and strategies individuals put in place in highly constraining contexts. One could argue that I found autonomy in women’s lives because I went looking for it, which is not entirely wrong. In fact, in Chap. 6, I chose to test a number of claims about autonomy in the field—especially the so-called autonomy of migration—that are theoretically stimulating but rarely empirically tested. I encountered few refusals of interviews. In fact, I felt an urgency on the part of these women to testify. I tried to guarantee the confidentiality of our conversations during interviews, although some took place in the presence of relatives, when it was reassuring. Many of these interviews took place in particularly strained settings: emergency reception centres, detention facilities, sorting centres. Most were held in French, English, or Italian. When the interviewee didn’t know any of these languages, a friend or travelling companion served as interpreter. I was frequently offered a cultural mediator but I always politely refused, because it would have compromised some of the freedom of discussion and, even more importantly, could have had subsequent repercussions on women’s lives. When dealing with journeys as bumpy as these women’s, with “lives exposed to the violence of the world,” a serious problem arises: restituting the atrocities they experienced. The extent of the trauma is such that some women will not talk about it, a well-known repression mechanism. Others use metaphors or ellipses. Yet others tell me the facts in great detail and ask me to publish their story, only to beg me never to discuss the issue with them again, as was the case of the terrible experiences in Libya that I

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report in Chaps. 2 and 3. I tried to respect their wishes as best I could (Naepels, 2019). Moreover, although obviously no interview took place without obtaining the informed consent from the people who spoke to me, my role could still be ambiguous sometimes. For example, some of the interviews at CARA in Castelnuovo di Porto and in the Hal Far open centres in Malta occurred at the same time that representatives of the French State and officers from EASO (the European Asylum Support Office) came to conduct interviews for relocations. Although I informed the women I spoke with about my research objectives, this concomitant situation led to misunderstandings that I tried to clear up: I systematically told them that my work could not influence their application, which could produce reactions of frustration or even rage. All my precautions probably did not prevent some women from shaping their stories to attract my attention and compassion, or hoping that I would testify to asylum or detention institutions on their behalf, attributing me with much more power than I actually had. More generally, the administrative process of applying for asylum puts women in the position of having to practise the “art of storytelling,” to use Gérard Noiriel’s beautiful formula (1991). This is a hazard of working with people in refugee situations from which I cannot completely free myself: the relationship between knowledge and power—always central to the ethnographic relationship but particularly salient in this case—is constantly surfacing. It is always present in interactions, despite my desire— probably illusory—to position myself outside the institutional power game. The question of the veracity of the narrative is, of course, common in the social sciences, but increases tenfold in the legal context and specific vulnerability of asylum applications. While doubt can always be cast on the truth of any given account (thus fueling sceptics’ arguments of the existence of “false refugees” and those who accuse migrating people of taking advantage of European generosity), the violence and situations described by the women I met have been sufficiently documented by intergovernmental organisations, NGOs, and other sources that we cannot doubt their general existence (Isnard, 2011). The issue of confidentiality must also be raised: although most of the names have been changed, some women wanted me to use their real names. Although I only mention their first names, they may be recognisable through careful or particularly informed reading. This troubled me, so I tried to find a balance between protecting their privacy, taking their vulnerability and their desire to make themselves known into account, and

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being able to make their situation known through this book. I hope I have succeeded. I add to this one exception: I did not seek to protect the identity of people whose stories had been covered in the media (such as Ali and Alia, the Romeo and Juliet of the Ponte Galeria detention facility mentioned in Chap. 4) or made public by a court decision (like Aslya, who is also discussed in Chap. 4).

Which Kind of Mobile Ethnography, in the Age of Borders and Social Media? Over twenty years ago, the American anthropologist George Marcus (among others) stressed the need for ethnography to be attentive to human and non-human circulations in a globalising world (Marcus, 1995; Schmoll & Semi, 2013; Falzon, 2016). Marcus showed how necessary it had become for researchers to follow things, people, metaphors and plots, embarking on mobile research strategies. They should monitor and track situations so they can put them in perspective. This way of working, often called multi-sited ethnography—and which I prefer to call mobile ethnography—has inspired anthropological imaginations and debate relating to conceptions of the field. Applied to the study of migration, it has made it possible to see what is happening in the in-between, between here and there, in contexts of circulation intensified by globalisation. It aroused especially strong enthusiasm in the 2000s, particularly in the field of transnationalism and diasporas. But how can this type of ethnography be practised today, when trajectories are increasingly dangerous, long, and uncertain? When journeys last for years, without any regularity, alternating phases of mobility and immobilisation? And how can we talk about trajectories and border crossings without experiencing them alongside people, over their long timeframes? And what happens to these people when we leave them behind, on the margins of Europe? Such dizzying questions concern more than proponents of mobile ethnography. They concern all the empirical reductions inevitably made by the social sciences: we only work with fragments of lives, pieces of stories. These questions don’t really require answers, and raise many more problems than they solve. I merely wish to say that I used two tactics to refine my understanding of trajectories and border situations and understand what happens to women after they pass through border sites. Firstly, I made frequent returns to the field and maintained contact with women,

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a classic iterative technique that led me to find some of them in other countries, notably France and Switzerland. I also followed people remotely online. I used social media to observe an array of gestures of autonomy, as described in Chap. 6, and as a reserve of information on the fates of migrant women and a tool to keep in touch with them. It is important to clarify that all the people I contacted via the Internet were previously met in person. In this way, digital fieldsites and material fieldsites complement and resonate each other (Mainsah, 2014). I hope that the association of this methodological approach with others helps me avoid the common pitfall of digital ethnography, so prone to taking a superficial overarching approach that is uprooted or exclusively discursive.

References Debarbieux, B. (1995). Le lieu, le territoire et trois figures de rhétorique. L’espace géographique, 24(2), 97–112. Falzon, M. A. (Ed.). (2016). Multi-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. Routledge. Isnard, H. (2011). Le récit du réfugié est-il une fiction? L’autochtonie, (1), 107–114. Jolivet, V. (2007). La notion de trajectoire en géographie, une clé pour analyser les mobilités? Regard croisé sur des trajectoires caribéennes. EchoGéo, (2). Mainsah, H. (2014). Young African Norwegian women and diaspora: Negotiating identity and community through digital social networks. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, 5(1), 105–119. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. Naepels, M. (2019). Dans la détresse: une anthropologie de la vulnérabilité. Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Noiriel, G. (1991). Réfugiés et sans-papiers: la République face au droit d’asile, XIXe–XXe siècle. Hachette littératures. Sayad, A. (2018). The suffering of the immigrant. John Wiley & Sons. Schapendonk J. et al. (2020). Re-routing Migration Geographies: Migrants, trajectories and Mobility regimes, Geoforum, 116, 211–216. Schmoll, C., & Semi, G. (2013). Shadow circuits: Urban spaces and mobilities across the Mediterranean. Identities, 20(4), 377–392. Vaiou, D. (2012). Gendered mobilities and border-crossings: From Elbasan to Athens. Gender, Place & Culture, 19(2), 249–262.

Acknowledgements

I want to express my gratitude to Martin Geiger, Nicola Piper, and Parvati Raghuram, editors of the Mobility and Politics book series at Palgrave Macmillan, as well as my colleagues Antoine Pécoud and Djemila Zeneidi, and the anonymous referees of the manuscript, for their support on this book project. My appreciation also goes to Anne Kathrin Birchley-Brun, Isobel Cowper-Coles, Matthew Savin, Sheela Jasmine  and Delphine Ribouchon for their patience, encouragements and careful editing of the English version of this book. This book was first published in French by La Découverte in 2020. I would like to thank my editors Joseph Confavreux and Marie-Soline Royer for their insightful comments on the first version of this manuscript. I am also indebted to Ludmila du Bouchet, who translated multiple chapters of the book, and Juliette Rogers, who translated the rest of them. This book builds heavily on the research conducted by Sandro Mezzadra on “autonomy of migration”: therefore, I am particularly grateful and honoured that Sandro accepted to write the foreword. The book also owes a lot to the formal and informal discussions I had with colleagues as Michel Agier, William Berthomière, Nadine Cattan, Janine Dahinden, Simone Di Cecco, Stefan Le Courant, Alison Mountz, Sabrina Marchetti, Ferruccio Pastore, Olivier Pliez, Anna Triandafyllidou, Dina Vaiou, Mirna Safi, Aurélie Varrel, as well as my co-authors Karen Akoka, Nathalie Bernardie-Tahir, Olivier Clochard, Hadrien Dubucs, Thomas Pfirsch, Iris Polyzou, and Hélène Thiollet. Chiara Facello, Francesca de Masi, Enrica Rigo, and Isabelle Cerruti, who all supported my work in many different ways. xxi

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I would also like to thank all my colleagues at the Géographie-cités research centre and at University Paris Cités who supported me during my 2013–2014 sabbatical leave. I was given, thanks to the École française de Rome and Institut Universitaire de France research grants, some time and space for research. I would like to express my gratitude to these institutions and their teams for allowing me to take the time to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. My special thanks goes to Catherine Virlouvet for her enthusiasm and constant encouragements. I was able to finish this book in good company thanks to an invitation to the University of Turin: I am very grateful to Giovanni Semi for offering me this opportunity, as well as his friendship. A special thanks goes to the Institut Convergences Migrations, for supporting me on the translation of this book and providing such a fulfilling environment for migration scholars in France. I am most grateful to Roberto and my children for their emotional support and patience. This work is dedicated to Julienne and to all the migrant women, wherever they come from and wherever they go.

Contents

1 Introduction:  At the Crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean  1 When Truth Is Stranger than Fiction   1 An Ethnography of Survivors   5 Life in the Age of Borders   6 A Genealogy of Enclosure   9 In the Margins of Europe  12 African Women in Italy: A Long History  14 The 2000s Era: The Humanitarian-Repressive Turn  17 A Version of the Facts  18 References  21 2 The  Life of Julienne 27 “On the wedding day, I didn’t agree to it”  29 “I spent ten years like that”  31 “That woman, she helps you get out, she knows the road”  33 “I was lying on the side of the road, as if dead”  35 “Come, come, I’m going to put you on the boat, you’re going to Italy”  37 “Every day I pray to God that He gives me papers”  38 “That’s when the anger, it went to my head”  40 “I’ll never be able to forget this story”  41 References  45

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3 The  Long Journey of African Migrant Women 47 Multiple Motivations for Leaving and Cumulative Violence Exposure  48 Blazing a Trail  49 Leaving War-Torn Libya  52 Fleeing Eritrea  54 Finding One’s Place  55 What Does “Mixed” Stand for in “Mixed Migration”?  57 Vulnerabilities: Asylum Claims and Violence Experienced en Route  59 Perilous Land Journeys  62 When Knowledge Is Not Power: Being Aware of the Dangers of Travel  64 The Sea Crossing  67 With or Without Consent: The Victims of Human Trafficking  69 References  73 4 Archipelagos  of Constraint: Arrival in Europe 79 Arrival in Europe, from Sorting Centres to Selection Apparatuses  80 “Hotspots”  82 In Malta’s Detention Centre  84 Romeo and Juliet in the Panopticon  85 In the Detention Centre of Ponte Galeria  86 Criminalising Asylum Through Detention  89 “Voluntary” Return as Governmental Mobility  90 Relocation within the EU  93 Secondary Movements Despite the Dublin Agreements  93 Fingerprinting: Women Subject to the Dublin Regulation and Deportation to the First Country of Entry  96 Static Mobility  97 References  99 5 In  the Margins: The Moral Landscapes of Migrant Reception 105 At the Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers 107 The Empire of Acronyms 110 Lives in Limbo, Time Stretched Out 113

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Moralscapes: The Moral Landscapes of Waiting 114 Reception and Accommodation Centres: Places of Opportunity? The Logic of Crisis and the Logic of Emergency 116 Emergency Receptions Centres: Micro-Facilities and Mammoth Buildings 120 The Spatial Grammar of Waiting: Immobilisation, Remoteness, Captivity 121 Women’s Mobility as a Source of Concern 123 Privacy Policies and the Politics of Intimacy 125 The Micro-Politics of Internet Use 130 In the Margins, Towards a “Politics of Resilient Life” 132 References 135 6 Scales  of Autonomy: The Body, the Domestic Space, the Digital Space141 Autonomy in Tension 143 The Spatial Dimension of Autonomy: Three Nested Scales 146 Resisting with One’s Own Body 148 Controlling the Domestic Space 151 Making the Internet a Safe Space? 153 Autonomy in Tension and the Restructuring of Intimacy: Some Concluding Remarks 156 References 157 7 Conclusion:  What Migration Does to Women, What Women Do to Migration165 Researching Migration. A Politically Heated Issue 166 Taking Women into Account: Three Waves of Research on Women and International Migration 168 Feminising the Gaze 172 Rethinking the Equation “Female Migration=Emancipation” 174 Repoliticising Migration, Repoliticising Gender: A Feminist Approach 175 References 177

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: At the Crossroads of Europe and the Mediterranean

When Truth Is Stranger than Fiction Shauba goes to sea. Shauba goes to sea, thinking that she has already been through the worst. And yet she had carefully planned her journey. As, incredulous, she is drowning in the water after the small boat aboard which she was capsized, she clings on to her pair of sunglasses, the only belongings she has left, and calls on Mahama, the woman who raised her and arranged her departure: “African women must travel by plane,” she tells her. During her long monologue, Shauba recounts her preparations for the journey, the violence that she suffered along the way and on the overcrowded boat, and finally, inevitably, the shipwreck—until she sinks to the bottom of the sea. Khady lost her life on the road. Khady lost her life after having travelled quite a long way. Humiliated by her late husband’s family, shunned by her relatives, as all women whose life is considered worthless are, Khady set out on a long journey to join a cousin in France. As she careened from one misfortune to another, and stumbled from good travelling companions to the wrong kind of acquaintances, her life ended on the barbed-wire fence of a Spanish enclave in Morocco, halfway through her journey. These two women, Shauba and Khady Demba, are fictional characters. The former is the protagonist of Lampedusa Beach, a drama by Sicilian playwright Lina Prosa (2007). The latter is the heroine of one of the narratives in Marie NDiaye’s (2012) tripartite novel Three Strong Women. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Schmoll, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6_1

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These two characters, whose stories bear witness to the violence of borders, have in common that neither survives the journey, as one dies at sea, the other on the way. Shauba and Khady appeared in the late 2000s, at a time when, although the number of migrant fatalities was not as high as it is today, the death toll at the border was already a topical issue. Activist groups and journalists then took upon themselves to compile a list of deaths, collect survivors’ stories, and document these tragic incidents (Babels et  al., 2017).1 The International Organization for Migration (IOM) was not formally in charge of recording and counting migrant deaths yet (Heller & Pécoud, 2017): it began collecting data in 2014, as part of a broader policy aimed at quantifying migrant flows and monitoring migration routes. Khady Demba and Shauba have been my constant companions throughout this inquiry. Firstly, long before the carnage that we are witnessing today, these characters were a harbinger of things to come for African migration in the next fifteen years—the main focus of this book: a long journey that has become increasingly dangerous, hindered, and uncertain.2 Moreover, these two tragic figures hold a symbolic place in my mind, as they stand for all the women whom I was not able to interview—those ghosts who sometimes appeared in the form of silences and gaps in the testimonies of the women I met or, conversely, who populated their stories; those women whose tales of their adventures were forever lost, as they were swept away by the waves, perished in the prisons of Libya and Sinai, or vanished during their journey across the desert. The voices of women who never reached the shores of Europe can be heard in the accounts given by those whom I met. Lastly, when I began my investigation, only the fictional literature on border deaths could help me to try to understand the accounts I was receiving. At that time, there was no empirical research work specifically focused on female deaths at sea borders, which is the case today (see, for instance, Pickering & Cochrane, 2013). The number of women making the Mediterranean crossing is increasing indeed (according to IOM, today it accounts for up to 20% of all sea arrivals in southern Europe), but what little data is available, together with the evidence given by researchers, activists, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operating at the borders, suggest that women actually make up a larger share of migration occurring before the sea crossing. In other words, women would have a higher mortality rate at sea than men. Women are, indeed, particularly exposed to danger during the sea crossing, which in itself carries a higher risk for them: in 2016, one out of two

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dead bodies recovered in the Mediterranean Sea, among those (a fraction) whose gender could be determined, was a woman. This raw data leaves many questions unanswered: why are women less likely than men to survive the sea crossing? Is it because of the place where they sit on the boat or because of the physical and sexual abuse to which they may be subjected while aboard? Is it because, being sometimes physically weaker (if they are pregnant or carry their children), they are less able to survive in the water? Is it because they cannot swim? Is it because they were already vulnerable, when they left their country or as a result of violence experienced during their journey? Indeed, another fact is certain, although it cannot be quantified accurately: the mortality rate en route, before reaching the Mediterranean Sea, is higher among women than men. Scores of women die in the desert or in Libya’s prisons, long before they can get a chance to set out for other parts of the world. That the border may be deadly is hardly a new idea or a recent development: it has been common knowledge since the 1990s that the border line demarcating Mexico and the United States is the site of death-dealing trade and trafficking, especially for women and children (Cornelius, 2001). Likewise, the Mediterranean has long been known to be a lethal place. In 2004, thanks to the testimony of a local fisherman, Salvo Lupo, Italian reporter Giovanni Maria Bellu unearthed the story of the massive shipwreck that had occurred on Christmas night 1996, off the coast of Portopalo (Sicily, Italy), and had claimed the lives of 283 Asian migrants. In those years, however, one could hardly have anticipated the proliferation of walls and the necropolitics of carnage that would soon come to define the recent period (Mbembe, 2008). The Strait of Sicily is by far the deadliest maritime transit route in the Mediterranean, in both absolute (the number of deaths) and relative terms (the mortality rate for all sea crossings). Out of 50,000 people who perished in the Mediterranean Sea between 1993 and 2022, the majority died on this route, which encompasses the coastlines of Malta, Libya, Tunisia, and Italy, including some 16,000 in the past eight years alone. This rapidly increasing death toll was concomitant with several major shipwrecks: on 3 October 2013, 366 people drowned off the island of Lampedusa (Italy); on 19 April 2015, a trawler with nearly 800 migrants aboard capsized 68 miles off the Libyan coast, and only 28 people were rescued. That same week, two other boats sank, and nearly 450 migrants lost their lives. These maritime disasters

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have occasionally raised public awareness, but such dramatic events should not obscure the fact that death has actually become commonplace in the Mediterranean. Moreover, while the situation in the Mediterranean is increasingly well documented, we should bear in mind that many migrant deaths also occur during the journey preceding the sea crossing itself, especially in the desert, although the extent of this phenomenon has yet to be fully assessed (Migreurop, 2017). The centrality of southern Europe in these morbid processes is the reason that I chose to conduct my fieldwork in that region, using Malta and Italy as country case studies—two countries that have very different histories indeed, yet are both frontline states given their central geographical location on transit routes. On the one hand, Malta is an island country and a relatively recent European Union (EU) member state (it joined the EU in 2004), which is characterised by its small size and extremely high population density. The vast majority of the Maltese people consider migrant arrivals by boat, a trend that has gained momentum since the early 2000s, to be both unbearable and unsustainable, even though so far these landings have only involved around 20,000 migrants in total, many of whom have “vanished into thin air” since they reached the island. On the other hand, Italy is a major immigration country in which, within less than forty years, the number of foreigners has increased from 300,000 (1981) to some 5 million (2019), or 8% of the population. While migration trends in Malta are hardly comparable in magnitude to those in Italy, in both cases the rather sudden shift in migration patterns—in the span of just a few years in the case of Malta and a few decades in that of Italy, they have changed from emigration to immigration countries—helps understand the profound changes that both countries have undergone. More importantly, these two countries are an integral part of the political geography of migration control: they are both centrally located on sea routes and have, moreover, become a symbol of the present emergency. Indeed, as first countries of entry into the EU, these states are responsible for processing migrants upon their arrival on European shores. As such, these countries are spaces that play a critical role in the institutional trajectory of migrants and in the relationship that they will gradually build with Europe.

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An Ethnography of Survivors Unlike the two tragic figures mentioned in the opening, the women whom I met as part of writing this book had survived. Coming from East Africa, West Africa, and the Maghreb, they all had in common that they had taken the land and sea routes to Europe, facing violence and fear in the process—a foundational experience, then. Their encounter with the border, however, had not ended there: upon their arrival, these women had all run into various obstacles, and thus their experience of the border had extended into mainland Europe. All along their journey, women make decisions, organise themselves, mobilise, and try to improve their daily lives. While they are survivors indeed, they are also adventurers, strategists and, in some cases, leaders even. In this volume, I would like to shed light on the many faces of female migration and thus give it substance and depth, a quality which all too often accounts of so-called irregular migration, especially those focusing on migrant women, are denied. Indeed, women have long been missing from the dominant narrative of migration in the Mediterranean region. They were often portrayed as an African Penelope, waiting for her husband, sedentary and patient.3 At best, one would encounter such a woman a few years later, as a follower who had joined her man and taken her place by her husband’s side, sometimes surrounded by a flock of young children. For a long time, however, there was no mention of those women emigrating alone, or without their spouse at any rate, let alone of those who risked crossing the Mediterranean Sea. As we are blinded by sensational media images of young men crammed into boats or crowded behind the wire fences of Ceuta and Melilla, our representations are, admittedly, still very much informed by a masculinist bias. As a matter of fact, I myself almost missed meeting these migrant women at the border. I may very well be a migration expert—what in academic jargon is sometimes called a “migratologist” (Domenach, 1996)—but I began my research work in the 1990s, when the issue of borders in Migration Studies was not nearly as salient as it is now. At the time of my studies, most of the courses that we took, as well as the readings we did, revolved around other questions, such as: what are the reasons behind emigration, and what are the attraction factors determining the decision to leave (the classic push-and-pull factors)? How are migration networks and chains structured? Who leaves and who does not? And

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finally, who (or what) is travelling between sending and receiving countries? Throughout my studies, the border was ultimately seen as a mere demarcation line that one would cross to get from a starting point to an arrival point—a line drawn in the sand or in the sea. We were chiefly interested in the mechanisms leading a migrant to go from one point to another and, most of all, in what happened once he or she arrived, as well as in the reason that ties were maintained (or not) with the home community and the country of origin. Such issues are still relevant today and, arguably, they form the core expertise of Migration Studies as a discipline. Following major theoretical and methodological breakthroughs that have advanced our understanding of the meaning of migration, these issues have been completely reworked and have produced a rich vein of scholarship over the past few years. Besides these debates, in recent years there has been a significant and growing body of work that critically examines what actually goes on at the border (and what goes through the border or does not), in the space in between the two cardinal points defining migration trajectories, with the arrival point becoming ever more uncertain and indeterminate, not only because it is increasingly out of reach, but also because migration projects are constantly revised along the way. Today, much of the research on migration—and far more than anticipated twenty years ago—focuses on the in-between that characterises the processes unfolding in the space-­ time of borders (on the in-between of cross-border fieldwork, see Brachet, 2012).

Life in the Age of Borders For migrants, both women and men, the question is no longer about “crossing the border,” but rather about “living on the border” or “in the border.” Political thinkers, such as Étienne Balibar and Didier Bigo, were the first to pursue this line of inquiry and pointed out that, far from disappearing, borders, multifaceted and shifting as they were, were relocated and reconfigured into new spatialities. As a result of changes in the “border-­form,” its rhizomatic and zonal development, as well as its labile nature, the border could no longer be viewed as a mere demarcation line (for critical border studies, see in particular Amilhat-Szary, 2015; Amoore, 2006; Andreas, 2000; Balibar, 2009; Bigo, 1998; Bigo, 2011; Brown, 2010; Clochard, 2010; Crosby & Rea, 2016; Cuttitta, 2006; Dubet, 2018; Fassin, 2011; van Houtum, 2010; Kobelinsky & Makaremi, 2009;

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Makaremi, 2009; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Parker et al., 2009; Paasi, 2009; Pian, 2016; Squire, 2011).4 “Borders are constantly multiplying and moving, as owing to an unattainable imperative of closure, they are ‘driven’ from one place to another, so much so that their ‘governance’ is akin to a permanent state of emergency,” Balibar (2015) wrote, suggesting the concept of “borderland” to define Europe. Indeed, Europe “believed that it had established its own borders, but actually, it does not have any borders, it is itself, per se, a complex ‘border’: both single and multiple, fixed and mobile, facing outwards and inwards. To put it in plain words, Europe is a Borderland or a ‘land-of-borders’” (p.  138, original italics). There is now a rich literature on borders. This scholarship emphasises that in order to fully understand the processes unfolding at the EU external border, we must take into account the complex web of actors involved in it—ranging from the private to the public sector, from large non-profit organisations and United Nations (UN) agencies to small charities, from states to local governments, from actors whose mission is to rescue and heal people to those whose mandate is to punish and repress, from those who “make live” to those who “let die” (Revel, 2018). From the perspective of those men and women who attempt the crossing, their experience of the border is that of an extension, of time and space stretching out, of an ever-expanding transit, the latter no longer being a moment, but a long, sometimes endless, journey—what Michel Agier (2010) has termed the “corridor of exiles.” The border, then, becomes a liminal experience in that it leaves migrants grappling with the condition of otherness and denotes a particular status, an intermediate state between two positions— neither really from here nor entirely from there. Given its duration and intensity, crossing the border is an experience that leaves its mark on people and changes them (see Fourny, 2013). Living “in” the border means alternating between mobility and immobility, constantly redefining one’s goals and revising one’s migration project. Border life is governed by a short-term logic wherein the short term extends into an indefinite period of time—the logic of uncertainty, survival, and enduring legal limbo. This short-term logic is closely related to the dual condition of migrants: on the one hand, their condition of illegitimacy, as migrants are considered the “undesirables,” according to Michel Agier (2008); on the other hand, their precarious legal status, which lies somewhere on a continuum ranging from the “deportable” migrants to those who are “non-deportable yet non-legalisable,” and

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including those whose case remains “pending” (De Genova & Peutz, 2010).5 For migrants, the key question has changed from “How does one cross the border?” to “How does one live on the border and survive the border?”. The latter issue is the main thread running through my argument in this volume. This, in turn, raises the following question: just how far can migration policies go when it comes to violence? Indeed, this book revolves around border violence, rather than suffering (Fassin, 2010). Although such violence is the soft, slow and sometimes attenuated kind, where there is violence, there is a perpetrator or a party responsible. Moreover, although we fail at times to see the logic behind such violence, and although it appears that its rationale even eludes those who exercise it, we can nevertheless trace its genealogy. In its attempts to trace the genealogy of responsibilities, this book deals not only with smugglers, traffickers, and other such intermediaries, but also with governments and the impact of their policies on migration trajectories and human lives. My approach is sensitive to the way contemporary mobility regimes increasingly contribute to the shaping and reshaping of (im)mobilities, as well as to “migranticize” movements that would have been considered in the past as ordinary or unproblematic (Schapendonk et al., 2021). It is also informed by a postcolonial gaze which shows that the repressive turn of migration policy is informed by race, as well as long-­ standing historical relations between states and people, which have been active in forming a racialised system of gender hierarchy (Pastore, 2020; Mayblin & Turner, 2021). However, determining the exact role of states among the many actors involved in border games proves difficult. Migration policies carried out at the border can change very quickly, and policy statements are not always consistent with actions on the ground: as a result, people on the move, as well as those responsible for implementing migration policies, often operate in a state of uncertainty or ignorance. Furthermore, the relationship between national and EU policies is anything but straightforward. For instance, there are many signs of a trend towards national retreat or isolationism—consider the tensions between Malta and Italy, or between France and Italy, which on several occasions have led to the suspension of the Schengen Agreement. At the same time, states can be seen working together, and new forms of supranational cooperation have emerged, sometimes with a view to strengthening the EU external border, sometimes to promote, in institutional parlance, “asylum burden-sharing.”

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Étienne Balibar (2009) has written in this regard that borders overlap and proliferate, but never merge. Using an ethnographic approach, we need, then, to open the “black box” of the state in borderlands in order to understand local bordering activities, that is, the constant process of redrawing and marking boundaries (Fassin et al., 2013; Darley, 2018).

A Genealogy of Enclosure What is the migration crisis about? There are several ways of understanding what is usually referred to as the “migration crisis” or the “refugee crisis” in Europe (Morice, 2019). The first is to consider that there is not really a crisis as such, other than a political and media construct. This interpretation allows us to situate the present moment in a broader historical and geographical context, and thus to qualify and deconstruct the assumption that the current situation regarding migration in Europe is of an exceptional nature. Such an approach shows that the crisis is, in essence, unfolding elsewhere—in Near Eastern and Middle Eastern countries for Syrian migrations, and in African countries for sub-Saharan migrations. In fact, forced migration occurs mainly in the “refugee arc” depicted by Philippe Rekacewicz (2012) and spanning much of Africa and Asia, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Bangladesh. 6 If there is a crisis indeed, it is therefore not a quantitative crisis, at least not in the EU— except in 2015, the so-called Syrian year, a unique year in every respect, when over 800,000 people landed on the Aegean coast of Greece. In addition to establishing the geographical scope of these migrations, we need to historicise them: the current period is part of a long history of relations and exchanges linking the two sides of the Mediterranean, which coincides with the region’s broader political history (Baby-Collin et  al., 2017). This is a history forged by movements and connections, forced migration and mass deportation, economic and demographic utilitarianism.7 Such a perspective suggests that, far from being exceptional, migrations currently taking place across the Mediterranean region are rather limited in scale when compared to those in previous eras, especially labour migration in the post-war period and since, which drove hundreds of thousands of people from North Africa to western Europe, and later to southern Europe. As for the uptick in sea crossings, it can easily be accounted for: other routes to the EU have been either closed or restricted and, in particular, obtaining a European humanitarian visa is nigh impossible today.8

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Another approach, which complements the aforementioned one, explains this crisis as the result of borders being adrift, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word (Schmoll et  al., 2018). The Euro-­ Mediterranean region has, indeed, become a space in which “border events”—brutality, vulnerability, interruption, and suspension of migration trajectories—take increasingly violent and acute forms. The reason behind this downward slide is not that migration to Europe has increased but that, for many people, there is almost no alternative to so-called irregular routes in order to gain entry into the EU. Likewise, in many respects, asylum is now one of only a few paths to legalisation. Such an approach posits that the migration crisis has a genealogy and, moreover, that the ongoing process of enclosure needs to be examined considering several temporalities. In the short run, that is since 2011, the high concentration of arrivals in southern Europe (in Greece, in Sicily and, more recently, via the western Mediterranean route), combined with low solidarity among EU member states in terms of the processing and management of asylum seekers, has arguably created a real institutional crisis. This, then, is a crisis of solidarity, of migrant reception, and of state capacity since, besides a few interludes such as Mare Nostrum, the Italian-led search and rescue operation from 2013 to 2014, states have proved unable to respond to boat arrivals other than by taking border closure measures. One can therefore speak of a crisis in a literal sense, that is, a situation characterised by rather abrupt change, leading to radical and violent transformation, along with a whole range of institutional mechanisms that are increasingly elaborate as well as costly in human terms: the creation of hotspots9; externalisation agreements drawn up with authoritarian and/or war-torn countries, including the Memorandum of Understanding signed on 2 February 2017 by Libya and Italy, then under Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, and recently renewed by Giuseppe Conte’s government; the expansion of the assisted “voluntary” returns programme; an increase in preventive and punitive detention, and so on (Schmoll et al., 2018; Tassin, 2019). I will discuss some of these measures in this book in order to show how they have had a very real impact on the lives of migrant women. This crisis sequence began in 2011, when some tens of thousands of people arriving from Tunisia ended up stranded on Lampedusa as a result of the Italian authorities’ decision. It was preceded by a long period of calm (was this the calm before the storm?) brought about by the agreements between Colonel Gaddafi and then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, as a result of which the authorities had been able to interdict all

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Mediterranean crossings between 2009 and 2010. The rest of the story is well known: the Arab Spring uprisings, growing violence in the Middle East, a wave of departures by boat, and a concomitant increase in migrant deaths at sea. It reached its denouement with Giuseppe Conte’s government—with Matteo Salvini as home affairs minister—ordering the closure of Italian ports (June 2018) and introducing measures severely limiting access to humanitarian protection status for migrants (September 2018); the criminalisation of NGOs, their rescue ships left roaming the sea; the decision to suspend the deployment of Operation Sophia’s naval assets, which had been used for sea patrols and rescue missions; and the hardening of borders on the other side of the Mediterranean—perhaps the most tragic instance of this development being the agreement signed by Italy with Libya. The Mediterranean is being closed off, and states are forced to face the paradox of restrictive migration policies squarely: when walls are erected on the open sea, considerable collateral damage is inevitable indeed. But anything goes (and at any cost) in this deterrence spiral, and we are probably entering a new phase, a new stage in migration control. The border has become increasingly reticulated, the sea has closed, the circle is complete.10 However, there is another possible interpretation of the temporality of this crisis: what has happened since the 2010s may be understood as implying increased momentum, rather than radical change, in the processes shaping the Euro-Mediterranean space into a border zone, into a borderland. We should bear in mind, then, that these dynamics—the enclosure movement and the growing crackdown on migration—date back to the beginnings of the creation of the Schengen Area (the Schengen Implementing Convention came into effect in 1995) and stem from the establishment of a European area of free movement, which very quickly became concerned with the protection of its external borders. This repressive logic has translated into the implementation of an approach to asylum in which asylum is subordinated to the requirements of migration policies and, moreover, reduced to an ideological equation describing migration as a necessarily negative phenomenon, which must be curbed and deterred. There have been key moments in the “borderisation” of the EU: the Dublin Convention as well as the Dublin II Regulation (2003) and Dublin III Regulation (2013), which harmonised asylum policies across the EU, but at the same time, devolved responsibility for managing migration flows to the first country of entry; the establishment of the EU common

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visa policy in 2001, which then made it nearly impossible for some third-­ country nationals to obtain a visa, that golden ticket to Europe; efforts to strengthen the means to combat so-called illegal migration, a plan which took shape in 2004 with the creation of Frontex, the EU border and coast guard agency, which has been given greater powers and resources ever since; cooperation agreements signed with third countries since the 1990s, which facilitated return operations and made it possible to externalise migration control by moving it “upstream” (see Cassarino, 2006 for the database of bilateral agreements that he has compiled). The security component, the cornerstone of EU migration policy, gradually took precedence over the integration and justice component (Rodier, 2012), so much so that during this phase spanning several decades, everything was tested and implemented: the principle of detention and deportation; cooperation with third countries; the conflation of asylum and migration; keeping the “undesirables” locked up in facilities located deep inside the Schengen Area.

In the Margins of Europe This book does not answer all the questions that the long journey of migrant women raises. The purpose of this volume is simply to provide avenues of inquiry and to suggest some key ideas to understand the ongoing experiences of women, by drawing on first-hand observations and oral testimonies collected on the southern borders of Europe, specifically in Malta and Italy. These two southern European countries have been “useful margins” in the context of the aforementioned borderisation process (Anthias & Lazaridis, 1999). These margins, however “useful” they may be for the EU, are often viewed by migrant women as worthless places serving no purpose, since they offer no prospects; they are denounced for the violent border policies implemented there; they are compared unfavourably with other host countries, perceived as more attractive; but nonetheless, they sometimes remain an integral part of these women’s relational and emotional geographies, as well as of their identification processes. However, the use of the concept of margins can be problematic in geography, as it implies the naturalisation of space as well as the conflation of the social and the spatial (Grésillon et  al., 2016; Bailly et  al., 1983; Morelle, 2016; Rochefort, 1986). Such use, moreover, may be highly questionable when it obfuscates the ambiguities, the tensions obtaining in

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the margins. For instance, Italy has historically played a major part in the political construction of the EU and, to this day, it is one of the world’s leading economies; but it is nevertheless marginal to some extent, in economic and social terms, and especially where its southern regions are concerned. Therefore, I offer a political, that is non-essentialist or non-culturalist, approach to the margins: the margins, in this sense, are anything but backward or underdeveloped areas. I rely on the notion of margins first and foremost as a rhetorical device to denote a set of phenomena—spatial peripherality, social and political marginality, setting and breaking boundaries—that can combine but do not necessarily occur simultaneously. European margins are not a simple, straightforward, easily identifiable spatial object that is coterminous with the borders of regions, states, or the EU. Accordingly, belonging to the margins and being distant from the centre are often expressed as a gradient, rather than a borderline (Bennafla & Peraldi, 2008). More importantly, such a position or determination changes depending on one’s vantage point. It would therefore be difficult for me to provide a cartography of the margins of Europe, or else this would take the form of plural, contingent, multiple, and conflicting cartographies. Yet the point is that the heuristic value of the concept of margins lies also in its vagueness, in that it offers a variety of thematic entry points and allows us to use many different focal lengths, ranging from detention centre cells to the vast expanse of the Mediterranean region. The margins and the border are two distinct yet complementary concepts in my analysis, since I argue that the margins are integral to the processes of building and expanding the border. The margins are a laboratory, a site of political experimentation, and a place to showcase EU sovereignty. Indeed, today the management of migration flows has been delegated to some southern European countries, and specifically to Mediterranean islands, and as a result, migrant screening and selection have been, as it were, outsourced within the very borders of the EU (Triandafyllidou, 2014). As such, the gateway to Europe—the southern margins—often turns out to be a trap, as these areas are the key sites where so-called irregular migrants are rounded up, sorted and, sometimes, stopped and detained (Bernardie-Tahir & Schmoll, 2015). From the perspective of migrant women, these European margins are a political laboratory. Following the analysis provided by intersectional feminists, who have focused on the interplay between various power relations and on the subjectivities generated by such relations (Crenshaw, 1991;

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Hancock, 2017; hooks, 1990), the margins may be understood as a place of both oppression and transformation. In this volume, I describe the margins as sites of intense moral activity, where women are socialised into the “subaltern future” awaiting them, but which can also be places of hope, places where new solidarity bonds are forged and forms of struggle develop—in a nutshell, places of resistance (Mainwaring, 2016). Mine is therefore a geographical approach that is politically engaged, in that it aims not only to identify power relations, but also to emphasise alternatives, potential forms of empowerment, “life lines,” and “lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980). In order to meet this twofold requirement of critical geography, I define the “autonomy in tension” of migrant women in relation to the spatialities in which they are embedded. While bearing in mind the macro-mechanisms by which borders are erected and extended, I offer a micro-political interpretation of the margins that is informed by the works of Michel Foucault and attentive to what he called the “insubordination of freedom” (Foucault, 2001, p. 1056). I therefore look at the subjectivities that come into being in the margins and at the way in which people who are often seen and represented as “weak” or “little,” as migrant women are, can regain power.

African Women in Italy: A Long History However, before delving into these women’s journey, I should stress that the presence of African women in southern Europe is hardly a recent development, but is rather connected to the colonial past and postcolonial present of the Mediterranean region, which has been only recently acknowledged (Lombardi-Diop & Romeo, 2014; Mayblin & Turner, 2021; Proglio et al., 2021). In 1941, in the aftermath of Italy’s defeat and the British occupation of East Africa, women from this region joined their employers returning to Italy. Later, from the 1960s onwards, Somali, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Cape Verdean women would come to Italy to work as colf (“domestic workers”) in Rome and Milan, often with the support of their relatives or through local parishes, which then acted as true intermediaries (Marchetti, 2011; Decimo, 2005). The fact that these women remained in the confines of the domestic space of bourgeois homes likely contributed to their invisibilisation, as did the fact that it proved difficult, as is often the case in migration histories, to admit that women could travel alone, without a husband or a male chaperon. Many of these African women left Italy in the 1990s, some undertaking

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secondary migrations to Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Canada, while others travelled back to their home country. As for me, I started working on African migration to Italy in the 1990s, carrying out fieldwork research in Greater Naples. The country was only just beginning to come to grips with the demographic shift that had rather suddenly transformed it from an emigration into an immigration country. In the 1990s, the domestic work sector, which initially had been the preserve of African women, was attracting an increasing number of migrant women from central and eastern Europe, the Philippines, and Latin America. At the same time, the presence of African women was growing, both on the roads and in the fields. Some women worked in agriculture, their movements following the endless cycle of the agricultural seasons in the south: oranges in Rosarno, tomatoes in Crotone, and so on. At the time, I was conducting fieldwork in the African “ghetto” of Pianura in Naples (Colucci, 2018),11 an old rural market town that had been abandoned by the locals and was regularly left without water and electricity, and one of the most deprived areas of the Naples conurbation. The women whom I met there came from Ivory Coast, Somalia, and Burkina Faso. They did not work in the fields as such, but they would accompany agricultural workers, preparing and serving them meals. Some of them ran refreshment stalls (maquis or “bar”) in the winter, during the break in the farming season. Most of the women I encountered in Naples in the 1990s had arrived by plane: in these days, crossing the Mediterranean Sea was uncommon and a practice usually limited to the most destitute women or to those trapped in human trafficking networks. The latter, mainly Nigerian women from Edo State, were put to work on the roads, where, incidentally, they can still be found today: the presence, for the past forty years, of these women, dubbed “fireflies,” who worked by the side of country lanes and suburban back roads or in run-down neighbourhoods, is a long-standing feature of Italy’s moral landscape, thus reflecting continuity (for a moral perspective on space, Lieber, 2016).12 In the same period, there were also many African women involved in small business: street peddlers working alongside Senegalese vu’cumpra (the nickname for hawkers, literally meaning vuoi comprare or “you want to buy?”),13 beach vendors, hairdressers, hair braiders, and managers of small restaurants located in the railway station area (on the role of women in street trade, see Blanchard, 2008). These women played a key role in the social reproduction of their communities. Through such trade

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activities, others managed to carve out a successful career as entrepreneurs. It was, indeed, during these years that I first met the Tunisian and Moroccan tradeswomen of Naples: these “ants” were moving goods across the Mediterranean, in a context in which the political pressure regarding human mobility was not as strong as it is today (Schmoll, 2004). These women’s extraordinary mobility practices would take them as far as Aleppo and, in some cases, even Shanghai. In the railway station area of Naples, there were a few sub-Saharan traders as well, Cameroonian and Ivorian women, who filled containers with goods bound for the African continent. These were the migrant women’s elite, so to speak: well-established ladies “who had done well for themselves,” the likes of Nana Benz and other such African entrepreneurs in Marseille (France) and in West Africa, who were then depicted in economic sociology scholarship (Bredeloup, 2012; Sengel, 2000). Obviously, not all women were in such an enviable position. In the 1990s, however, women undertaking migration arguably had prospects: opportunities for social promotion and the possibility of legalising their status. Indeed, starting in 1986, Italy would periodically issue residence permits as part of so-called amnesties or sanatorie (incidentally, the Italian word has connotations of a clean-up campaign), whereby those able to provide a contract of employment were eligible for legalisation. Over the years, these large-scale legalisation programmes allowed several hundred thousands of undocumented migrants to regularise their situation and, as a result, the number of legal foreigners in Italy grew from 350,000 in the early 1990s to 1,300,000 in 2001.14 Once they had legalised their status, migrant women residing in southern Italy would often move to other regions, to cities and to areas popular with tourists, or even to other European countries, to work in factories, restaurants, and the care sector. Legalisation paved the way for both social and spatial mobility. Nevertheless, this period should not be idealised, especially since the model of south-north mobility, while being the norm for men, did not follow such a linear path in the case of women, not least because there were fewer employment opportunities: it was difficult for them to find a job in the domestic work sector, in other words, to gain entry into people’s homes. This was rather ironic, considering African women had been the first foreigners to be employed in this line of work in Italy. But, as mentioned earlier, the migration landscape changed dramatically in the 1990s, and the arrival of other migrant groups created a form of racial segmentation of the labour market, which led African women to lose their

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positions of domestic workers, now filled instead by Ukrainians, Romanians, Filipinos and South Americans, in particular.

The 2000s Era: The Humanitarian-Repressive Turn In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the situation radically changed for migrants, both men and women, in the southern margins of Europe. First, the gap was widening between those from EU member states, such as Bulgarian, Romanian, and Polish women, for whom their country’s accession to the EU meant that they were guaranteed freedom of movement within the EU, and the others, towards whom migration policies became increasingly repressive. In Italy, a law was enacted in 1998, establishing Temporary Holding Centres (Centri di permanenza temporanea or CPTs),15 detention centres for so-called illegal immigrants: it laid the foundation for a repressive approach to migration, which today is no longer a point of contention in that country. Around 2004, Italy’s legalisation policy was discontinued following renewed pressure from the EU, which was concerned about the resulting “pull factor,” and eventually gave way to a strategy of closure. Visa access was restricted, thus leading to an unprecedented increase in sea crossings (Guild & Bigo, 2003). There is, moreover, an important, albeit often overlooked, aspect to be considered: those men and women arriving at the time, and always via the Strait of Sicily, were not, for the vast majority of them, from Syria. The people who landed then on the shores of Italy and Malta came mainly from Africa, and in particular from sub-Saharan Africa: it bears restating because the racialisation of these people was probably not unrelated to the way in which they were treated upon their arrival and portrayed in the media. Once in Europe, it became increasingly difficult to obtain a residence permit unless one could claim family reunification or was given refugee status and granted asylum. In this respect, in the 2000s, southern Europe followed in the footsteps of other countries such as France, only fifteen years later. On the one hand, borders and migration control measures were strengthened; on the other hand, the growing number of asylum seekers led to the restructuring of the reception system but also, and rather quickly, to the congestion of such facilities. The labour market underwent a “refugeeization” process as well (Dines & Rigo, 2016), as asylum seekers, by definition an insecure workforce, swelled the employable population. It was precisely then, at a time when a humanitarian and repressive turn in southern European migration policies occurred, that Malta joined the

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EU (Williams, 2016; Fassin, 2007): the first refugee camps for sub-­Saharan refugees were established in the southern margins of Europe, and mega detention centres such as the Hal Far prison in Malta, where men and women were held in appalling conditions, were created. This was a pivotal moment: the basic premises of the humanitarian management of emergencies, an approach that would become the norm during the “migration crisis” of the 2000s, were already present. It was then, in the 2000s, that southern Europe acquired the status of a “useful margin.” This book is about the women who have lived through this new phase in migration control that has taken shape over the past two decades, and it chronicles their everyday lives on and “in” the border. In terms of their aspirations, the African women whom I have met in Malta and Italy in the past ten years are, ultimately, not very different from those I knew in Naples in the 1990s. But at the same time, the legal conditions of migration have fundamentally changed, the violence that women experience during the migration journey is immeasurably greater than it was twenty years ago, and these women’s prospects in terms of social and spatial mobility have become considerably more limited.

A Version of the Facts A final caveat is in order. The ideas developed in this book are embedded in a complex web of meanings, woven from the many stories and experiences of the women I met, and therefore sometimes difficult to untangle. Moreover, the oral testimonies of migrant women need to be placed in their proper context, as they were collected in a given time and place— between 2010 and 2018, in Malta and in Italy. Borrowing from Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Stengers (2011), I would like to use the metaphor of what in French is called a version, that is, a translation from a foreign language into a native language (as opposed to a translation from one’s language into a foreign language), to describe the text in the following pages: this is, indeed, my own version of the question of migration, and therefore a version that is situated, embodied and, in several respects, limited. An unbridgeable gulf exists between these women and myself. Moreover, for various reasons, the very fact of speaking on their behalf, that is, in their place, may constitute an act of violence. By opening our eyes to the power relations structuring and permeating scholarly inquiries, feminist and subaltern studies have cured us of the belief that there is such a thing as an “innocent” gaze in academic research (Zitouni, 2012). The

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point here is not to commit to relativism, but merely to give scholarly contribution its rightful place, and thus its proper, modest meaning: indeed, my voice is but one of many that could speak about female migration. This is why I felt that it was important, in Chap. 2, to let one such voice, that of Julienne, be heard. Chapters 3 and 4 explore women’s trajectories in the age of borders and “in” the border, from their place of departure to their arrival in Europe. Chapter 5 focuses on the moral geographies of waiting and on everyday life “in the margins.” Chapter 6 provides a socio-geographical analysis of women’s autonomy in a highly constrained context, investigating it on three different scales—the body, the domestic space, and the digital space. The conclusion examines in a broader sense what the “feminisation of the gaze” entails for a critical and politically engaged reflection on contemporary migrations.

Notes 1. At the time, Gabriele Del Grande, an Italian journalist, kept a blog in which he updated daily the list of the dead in the Mediterranean: https:// fortresseurope.blogspot.com/. 2. The women I met were all nationals of an African country. Today, African women constitute the overwhelming majority of women taking the central Mediterranean route. The nationality criterion, however arbitrary it may seem, is clearly important since it determines the future of these women: for instance, being from a particular country has a significant impact on one’s likelihood of getting papers. Furthermore, in southern Europe today, Africa is, by definition, the continent of the “undesirables” in that restrictive migration policies are primarily designed to address African immigration, even though, needless to say, African people do not represent the largest number of foreigners in southern Europe (those being European nationals). 3. I borrow this metaphor from Nancy Green (2002). 4. There is a vast literature and, indeed, an interdisciplinary field of study has developed on the subject of “critical border studies,” with its own academic conferences and specialised journals. In addition to these references, see the volumes produced by the Babels programme, which have appeared in the book series “La Bibliothèque des frontières,” edited by Michel Agier and published by Le Passager clandestin.

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5. From this perspective, the category of “undesirable” devised by Michel Agier (2008) seems more compelling than that of “deportable” proposed by Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (2010). 6. The phenomenon whereby migrations, notably forced migrations, occur near the place of departure is called the “regionalisation of migration.” 7. It should be noted that the Mediterranean is still the site of various human and non-human movements to this day. In many ways, this region remains, indeed, a “space-movement” as described by Fernand Braudel: holidaymakers and transnational migrants carrying all kinds of goods, cruise passengers and travellers of all stripes, containers, and container ships move across the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the region. Tourism is particularly noteworthy: in terms of sheer numbers, migration is but a drop in the ocean compared to tourism, which is obviously the major mobility phenomenon of the twenty-first century. The way in which borders have been “drifting” has sometimes obscured these different forms of mobility, which have shaped the Mediterranean just as much as migrations have. This goes to show that the strategy aiming to close the Mediterranean is actually designed to screen and differentiate between various types of mobility. 8. A humanitarian visa allows a person whose security is threatened entry into a EU member state. Obtaining a humanitarian visa is not an indication of one’s refugee status, even though both this visa and asylum are granted on similar grounds. This visa allows a person to travel regularly to the EU. For instance, since the early 2010s, France has issued a few thousand of such humanitarian visas. In Italy, the Community of Sant’Egidio and the Caritas organisation sponsored the creation of “humanitarian corridors,” but in this case too, the initiative only benefitted a few thousand people. 9. Hotspots were established in 2015 as part of the EU response to the migration crisis. They are located in Greece and Italy, and are designed to identify and triage migrants at the EU’s external borders. 10. At the time of writing, in February 2020, the second cabinet led by Giuseppe Conte had yet to reverse Matteo Salvini’s migration policies, in particular measures abolishing the humanitarian protection status for migrants. 11. At the time, “ghetto” was the term that was used specifically to denote African settlements in Italy. One such ghetto, the ghetto of Villa Literno in the region of Campania, became infamous in 1989, following the murder of a South African agricultural worker, Jerry Essan Masslo, who had been denied political asylum in 1988. This event marked the birth of the anti-­ racist movement and led to the removal of the geographic limitation clause of the 1951 Geneva Convention (or Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) for those persons wishing to claim asylum in Italy.

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12. The presence of African sex workers on the roadside pertains to a moral geography, in that these women follow spatial practices consistent with the idea that receiving societies have of the place of each and everyone. This involves both forms of isolation and processes of invisibilisation, which, in turn, represent as many moral boundaries. I discuss the concept of a moral landscape in Chap. 5. 13. While there is a substantial literature on these figures of street trade, the role of women in this sector in Italy has been almost entirely overlooked, Blanchard (2008) being a notable exception. 14. The number would keep increasing, reaching 4 million foreign residents by the late 2000s. Source: census carried out by the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT), the Italian National Institute of Statistics. 15. CPTs would later become CIEs, Centri di identificazione ed espulsione or “Identification and Deportation Centres” (see Chap. 4).

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Hancock, C. (2017). Feminism from the margin: Challenging the Paris/banlieues divide. Antipode, 49(3), 636–656. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12303 Heller, C., & Pécoud, A. (2017). Compter les morts aux frontières : des contre-­ statistiques de la société civile à la récupération (inter)gouvernementale. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 33(2–3), 63–90. https://doi. org/10.4000/remi.8732 hooks, b. (1990). Marginality as site of resistance. In R.  Ferguson, M.  Gever, T. T. Minh-ha, & C. West (Eds.), Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures (pp.  341–344). The New Museum of Contemporary Art/The MIT Press. Kobelinsky, C., & Makaremi, C. (Eds.). (2009). ‘Enfermés dehors’ : enquêtes sur le confinement des étrangers. Éditions du Croquant. Lieber, M. (2016). Qui dénonce le harcèlement de rue ? Un essai de géographie morale. In F. Fassa, E. Lépinard, & M. Roca i Escoda (Eds.), L’intersectionnalité : enjeux théoriques et politiques (pp. 223–248). La Dispute. Lombardi-Diop, C., & Romeo, C. (2014). The Italian Postcolonial: A Manifesto. Italian Studies, 69(3), 425–433. Mainwaring, C. (2016). Migrant agency: Negotiating borders and migration control. Migration Studies, 4(3), 289–308. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnw013 Makaremi, C. (2009). Governing borders in France: From extraterritorial to humanitarian confinement. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 24(3), 411–432. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0829320100010103 Marchetti, S. (2011). Le ragazze di Asmara : lavoro domestico e migrazione postcoloniale. Ediesse. Mayblin, L., & Turner, J. (2021). Migration studies and colonialism. John Wiley & Sons. Mbembe, A. (2008). Necropolitics (pp. 152–182). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Borders as methods, or, the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. Migreurop. (2017). Atlas critique des migrants en Europe : approches critiques des politiques migratoires. Armand Colin. Morelle, M. (2016, July). Notion à la une : marginalité. Géoconfluences. http:// geoconfluences.ens-­lyon.fr/informations-­scientifiques/a-­la-­une/notion-­a-­la-­ une/notion-­a-­la-­une-­marginalite Morice, A. (2019). Ce que la crise de 2015 nous révèle sur les politiques migratoires européennes. In A. Lendaro, C. Rodier, & Y.-L. Vertongen (Eds.), La crise de l’accueil : frontières, droits, résistances (pp. 33–63). La Découverte. NDiaye, M. (2012). Three strong women (J.  Fletcher, Trans.). Alfred A.  Knopf. (Original work published 2009). Paasi, A. (2009). Bounded spaces in a ‘borderless world’: Border studies, power and the anatomy of territory. Journal of Power, 2(2), 213–234.

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Parker, N., Vaughan-Williams, N., et al. (2009). Lines in the sand? Towards an agenda for critical border studies. Geopolitics, 14(3), 582–587. https://doi. org/10.1080/14650040903081297 Pastore, F. (2020). Are European migration policies racist? Brown Journal of World Affairs, 27(2), 1–15. Pian, A. (2016). D’une Europe à l’autre, une vie faite de frontières. Migrations Sociétés, 164, 135–150. https://doi.org/10.3917/migra.164.0135 Pickering, S., & Cochrane, B. (2013). Irregular border-crossing deaths and gender: Where, how and why women die crossing borders. Theoretical Criminology, 17(1), 27–48. Proglio, G., Hawthorne, C., Danewid, I., Saucier, P. K., Grimaldi, G., Pesarini, A., et al. (2021). In V. Gerrand (Ed.), The black Mediterranean: Bodies, borders and citizenship. Springer Nature. Prosa, L. (2007). Lampedusa Beach. Edizioni della meridiana. Rekacewicz, P. (2012, June). L’arc des réfugiés. Le Monde diplomatique. https:// www.monde-­diplomatique.fr/cartes/arcdesrefugies. Revel, J. (2018). Ne pas faire vivre et laisser mourir. Esprit, 7–8, 93–102. https:// doi.org/10.3917/espri.1807.0093 Rochefort, R. (1986). La marginalité de l’extérieur et de l’intérieur. In A. Vant (Ed.), Marginalité sociale, marginalité spatiale (pp. 26–34). Éditions du CNRS. Rodier, C. (2012). Xénophobie business : à quoi servent les contrôles migratoires ? La Découverte. Schapendonk, J., Bolay, M., & Dahinden, J. (2021). The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 47(14), 3243–3259. Schmoll, C. (2004). Une place marchande cosmopolite : dynamiques migratoires et circulations commerciales à Naples [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Université Paris X-Nanterre. Schmoll, C., Bernardie-Tahir, N., & Babels (Eds.). (2018). Méditerranée : des frontières à la dérive. Le Passager clandestin. Sengel, M. (2000). Nana-Benz de Noailles. Hommes & Migrations, 1224, 71–78. https://doi.org/10.3406/homig.2000.3482 Squire, V. (Ed.). (2011). The contested politics of mobility: Borderzones and irregularity. Routledge. Tassin, L. (2019). L’approche ‘hotspots’, une solution en trompe-l’œil : compte rendu d’enquêtes à Lesbos et à Lampedusa. In A.  Lendaro, C.  Rodier, & Y.-L.  Vertongen (Eds.), La crise de l’accueil : frontières, droits, résistances (pp. 161–185). La Découverte. Triandafyllidou, A. (2014). Multi-levelling and Externalizing Migration and Asylum: Lessons From the Southern European Islands. Island Studies Journal, 9(1), 7–22. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.290

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van Houtum, H. (2010). Human blacklisting: The global apartheid of the EU’s external border regime. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(6), 957–976. https://doi.org/10.1068/Fd1909 Williams, J. M. (2016). The safety/security nexus and the humanitarianisation of border enforcement. The Geographical Journal, 182(1), 27–37. https://doi. org/10.1111/geoj.12119 Zitouni, B. (2012). With whose blood were my eyes crafted? (D. Haraway) Les savoirs situés comme la proposition d’une autre objectivité. In E.  Dorlin & E.  Rodriguez (Eds.), Penser avec Donna Haraway (pp.  46–63). Presses Universitaires de France.

CHAPTER 2

The Life of Julienne

September 2015: the picture of the lifeless body of a young boy washed up on a beach in Turkey led to an outpouring of emotion and condemnation. There have been numerous accounts of border crossings since then— whether journalistic, literary, scholarly, or activist—although they tend to focus on male migrants. After the initial shock has worn off, there is a feeling of saturation: we have become inured to these stories and pictures, which tell us nothing, it seems, that we did not already know (Schmoll, 2019a). Our memory and imagination cannot take it anymore. This is why the story that follows may seem in many ways predictable, trite, if indeed we choose to read it as the story of one migrant woman among many: a woman who was forced to leave her country to flee gender-­ based oppression and poverty; who was caught in the web of smuggling networks; whose journey took her into the “Libyan inferno” and across the Mediterranean Sea; and, finally, who ended up wandering around and became disillusioned with this Europe reluctant to accept her. There are hundreds, thousands of women like Julienne. While not succumbing to Bourdieu’s “biographical illusion” (1986) I felt, however, that it was important that at least one of the first-person accounts that I had collected be presented as such, in a direct form: for once, to reproduce such a story without breaking it up, dividing it into pieces, which, besides, I will do with other interview excerpts elsewhere in this volume.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Schmoll, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6_2

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The following account arose, moreover, from a request from the women whom I met: to tell their story. I chose to grant this request, which reflected a desire for recognition and, to some extent, made up for the feeling, which overwhelmed these women at times, that all their past ordeals had been for nothing. Much like the accounts of immigrants found in the works of sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad (1999), Julienne’s story is as representative as it is unique. It could certainly lend itself to a variety of interpretations, leading us to think about violence in times of crisis or gendered structures in sub-­ Saharan Africa, for instance. In the present volume, however, her story serves as an introduction to a political geography of life in the age of borders and helps illustrate—without essentialising—the vulnerabilisation of women throughout their journey. It is also a device which allows a different reading of the chapters that will follow, as it gives an empirical introduction to issues of trajectories, forced (im)mobilities, moral landscapes of migrant reception and autonomy of migration, that Il will deal with in the following chapters. It allows me to conceptualise the border as an ordeal for those women who are in limbo—in this in-between state wherein they are neither really deportable nor truly settled or allowed to settle—for those who have left but have not made it yet. In Julienne’s account, the alternation between the passive and active voice reflects the tension defining the ambivalent position of women at the border: they are caught up in the games of political, institutional, and everyday social actors that are beyond their comprehension and beyond their control; they are trapped in the world of migration networks and policies; and yet, they also remain the first-person protagonists of their stories, taking charge of their own destinies and journeys. This story, based on real-life experience, is punctuated by episodes of violence and thus it may be disturbing or hard to read. My hope is that, beyond the emotional response it may elicit, this account will nevertheless help readers better understand the question of migration in the Mediterranean. Indeed, Julienne’s testimony serves as an entry point to the various themes that will be explored in the next chapters: the mixed motivations behind migrant women’s decisions to leave, and the difficulties of undertaking migration “on one’s own,” when one makes such a journey without the blessing or the assistance of one’s relatives, as was the case for Julienne; the continuum between various forms of gender-based violence; the ways in which such violence is closely, and causally, related to the brutality of current migration control policies, as well as to the

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ambiguities and delays of EU reception policies for asylum seekers; the disjunction between the political management of migration and individual migration projects; migrant women’s encounter with host societies whose attitude towards them is sometimes welcoming, sometimes distant, and often paternalistic; the tension between power structures and autonomy that plays out throughout the journey; the constant changes in migration trajectories, as they are modified in response to opportunities and obstacles, as a result of good and bad encounters; the many people and the many things that migrant women have to give up—in Julienne’s case, she was, first and foremost, forced to leave her son behind, but she also had to abandon a certain idea of Europe, as she had pictured it before she made the sea crossing. The following first-person account, which Julienne and I went over together in 2019, is based on a series of interviews conducted first in Sicily, in the small village where Julienne was staying, in 2016 and 2017, then at my Paris home in 2018, and lastly, in the French  town where she now lives, in 2019. Eventually, after the time limit set by the Dublin Regulation had expired,1 Julienne sought to obtain legal residence status and was granted a short-term residence permit on the grounds of vulnerability. I took the liberty of cutting out my follow-up questions as well as a few passages, mainly to avoid repetitions, and of grouping the paragraphs by theme.2 The structure of the interview follows the chronology of Julienne’s journey (see Schmoll, 2019b).

“On the wedding day, I didn’t agree to it” My name is Julienne and I turned thirty-seven this year. My father died a long time ago and my mother is still alive. She’s just turned seventy-two. Since their five older children are dead, I’ve become the eldest, and after me, there’s my sister, who lives in Spain. My childhood was hard because in Cameroon, the rich use the poor. So my mother was pregnant and, at the time, my father was penniless. And my mother didn’t work. We lived in Nkoabang. And there was a man in Nkolafamba: he had money, he worked and, besides, he’d already been here to France. When my mother got pregnant, he told her he’d take care of the baby. It was my aunt, my mother’s older sister, who’d arranged it. That’s how it was in Cameroon at the time: the person who had money had a chat with the child’s father; he’d tell you that if you had a girl, his

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son would marry her, and if it was a boy, his daughter would marry him— that’s how it was at the time. These things would be discussed even before the baby was born. So my father agreed to it, and so did my mother. That man, he said his son would be the one to marry me. He was a military man, he was a man in uniform—he was a man. But he was like a father to me. When I turned thirteen, I was sent a ring. I was told that it was him, the “uncle,” who’d sent it to me. I had no idea. They’d say to me: “You’re going to go live with the uncle here. He’s your husband, or if not him, then his son: the decision is up to him.” I began by refusing: “I know him as my uncle, I can’t marry my uncle.” But he kept insisting, he’d take me to school, he’d give me 100 francs, 200 francs. And I’d refuse. I was told: “No, he’s the one who’s paid for you and your education, so the final decision is his alone to make.” When I was fifteen years old, I went to his house and he started telling me: “I want to marry you, your parents know about this. Have they already told you about it?” I asked him to give me some time, and he left me alone. From that moment on, I didn’t want to go to his house anymore, and I ran away from home to stay at my mother’s sister’s, in Nkolemeya. My aunt would tell me: “It’s normal, that’s how it goes.” I spent a year there, not going to his house once. The man knew, but he let the time pass. When I turned sixteen, my father told him: “She’s old enough, you have to take her in now.” And to me, he said: “You have to go live with him.” On the wedding day, I didn’t agree to it, but I was forced [to go through with it]. He gave me a dowry. Back home, the dowry, we call it “knocking on the door.” The husband turns up with some friends and says: “I’ve come for your daughter, I love her, I’m going to marry her.” The parents write down on a piece of paper what they’re asking for: food, beer, any number of things. And the husband goes to get it. And then we perform the wedding. And so I went to live with him. And then I got pregnant with my son. That’s when the torture began: this man was drinking a lot, he was aggressive. I don’t know if he still drinks today. He doesn’t know the limits, I don’t know how to put it, he beats women so much. When he’d be done drinking, he’d come home and start hitting me. My son was already almost two years old, so he wanted us to have a second child. But he couldn’t impose that on me: it was something we had to discuss together, and I’d tell you if I was ready. But for him, that wasn’t

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how it was; for him, that wasn’t like that; for him, you were a slave because he’d given you a dowry. And I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t the only one: he already had two wives and six children. One of them left when I arrived. My husband, he was an irresponsible father. He didn’t care about his wife anymore. And then, every single time, there was a beating. His first wife, she ended up leaving. One day, on a Sunday, I was bathing my son, as I wanted to go to Mass. He came. He was drunk. He’d been out all night. He said: “What are you doing?” I replied that I was bathing my son so that I could go to church. Then he told me that I couldn’t go to church because he wanted to lie down with me. I replied that the night was for sleeping, but during the day I had to go out. So he started hitting me; he took some hot water and threw it at me. Look, I still have the scars, but it’s fading. He poured the water on me, the water burnt me, and it also burnt the child. I went across the street to his older brother, who was the village chief. “Can you see how your brother’s treating me? You have to talk to him, or else I’m leaving.” So he called his brother and talked to him. But it didn’t change anything. I went back to live with my family. I spent a week at home. He showed up, he bought food and beer, and then he came to apologise, to say that he’d been drunk, but that he wouldn’t do it again. By that time, I was already twenty years old. My mother told me: “You have to go home. That’s how it is, marriage, you have to put up with it.” And so I went back and I prayed that he wouldn’t do it again. But every single time it happened again. Every single time he beat me.

“I spent ten years like that” The young men got together on Sundays. My husband had started drinking with the young men. He’d go there, and the young men would say to him: “Why are you abusing the little girl? She’s a little girl, she’s your child. You shouldn’t do this, she’s like a daughter to you.” And then he came home one evening, when I was already in bed. He shouted: “Where is she? Where is she?” Then he started hitting me, he threw punches at me: “Because of you, people speak ill of me! Because of you!” Every Sunday he told me: “Because of you, I can’t walk around the village anymore, people insult me, the whole village is against me.” And he’d start hitting me again. One day, I was in so much pain that I went over to

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his brother’s home, across the street. I had bumps all over. I told his brother: “Your brother had told my family that he wouldn’t do it again, but he’s done it again, he’s hit me again! I can’t take it anymore, you have to call your brother.” He called his brother, and his brother said that he’d had to beat me up because the young men accused him of being violent. So his brother intervened and told him to stop. He’d say that he’d understood, that he wouldn’t do it again. Yet he kept doing it, he beat me, he traumatised me. And afterwards, it was always: “I don’t want to do it again, you have to forgive me.” I spent ten years like that. My mind wasn’t there with him anymore. In fact, I’d already made my decision. I was doing my little business, I was setting money aside: I went to Benin, to Mali; I bought fabrics, wax prints; and I resold them at my house or at my customers’ in Yaoundé. That way, I was saving up, I was making a bit of money. Where it’s been hard, it’s the day he broke my foot. It was just before Christmas. He’d given me some money—roughly the equivalent of 30 euros—and he’d asked me to use it to buy food for Christmas and a present for the child. I looked at that money and I thought: “I need to buy shoes and something for my son: on Christmas Day, every child should have a toy. My son should be able to play like the other children.” So he gave me that money, and within two days I’d spent it all. Meanwhile, he went out drinking and he bought people drinks. He called the lady who’d served him the drinks and told her I’d pay her back. The lady came to our house to claim the money she was owed. She said to me: “Your husband’s been drinking and he told me to come and get the money from you.” My husband told me: “You have to give her the money because I don’t like having debts.” I told him: “You don’t like having debts? Well, I don’t have any money. That money is meant for the child’s Christmas and the things we’re going to eat.” I said “I’m not giving it,” but I didn’t realise it would create other problems. I wanted to run away and, since he was a bit drunk, he grabbed me. I fell down, and he gave me a thrashing. He broke my foot. I was three months pregnant, and he started hitting me, pummelling me. I was screaming and screaming. The lady, who was there, was yelling at him to stop. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t feel anything, my child wasn’t moving anymore. I was three months along. My child was dead. When the blood started pouring out, they told him to take me to hospital.

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“That woman, she helps you get out, she knows the road” I went to the hospital in Yaoundé, and they told me I was going to have surgery. I stayed there. My husband, he left me and never came back. My foot wasn’t well. But they told me they were going to look at the womb first, and they’d examine my foot later. They finished operating on my womb, they cleaned it up. Thank God, everything went well. Afterwards, it was the foot that wasn’t doing well. I spent fifteen days in hospital, but I had no money. Then a friend told me that, not too far from there, there was a man who did things in the native way, who could massage my foot using traditional methods. By the time I got out of hospital, there was no trace of me left. My husband had lost track of me. I spent nearly a month at that man’s place. My son came to see me, alone. He was nine years old at the time but, since he was angry with his father, he didn’t tell him anything. One day, at this healer’s, I met a girl who’d come to visit her parents. We talked, and then she said to me: “After what this man did to you, if you go home, it’s going to start all over again as before. But if you want, I can help you, I can take you to Mali.” I told her I had no money, but she said I could work in Mali and pay her back bit by bit. That woman, that’s her job: since she knows the road, she specialises in women, she goes back and forth from Yaoundé to Mali. She helps you get out, she knows the road. I agreed, and she paid for everything. We were six women and we travelled through Nigeria, Benin, Burkina [Faso]. Then in Mali, I looked for work to pay her back. You’d look for a job by yourself, you’d pick a job—waitress, prostitute—and then you’d pay her back. I worked in a restaurant, sweeping, cleaning, tidying up. The work was hard. I started at eight o’clock in the morning and I finished at six o’clock in the afternoon. Besides, the owner, she had customers. And I had to clean everything—everything. I don’t know how my husband tracked me down in Mali. It’s true that, when I got there, I spoke with my mother. I told her: “I left because you, the family, couldn’t and wouldn’t protect me. Every time I came to you, you sent me back to him. Every time he beat me, you told me: ‘No, that’s what marriage is like, you have to put up with it.’ But he’ll end up killing me. He beats me, he beats my children, he kills my children, and I can’t take it anymore. I’m fine, but I can’t come home.” And then, one day, my

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husband showed up in Mali to get me back. I came home from work and I found my husband sitting at my friend’s table. He’d lied to her, he’d just said that he was a friend of mine, that he wanted to surprise me. My friend had chatted with him and she had given him the whole itinerary—at least, I think so. When I found him there after I got back from work, I grabbed all my money and I took off again. I’d already paid back almost everything because I’d already been working: there was only a small amount of money outstanding. So, as I’d already made some acquaintances in Mali, I went to hide out at another friend’s, who took in many Black people. There were six of them (two men and four women), they slept in the living room and they talked. They said they wanted to go to Libya. I asked them: “What are you going to do in Libya?” They told me they were going to work. I asked them: “Is there work in Libya?” They told me there was indeed. Life in Mali was difficult, and with my husband there, I’d rather leave, so why not give Libya a try? I followed this group. I didn’t know the road and I only had 25,000 francs on me.3 That’s how I went to Libya. There were fifteen of us. There were six women, three children, and some men. We spent six days on the road. We endured: it was the desert, it was awful. The car in which you travelled was open like a pickup truck. You couldn’t sit in the front unless you had a newborn, in which case you had to really pay a lot. We had five litres of water each. I shared it when someone asked me to. And then, after that, my water was gone. I asked for water, but no one would give me any. Then the car broke down, and we waited two days for them to fix it. It was so hot. Two men—two Malians—died of dehydration; they died in front of me. It was a difficult experience. I didn’t know it was going to be like that. You couldn’t cope with the Mali desert. Since I’d run out of water, I had to drink camel urine. Everyone did it. That’s how I survived. You went to the well, where camels shit and peed. You put that in a bottle, you waited for the dirty stuff to fall to the bottom, and you drank what was left at the top, where it was clearer. So I fell ill: I was covered with pimples. Next, we were asked by the police for our papers when we crossed into Algeria. We just gave them a bit of money. We all chipped in, and they let us through. The border went smoothly. Then we arrived in Tamanrasset, and the Black people I met there came up with the little extra money I needed. We took the bus. The bus dropped us off somewhere, and there, we called the Libyans, those who were supposed to pick us up.

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There, at the Libyan border, it was tough. They came to get us with three cars. They searched us, they had rifles. A complete disaster. What I saw, it was horrendous. I’d never seen anything like this in my whole life. Never in my life had I seen rifles, only on TV. We thought they were good people, but in fact they took everything from us. Everything: the money, the phones, everything. They left us there the whole day and they came back at night to get us, to take us to the place where they were supposed to take us. And then eventually, a week later, the rebels—I think—came to get us. Well, I’m not sure if it was them or another group who came to get us, but at the place we went to, there were other people. There were 428 of us. I know this because there was a guy, an African man who spoke Arabic: he wrote down and counted the names as we came in. It was a big house. There were no separate bedrooms, only one room. Men and women were kept apart. It was horrendous. That’s when I fell ill. I was very unwell. I spent three months in that house. They gave us half a loaf of bread in the morning, with half a bottle of water every day. We ate. On Sundays, they gave us pasta. I’d become like this [she holds up her little finger]. I was ill, I had a lung infection. At night, it was so cold. They’d bring some wood, planks, and we’d light a fire in the house. When night came, they raped the women. I don’t know where we were because we couldn’t see anything. I only saw their beards, their long beards. With everything that I was seeing, I thought I was already dead. Every evening, they came to get the women and rape them. Every day we were raped. Every day. When they came, they concealed their faces. They were dressed in black, with rifles. When they came in, they didn’t walk through the door, they climbed right in. You’d be lying and you’d hear them jump inside.

“I was lying on the side of the road, as if dead” And I was ill. Then one day, a man came up to me, and I told him: “I’m ill, I’m not feeling well.” That day, he didn’t rape me—I can’t lie—because he saw the state I was in, and he threw me out of the house. He made me go outside because, since I was ill, I was going to die if I stayed there. They told me to go die outside, that they didn’t want me to die in their house. I was already ill with tuberculosis; I was tired. I was lying on the side of the road, as if dead. Out there, in Libya, women do not go out in the street. I had nowhere to go, I didn’t know anyone. I saw a woman, a mother walking past. I

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asked her if she could help me, take me home, at least buy me some medicine. I didn’t realise I had a lung infection. We couldn’t understand each other: she spoke Arabic, and I spoke French. She touched me, and I raised my head; she asked me to get up and she took me to her house. This mother had a son. She tried to tell me, but I couldn’t understand her. She told me that her son would be coming. Me and the mother, we spent a week together. She’d go buy me some paracetamol, she was always telling me not to go out. Because in Libya, if you’re a Black woman and you don’t speak Arabic, you just can’t. For a start, as a woman, you’re not allowed to go out, or you’ll get raped and everything. And she’d go out to pick up the medicine, but it didn’t help with the pain. Her son came. When he arrived, he asked me what I was doing in their house. I told him: “Your mum brought me here.” The mother said: “She said she was ill, and I want to help her, not just buy the little tablets.” In Libya, I couldn’t go to hospital because I didn’t have papers. Her son told me: “No, you can’t stay here unless you work for me.” The mother said: “Why, can’t you see she’s unwell?” He said: “No, I can’t have a Black person staying in my house. If she can’t work, she’s out.” I asked him: “What kind of work is there?” He told me: “If you agree to work, I’ll take you there tomorrow morning.” I asked if it was paid work. He replied “Yes,” but I’m not sure he understood my question. The next day, he took me to the bush4: there was a house there, and he spent all day there with his friends. There were rifles, bullets, so my job was to wipe everything clean: I swept the house, I washed the floor and all that. I was the only woman there. That’s when he told me: “My job, it’s to kill people. And the state knows about it—the government. So even if I kill you, they’re not going to ask me why I killed you. The state knows about it.” I was scared. I spent nearly a week out there at his place. The day I asked him “When are you going to pay me?,” he kicked me out. He told me he never wanted to see me again. But I came home in the evening. The mother said to me: “Why did you ask him for money? You shouldn’t have. If you wanted something, you should have asked me.” I told her that I didn’t understand, that I thought he was going to pay me. He left me there a whole day, and at six o’clock in the afternoon, he came and asked me to get in the car. There were three men in the car; I was the only woman. They took us to the bush.

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“Come, come, I’m going to put you on the boat, you’re going to Italy” Out there, in the bush, they were killing people, they were killing Black people. The guy who was in the front seat, they killed him right there, in front of me. Another one, they tied him up and took him away. Then they talked, and they talked some more. I don’t know what they were talking about. They told me to get out of the car. I saw the bodies of ten Black people, corpses—ten, lined up like that. I came across two more Black men there: they were beating up a guy. I didn’t know what the problem was, but the guy just kept begging. Then they left me there. There was a Ghanaian man, the other one only spoke Arabic. They were speaking in Arabic, I couldn’t understand. He asked: “The lady, what’s it about?” I was scared. I simply called on my God: “O Lord, don’t forsake me! Is this where you’re going to forsake me? Where am I here?” The [Libyan] man, he started the car and he left. When I told him “You’re going, you’re leaving me?,” he didn’t look at me, he left. The Ghanaian man, he gave me a shake. I said: “Brother, I’m ill.” He said: “What? What?” He spoke to me in Arabic. I told him: “I don’t speak Arabic.” I don’t speak English, but I can understand English. He asked me: “What did you do to this man that he brought you here?” I said: “I didn’t do anything. I worked at his house. I asked for money because I was ill. And then he took me here.” The Ghanaian then told me: “He brought you here to be killed.” The others started talking with the Ghanaian. Then they left. The Ghanaian told me: “I’m going to help you, I’m going to take you somewhere. Because they told me to kill you, but I can’t see what you’ve done to this man, I just want to help you.” He didn’t ask me for anything in return. He told me: “That’s how they are, the Arabs: if you do something, they kill you. But you, you’re a good soul. You’re going to go to Italy, and they’ll nurse you back to health. If you stay here, you’re going to die. You’re going to leave.” So he took me to the seaside, to a house. I was there for nearly two weeks. He’d bring me sardines and bread, a litre of water, some juice. And some paracetamol. He didn’t come every day. I was in a room on my own. But he didn’t rape me. I was ill, however; I couldn’t even eat the food. I was there for nearly two weeks, and then, one night, he came knocking on the door and told me: “Come, come, I’m going to put you on the boat, you’re going to Italy. If you die in the water, you die. But if you get there, they’ll take care of you.”

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He didn’t ask me for anything for the sea crossing: his heart told him to help me. Normally, in Libya everyone pays. In Libya, you can’t make the crossing unless you pay, or you have to be lucky like I’ve been. All the people I’ve talked to told me they’d paid, not a large amount, though—200, 300, 500 euros, it depends. But if you have money, you have to pay. He put me on the boat. I made it to Italy. The Ghanaian man was sent to me by God.

“Every day I pray to God that He gives me papers” The boats were frail. Back at the house, the Libyans guarding you would tell you that you’d make the crossing in a big boat. But when you got to the seashore, you couldn’t even cough. Because you saw the inflatable dinghy, and if you didn’t get on it, they killed you. Because they knew that if you [came back and] said anything about it, the others in the house would start screaming, since they’d been told it would be a big boat. When you got to the shore, that wasn’t what it was. And you had to wade into the water before climbing into the boat. If you said you weren’t getting on it, they killed you. An Ivorian woman was killed on the shore because she said she wouldn’t get on the boat. You could barely hear the sound of the rifle—tchsss—and the person just fell down. I too wanted to refuse, but a man whispered to me: “You saw: the girl is dead, they killed her. You have to keep quiet.” I was shaking, thinking: “I can’t. I can’t swim.” It was the first time I saw the sea. I’d seen it on TV, but this was different. We put to sea at three o’clock in the morning and we landed at Pozzallo [Sicily, Italy] at seven thirty. We were rescued at sea, the water was already coming in: since we were sitting, water was already getting in everywhere. There were 110 of us. There were more women than men. There were many of us women. Once we arrived in Italy, we were given a warm welcome. I told them I was gravely ill. They put me aside, and everyone left. In Pozzallo, at the hotspot, I was with a little boy who was just as ill as I was. They were giving him shots, they were giving him medicine and all that, and to me nothing. So I started to cry. Then a doctor came and told me: “Madam, stay still, you’re ill.” I said: “Yes, I’m ill, but you’re not giving me any medicine.” He said: “Wait.” And then they called a car, and I was taken to the hospital in Ragusa. I got there on 26 January, and they started the treatment. I was in hospital for two weeks; it went well. Italians are not like the Arabs: I was afraid they’d take me for a ride because I was ill, but they didn’t. Every morning

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they said: “How are you, Julienne? Have you eaten? Have you taken your medicine?” They brought me pasta. They gave me clothes. It was fine. The only thing they wouldn’t give me was a phone [laughter]. They told me: “It’s not possible in hospital.” Then, when I was discharged from hospital, they took me to the police, and I ran into some Black people. I asked them to lend me their phone so that I could call my friends from the boat, to see where they were at. The guy handed me the phone, and I called a woman. She shouted: “Yeah, the others got here, we didn’t know where you were!” I said: “I’m here, I’m in hospital, I wasn’t feeling well.” Everyone was happy. Later on, I lost touch with them; we went our separate ways. When I left hospital, they took my fingerprints and they took me to the bush.5 I arrived at the camp on 10 February 2016. I was the only Cameroonian woman at this centre. There were many Nigerian women, which bothered me a little bit because I didn’t speak English. The manager saw that I was all on my own and left out, and he went to Pozzallo to get a woman who spoke French. Earlier, he’d told me: “I’m going to bring you someone, don’t worry.” He brought me Aïcha. Every now and then, she comes to my place,6 and I go to her place. We talk, it feels good, there’s no problem. We pass the time… Occasionally, I’m a hairdresser. I’m here, braiding them; it helps pass the day. In Ragusa, we can get some of the things we need [to braid]: there’s a store, but it’s expensive. But what are we going to do, it’s the only place where we can shop. Every now and then—even that time when you came, I was braiding: tomorrow I’ll be braiding, the day after tomorrow I’ll be braiding. It helps pass the day. Anyway, I’m fine in Italy, I don’t have any problems here, except that I miss my family. But the days are very long. I’d like to work. I was hoping they’d tell me at the camp how it works to get a job. I haven’t called home yet because, if I call, my mother will talk to my husband. I call my little sister. My son, I don’t really know where things stand with him. I’ve asked my sister to try and talk to him. Since he’s a man, a boy, I’m afraid he’ll take his father’s side. My sister, I don’t want to go and join her: no one sent me, so I can’t be a burden on her like that. You can’t come and impose on people like that. I’m waiting for the appointment with the Asylum Commission. Every day I pray to God that He gives me papers. Here, at the centre, everyone calls me “Mama.” As I am a Christian, I used to go to the Pentecostal church. In the village, I explained to them that I was a Christian. They called someone who was a Catholic; they brought me the Bible. It was really, really great: they took me to church!

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When I feel like staying with them, they say to me: “Julienne, Julienne!” They’re very, very nice, warm, welcoming. They come to visit me every time! Two people, three people. “Are you coming on Friday? On Sunday, we’ll come and pick you up!” My church friends, I told them my story: everyone was praying, everyone was crying. Especially the life I lived in Libya. I gave thanks to God. God spoke to me, he said: “I will not forsake you.” I felt in my heart that God hadn’t forsaken me. In Sicily, they’re welcoming. The interview was stopped in 2017 and resumed in France in 2018. This yearlong hiatus gave Julienne an opportunity to step back and reflect on the two years that had gone by since she had first arrived in Europe. In the meantime, she was granted a humanitarian residence permit in Italy. As for her sister, who used to live in Spain, she settled in France, in the town of Alès, where she gave birth to a baby boy.

“That’s when the anger, it went to my head” I got my papers in December 2016. And then nothing special happened. I wasn’t working and I was under pressure because I had to pay for my son’s [education]: I wanted him to go to school. My problem in Sicily was that I wasn’t working. Actually, I often went to work at the house of two women with whom I went to church. I’d leave early in the morning and I’d come in to do the cleaning at their house. One of them had a daughter who was a bit ill. I went there and I cleaned everywhere, from eight o’clock in the morning to five o’clock in the afternoon. I did eat at lunchtime, though. But she didn’t give me anything. The other one, she gave me 20 euros for the day. Fine, I had something to eat. At first, I thought I’d be staying in Italy, in the bush.7 Maybe I could get my papers there, and that way I could look for a job. But it was taking a long time, it was taking too long. Yes, we were bored. The garden, that was the men’s work. Some of the men in the camp would go to work in the morning, but the women never left [for work]. I only went to church. We went to Ragusa for an appointment, to go to hospital. There were even times when you’d be told you were going [to Ragusa], but in the end you didn’t. You stayed. I told the priest I was looking for a job, but he told me: “It’s hard, it’s hard.” That’s why one day I decided to come to France. I had family here in France: my mother’s cousin. But at first, I couldn’t go there—family issues. I didn’t want to impose. I’d called one day to tell them I was in Italy, and she’d immediately stopped me and said: “You’re staying there.

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Here in France, it’s hard, my husband is no longer working, and you, you want to place an additional burden on me!” And so on and so forth. But in Italy, I had no one anyway. At the centre, it had already been a year since I’d got my residence permit, and nothing changed. I had to show the newcomers around the centre for free because I understood the language a little, so I translated. Every time I’d ask: “Why won’t you get me an Italian ID card?” I was the only one who didn’t have it! They’d refuse, they’d tell me that they’d already requested my transfer and there was nothing more they could do. But I’d already been waiting in the camp for a year! Whenever I asked for an update, they told me off: I thought there was something fishy going on here. So I went to the social worker’s office, I went to see Virginia and I told her: “I have a child back home who’s not going to school. I have to work. If you hire me, at least I’ll earn a little bit of money at the end of the month. I take care of the centre a little bit, and you hire me, you give me a little something at the end of the month.” They told me: “No, we can’t hire you.” And on top of that, they were no longer paying us the monthly 75-euro allowance. They’d let four months slip by, and then they’d give you a month’s worth of pocket money. So I went to Ragusa to see Raimondo, the director. At first, he wouldn’t see me and speak with me. He told me to sort it out with the social worker, to go back to the centre. But I had travelled thirty kilometres [18.64 miles] to speak with him, and a friend had lent me the money to cover transport costs, so he had to see me. That’s when the anger, it went to my head. And when I got back to the centre, I packed my suitcase—a small suitcase—and I left everything behind. And I said I wanted to leave. In my mind, I didn’t know I was leaving for good. I told the social worker I was leaving for fifteen days—the maximum allowed. I left for Rome. It was in January 2018. I arrived at a large coach station; it was the first time I arrived there, I didn’t know the place. There were buses going to Spain, Paris, Poland… I left for Montpellier: I had my sister, who had settled in that region, in mind.

“I’ll never be able to forget this story” I got off in Montpellier and I called my little sister. She told me: “You’re too far away from me!” She’d been sent to Alès. She was staying in a shelter and she couldn’t help me. So I asked around and I called the 115 [emergency helpline].8

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They told me to take a tram with colours and flowers on it. They took me in, letting me stay in a church where people were taken care of—they slept there. You left at six o’clock in the morning and you came back at seven in the evening. It was an abandoned church building. There were French people working there, people helping out. There were mattresses: you said which spot was yours when you left in the morning, and you told them if you’d be coming back. You had to call 115 to reapply for a place. You’d tell them: “It’s me, I’m going to have to stay in the church tonight.” There was a bathroom, and they gave you something to eat in the evening. It was cold! The first day, when they told me to leave in the morning, I started crying, screaming. I thought I’d come to a place where I’d be able to rest, and they told me: “You’re leaving with your suitcases.” You couldn’t get some rest. If you didn’t call 115 on Mondays, if you forgot to reapply for a place, you couldn’t spend the night there anymore. The mistake I’d made was that I’d showed them my Italian papers, so they told me there was nothing they could do for me.9 But I said: “I’m not going back to Italy.” I spent the day on the streets; I had three suitcases and I spent my days in the city centre. I wasn’t on my own, and that’s what gave me some strength: there was a group of us. The police would leave you alone if you weren’t doing anything wrong. They went after those who smoked, who drank. I spent a month in Montpellier; I couldn’t stand it. I started begging on the streets. I told my little sister I was going to move to another city because I had this issue with my papers. There was another woman, and she came along. My little sister put up some of the money for the trip: I begged on the streets, and she gave me 50 euros. I arrived in Caen. I called my cousin. He came to pick me up. I got on well with his wife. I spent nearly a week with them; we were getting along. I prepared some African food, and then she came and told me: “What you’re preparing here, it stinks. I can’t stand you anymore: you talk too much on the phone. If you’re going to stay here, you have to pay.” She said that while my cousin wasn’t around. When he came home, I told him what his wife had said. He didn’t say anything. So I left—that very same day. I spent two days at Caen’s train station; I was sleeping there. I saw a Black man at the station and I asked him if he knew any charity organisation. Then, the organisation took me to hospital. They saw I was fine. They asked me where I was sleeping, and I said I was sleeping at the station. And that’s when they sent me to a hostel.

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I arrived at the hostel on 2 August 2018. At first, I didn’t like it. In Caen, even if you have problems, worries, there are a lot of people around. But at the same time, no one was looking after me there. I didn’t come looking for the city; I came looking for a place where I could position myself. At first, while I was at the hostel, I went to Caen every day. I took the train every day; I got fined several times. One day, the ticket collector told me: “Madam, I already gave you a fine the day before yesterday, what are you doing in Caen?” I said: “I’m going there to beg on the streets.” After that, whenever he saw me, he didn’t ask to see my ticket anymore. Now, I don’t go to Caen anymore: I do volunteer work, I go there with some girlfriends from the hostel, it keeps us really busy. We sort the items, we tidy up, we clean. Today, I’m no longer begging on the streets. I’ve cleared my head. If I don’t have [any money], I stay put. I’m not working, I have nothing, I’m not living in my own place, so I can’t spend or send money [home]. Otherwise I’ll go crazy. There are several steps to follow. My girlfriends from the centre, they went to the prefecture to apply for asylum, and they were issued with an OQTF [Obligation de quitter le territoire français] because their fingerprints had been taken in Italy.10 So I don’t want to risk it. The girls at the hostel, they’re nice, they’re fine, but at times they just lose it. It’s quite understandable. In the evening, the girls, they come to my room; we get along well, it’s nice. The next step is the papers. Papers before men. I’m not taking chances with men. I’ll never be able to forget this story. I got separated from my son as a result of all this. But if I’d stayed there, I could have died. It was best to leave. My son stayed with his father, but he [his father] constantly threatened him, as he was trying to find out where I was, and he’d hit him for it. My son was in a very difficult position with his father. The child was tired, weak. One day, my mother called me while I was in Italy. I told her: “You know I only have one child.” She said she did. I told her: “I’m begging you, take my son in.” She told me: “Your son has a father.” I told her I’d rather he was on the streets than with his father. And then, eventually, my son went to live with my mother. And my husband, now he knows I’m here. But now, he won’t come, it’s too late and, besides, he’s already old. My son had to drop out of school—there was no money. I try to send him money.

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Notes 1. The Dublin III Regulation, an EU law which was approved in June 2013 and came into force on 19 July 2013, establishes the criteria and mechanisms determining which state is responsible for examining a request for asylum submitted by a third-country national or a stateless person in an EU member state (European Union, 2013). Like previous Dublin regulations, it stipulates that the state in which an asylum seeker first applies for asylum and has his or her fingerprints taken on arrival (first country of entry) as part of Eurodac, the EU-wide fingerprint database, is designated as “the member state responsible” for processing, and thus either accepting or rejecting, such an application (in Julienne’s case, Italy); that an asylum seeker may not concurrently apply for asylum with a state other than “the member state responsible;” that if an asylum seeker is found to have lodged an asylum claim in another state or to be in another state without a valid residence document (in Julienne’s case, in France), a state may request that the member state deemed responsible (in Julienne’s case, Italy) “take back” that person, a procedure also known as “Dublin transfers.” However, if the transfer does not take place within six months after the “take back request” was accepted by “the member state responsible,” responsibility is transferred to the “requesting member state” (in Julienne’s case, from Italy to France). 2. Julienne’s account is reproduced here as a continuous text: except for a hiatus between the first round of interviews conducted in Italy and the second one that took place in France, breaks occurring between one interview and the next are not indicated. 3. Julienne means CFA francs, and 25,000 CFA francs come to more or less 40 euros. 4. Julienne is referring to a rural area outside the city. 5. Julienne is referring to the rural area where the accommodation centre in which she would be housed was located. 6. Julienne is referring to the bedroom in which she was staying at the accommodation centre and which she was sharing with another woman. 7. Julienne is referring to rural areas. 8. The 115 emergency telephone number is operated by the SAMU Social, a humanitarian service providing food, medical care, and shelter to homeless people in France, notably in cities. 9. See footnote no. 1. Julienne had first arrived in Italy, and her fingerprints had been taken in that country (first country of entry). She had, moreover, applied for asylum in Italy and had been granted a residence permit in Italy. In accordance with the Dublin III Regulation, the “member state responsible” for processing Julienne’s asylum claim, then, was Italy, and if the

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French authorities found her without a valid residence permit, she could be sent back to Italy following a “take back request,” also known as a “Dublin transfer.” 10. An OQTF (Obligation de quitter le territoire français, literally “Obligation to leave French territory”) is a non-enforced removal order issued by the prefecture, whereby a person whose application for a residence permit or asylum claim in France has been rejected, whose residence permit and/or visa has expired, or who has been found to have entered the country illegally and without valid residency status, is under legal obligation to leave France, voluntarily and by his or her own means, within thirty days after such a decision has been pronounced. By way of comparison with the British immigration enforcement system, an OQTF lies somewhere between a “voluntary return” (non-enforced departure) and a “removal order” or “notice of removal.”

References European Union. (2013). Regulation (EU) No 604/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining the Member State responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the Member States by a third-country national or a stateless person. http://data.europa.eu/eli/ reg/2013/604/oj Bourdieu, P. (1986). L’illusion biographique. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 62–63, 69–72. Sayad, A. (1999). La Double Absence : des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré. Seuil. Schmoll, C. (2019a). 2015. In R. Bertrand & P. Boucheron (Eds.), Faire musée d’une histoire commune : rapport de préfiguration de la nouvelle exposition permanente du Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (pp.  405–409). Seuil/MNHI. Schmoll, C. (2019b). De vive voix. Le parcours d’une exilée camerounaise. In R. Bertrand & P. Boucheron (Eds.), Faire musée d’une histoire commune : rapport de préfiguration de la nouvelle exposition permanente du Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration (pp. 77–78). Seuil/MNHI.

CHAPTER 3

The Long Journey of African Migrant Women

Like Julienne, many of the women whom I met in the southern margins of Europe told me the story of their journey spanning thousands of miles and taking months or even years. These first-person accounts raised several questions: why does one leave? How should one travel? What were the risks that had been anticipated and what were those encountered along the way? What were the biggest obstacles? And if one knew in advance that it would be a bitter and dangerous road, why leave nevertheless? In order to solve this puzzle, this chapter emphasises the complex motivations behind migrant women’s decision to leave, as opposed to a linear and simplistic view of migration as merely a passage from one point to another that is as part of a broader migration project entirely predetermined before departure and driven by a single and unique cause. It then traces the journey of these women until their arrival in Europe, describes the various forms of violence they experienced in the process and, in relation to such violence, assesses the role of institutional and political mechanisms, of gender and kinship structures, of community networks, and of the different intermediaries in charge of taking migrants across the border respectively (bearing in mind, however, that these various actors and mechanisms are, in fact, deeply intertwined).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Schmoll, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6_3

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Multiple Motivations for Leaving and Cumulative Violence Exposure The reasons behind women’s decision to leave are manifold, thus suggesting that we need to radically rethink the overly simplistic distinction between voluntary and forced migration, planned and unplanned migration. Motivations for migration should be placed on a continuum (Laacher, 2010) combining individual and family, political and economic, gendered and non-gendered factors, rather than construed as opposites. This approach contrasts sharply with political and media narratives, which tend to caricature the profile of migrants to Europe (see Smith, 2018). It is worth noting, for instance, that some of the women I met had not been in a bad situation, socio-economically speaking, when they had left. While some stated that they had fled drought, famine, poverty, or war, others had enjoyed material circumstances that could be characterised, as it were, as “decent”: they had been workers, shopkeepers, nurses, teachers, and students. Some women had gone to university, others had not. Their cases bear out the findings of many studies on migration: those women who set out to Europe are not the most deprived ones, in terms of either social or economic capital. Neither are they, however, those who are best equipped for this journey, as women in a better position are more likely to enter the EU on a visa, even though obtaining one has become increasingly difficult and expensive, if not altogether impossible given the socio-economic context most of these women come from.1 No journey is entirely planned in advance. Equally, none is completely improvised. We need, therefore, to take into account the different temporalities of decision-making, ranging from an action taken in haste to a closely reasoned examination of possible alternatives, from opportunities arising unexpectedly to carefully considered decisions long in the making. Moreover, we have to take into consideration the family and, more broadly, relational (e.g. the diaspora or the home village) contexts shaping migration, as well as the effect that both one’s network of acquaintances and the peer groups formed while travelling have on the nature and direction of these journeys. What sociology defines as a “migration project” is ultimately a complex and evolving entity, as sociologist Sylvie Mazzella (2014) writes: “Migration is a relatively ‘open’ experience as well as a process, in that individuals opt for multiple courses of action and reaction in response to a

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number of constraints, and that they develop cognitive skills as a result of different rationales for action and pragmatic strategies, thus enabling them to construct and verify reality. […] Individual intentionality is built neither in opposition to collective structures (states, networks, families, etc.) nor in successive stages […], but rather through co-production” (pp. 77–78; on the notion of migration project, see also Boyer, 2005). If there is indeed a migration project at the outset, it is constantly being reworked “en route.” A recent study carried out in France about migrant women accommodated in shelters shows that the more complex the migration journey, the greater the likelihood of being a victim of physical or sexual abuse on the way (Andro et al., 2019). Another key finding of this study, moreover, is that the women whose journey has been long and difficult, regardless of their country of origin, are often those who had already endured various forms of violence before their departure. There is, therefore, a form of cumulative violence exposure occurring along the migration route, which, sadly, does not end when migrants reach Europe. In keeping with this study, the oral testimonies that I collected referred to a combination of sexual abuse and other physical violence, moral and symbolic violence, gendered and non-gendered violence: indeed, Laacher (2010) has talked of a “continuum of violence.”

Blazing a Trail In the beginning, that is, at the time of departure, there is violence, everywhere. Naturally, this is particularly true of the most obvious cases of forced migration, those of women fleeing armed conflicts, civil wars, and political instability in Africa—not only Sudanese and Somalis, but also Cameroonians, Nigerians, Burkinabés from Ivory Coast and, more recently, from Burkina Faso, as well as Libyans or African residents in Libya. In Malta, I met many Somali women whose personal histories were intertwined with their country’s history of civil war, especially following the arrival of Al-Shabaab militias in Mogadishu.2 “I’m twenty years old, and all I’ve ever known of my country is war;” “Until two years ago, I was studying to be a nurse, but every time I crossed the street to go study, my family was afraid for my life,” these women stated. We know that in times of crisis, the social construction of warrior masculinities is based on gender violence: abduction and rape are wielded as a weapon to destroy the enemy and, moreover, used as a means to subdue

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civilians, and women suffer the consequences, in their very flesh, of such tactics. Indeed, Al-Shabaab militiamen hunt down separated or adulterous women; they abduct and marry single women, even extremely young ones. This is why there are teenage girls and divorced women on the roads, who all chose to leave the country rather than end up in the hands of militiamen: “The militias go after those who aren’t married first. Men use force to take you. If you’re married, it’s easier to escape this, but if you’re a young single girl, they can force you and take you away,” Fawzio told me. “I didn’t decide anything, I wanted to stay with my family, but the fighting was escalating. My father told me: ‘If you stay, the problems are going to get worse.’ He was afraid I’d be kidnapped. They take unmarried women away and they rape them. The militias had already kidnapped him, and then they’d released him because we’d paid. He was scared for me. So was my mother. My father gave me money, enough to go to Ethiopia, Sudan, Libya. And then, from Libya onwards, it was my aunt, who lives in Minneapolis, who sent me money,” Hani recounted. Some women had lost their closest relatives. The imprisonment or death of their spouse had sometimes been what had triggered the decision to leave. Indeed, when they become widows, women not only assume the responsibility of being the main breadwinner in the family, but also become more likely to be abducted or forced into marriage, all of which leads them to leave their home country. The departure had often taken place unexpectedly and in great haste, and many women had to abruptly flee Somalia, leaving behind entire families. The separation had been brutal: “You leave: if you’re lucky, you’re told that your family has been kept out of harm’s way. But in most cases, something happened: you no longer know where your children are, they’ve been taken hostage, violent events have occurred,” seventeen-­ year-­old Faduma related. “In 2001, I was kidnapped by the militias along with other women from the neighbourhood, including my sister-in-law. I haven’t had any news from my eight children since. My family probably believes me dead. My sister-in-law, she disappeared one day. I think they killed her.” Often the parents themselves had made their daughters leave: “One day, they came into our home, they wanted to rape me,” Jijo, who was saved by her grandmother, recalled. “She told me to run away. She gave me all the cash she had. I didn’t even have time to kiss my children goodbye.” Other women had stayed in touch with their children and hoped to be reunited with them one day. Fara’s parents, husband, sister, and

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eight-month-old baby were killed in 2002 after a mortar shell landed on their house. In 2008, she decided to flee Somalia, leaving behind three children, with whom she had lost contact anyway. Another of her children, who was then fourteen years old and whom she had been able to place in the care of a friend, lived in England. She had not seen him for seven years, but hoped to be able to join him at some point. For now, she called him regularly. Despite the tragedies of war and migration, family solidarity endures and remains strong, taking long-distance forms and going both ways. Women enlist the help of richer “uncles” and “aunts” to fund their migration project and, in return, they send remittances to their relatives as soon as they could afford it. For instance, two of Sara’s brothers lived in UN camps in Kenya and Yemen respectively, and she tried to save on the monthly asylum seeker allowance (130 euros) that she received to send them a little money. Even in a war situation, there can be other reasons behind the decision to leave. Some Somali women, for instance, mentioned a plan for an arranged marriage that they had run away from, or their family’s rejection of their fiancé. Family violence, Mumtaas explained, was indeed what had driven her into exile: “I got married, but our fathers were against us. My father wanted to kill me. So, with my husband, we took to the road.” Although most of the women I met had set off on their journey alone or, at any rate, without a male companion, it would be a mistake to assume that migration is an individual or individualistic decision, made without consideration of the immediate family circle. On the contrary, migration is usually laden with family expectations and bound up with collective aspirations. When I began my fieldwork research in Malta, I wondered indeed that all the Somali women I came across were the eldest daughters of the family. Being the oldest, they had obviously been more at risk of violence from Al-Shabaab militias than their other female siblings. But it also happens that the eldest are often the ones who are expected to bear the burden of migration, to enter what sociologist Saskia Sassen (2000) has called the “alternative circuits of survival” (p.  515), in which migrant women play a critical role. Such a “birthright” is actually not specific to Somali women and, indeed, I would encounter it in most of the other groups. The eldest shoulder the responsibility for carrying out migration strategies that will hopefully ensure the survival of the entire household, and of their siblings especially. The women I met were charged with the onerous duty of “blazing a trail”: “My brothers and sisters will come here just like I did,

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for sure. But they won’t take the same route, it’s too dangerous for them. I did it because I’m the eldest.” Even in the most extreme situations, then, there is an important family and gendered aspect to motivations for leaving. To send the eldest daughters of the family on the road is, provided that the migration project is successful, to acquire some “legal capital,” the hope being that, after they have settled in Europe, they might be able to get their relatives to come as well. Migrants granted refugee status are, indeed, automatically entitled to family reunification. As we shall see in the next chapter, one of the main reasons that the women I met in Malta had no desire to stay long on the island was this particular issue—the impossibility of having their family members join them through family reunification, given how difficult it was, and still is, to obtain refugee status in Malta.

Leaving War-Torn Libya Among the women whom I met in Malta and Italy, several had fled the Libyan civil war. Some of them had been living in Libya and, until the outbreak of hostilities in 2011, had not especially wanted to go to Europe. It should be noted that Libya was, and still is despite the ongoing civil war, one of the major immigration countries on the African continent (see Bensaâd, 2012; Morone, 2018). These women had often worked as housemaids, and it had not been uncommon for them to be kept locked up and tortured by their employers. Some had never been paid and had been treated as slaves. “I hate Libyans, they’re racist. If they run into you in the street, they spit at you, they tell you ‘Go back to your country.’ The only thing they know how to do is ask for money.” “It’s very hard to live in Libya, you’re constantly terrified: that’s why I wanted to leave.” “I worked for a family who gave me $200 for ten months [worth of work]. But sometimes the employers wouldn’t pay me: they’d say that if I complained, they’d call the police.” Such were the experiences that these women related. Besides the growing criminalisation of African people in Libya, the abuse which migrant women were subjected to, as well as the racist bullying and violence targeting them both in homes and in public places, seemed to have gotten worse over the 2000s (Morone, 2018). After 2011, the events recorded in these first-person accounts were more and more intense and violent: “Black people” had been hunted down and accused of being mercenaries in the pay of this faction or that party. Moreover, while

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only a few of the women I met before the civil war had been raped, rape had become systematic in Libya since 2011. I met several of these “women from Libya” at the detention centre of Ponte Galeria, near Rome (Italy). Dalila, for instance, came from the city of Beni Mellal in Morocco, she had lived in Libya for about ten years and had met there her Egyptian husband, Omar, who had stayed behind and whom she no longer heard from. Faouzia and Fatiha, both also Moroccan, had been neighbours in Libya and had left the country following a military offensive in their neighbourhood in 2011. Faouzia had been raped and brutally tortured by a group of some twenty men: “They murdered my daughter and my husband right in front of me.” Fatiha, too, had lost her family in the war. After wandering around Tripoli for a long while, she had eventually found her friend in a hospital and, upon reuniting with her, had told her: “You’re leaving with me.” The two women huddled together and held hands while they recounted their journey from comfort to chaos. One could sense that, provided they did not end up separated as a result of legal decision, and as long as seeing the horrors of the past reflected in the eyes of the other did not become unbearable, they would not abandon each other on the road. When I met them locked up in the detention centre, I was told that their asylum claims were deemed flimsy since Morocco, from which they hailed, was considered a safe country. Yet they would rather die, they declared, than endure the shame of returning home “empty-handed” and, moreover, carrying the heavy burden of their traumatic experience. And indeed, there were many such women from the Maghreb and sub-­ Saharan Africa who were forced to leave Libya in a hurry. In that country, some had been barely scraping by and had suffered the wrath of demanding and brutal employers, but others had had a good situation before the war. Dina and Dawit, an Ethiopian couple whom I met in Malta, had been living for four years in Zaouia, where Dawit taught English, when the civil war drove them into exile: “The rebels killed several of our friends, and the roads to Tunisia were closed off.” They had no choice but to take to the sea along with their one-year-old baby boy. Loved ones had been lost, if not to war, to hasty departures. Halima, a Moroccan woman who had been living in Libya and had arrived in Italy with her eight-year-old son, told me that she had no idea where her husband was. Azzeza, a Somali, had lost her husband shortly before the boat sailed. Froweni, a young Eritrean aged nineteen, knew that hers had perished at sea: “I left Eritrea with my husband. We travelled across the desert

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to Libya, where we stayed for a few months to raise money for the crossing. I was five months pregnant when we found a boat, but we couldn’t go on board together. My husband’s boat never made it. I’m here all by myself, and my baby’s due soon.” Other women had kept in contact with their husbands, but had not been able to join them. Such was the case of Nura, also from Eritrea, and her husband, who had had to take different boats and thus had gone their separate ways: she had disembarked in Malta and therefore had had to apply for asylum there, whereas he had landed in Sicily and, as it had proved impossible for his wife to join him, he had decided to press on alone, travelling to England via France. In these cases, family reunification is theoretically and legally possible, provided that one is able to produce a marriage certificate or similar document. But as we shall see later, in practice, following this type of administrative procedure is extremely complex, costly, and time-consuming, which is why families are rarely reunited, or only long after their arrival in Europe.

Fleeing Eritrea On 3 October 2013, a Libyan ship that had sailed from Misrata (Libya), with the majority of the passengers being Eritrean nationals, capsized a few miles from the Sicilian coast, off the island of Lampedusa: 366 people perished at sea, and there were only 155 survivors (see the introduction to this volume in Chap. 1). On 25 October 2013, a few weeks after the shipwreck, a delegation staged a demonstration in Rome in front of the Palazzo Montecitorio, the seat of the Chamber of Deputies, with banners reading “Open your eyes,” “Shame on the whole world,” and “The only one responsible for the Lampedusa tragedy is the Afwerki regime.” Indeed, behind the Lampedusa disaster, another, more distant, tragedy was unfolding—that of Eritrea, sometimes dubbed “East Africa’s North Korea.” President Isaias Afwerki has ruled Eritrea with an iron fist since 1993, and the small Horn of Africa country has been consistently trailing at the bottom of international rankings for political freedoms and human rights: lack of judicial independence, ban on political parties, ever-increasing number of prisoners, steady rise of various forms of arbitrary arrest and detention, extremely limited and government-controlled Internet access, travel ban. Since 2003, all young Eritreans must perform compulsory national service, including military service, for an indefinite period or face imprisonment. Any attempt to avoid this form of forced labour by fleeing

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the country is punishable by death. Although the law states that the minimum age for conscription is eighteen, underage students are also forced to undergo such military training at the Sawa camp and are, moreover, subjected to harsh discipline and gruelling conditions. Female conscripts, in particular, are very badly mistreated during their military service. Several Eritrean women whom I met in Malta and Italy told me of the physical abuse and torture they had suffered while trying to escape this system, which has driven thousands of people into exile (Human Rights Watch, 2009a). Although these women could be very forthcoming about the violence they had endured during their journey, in Sudan and Libya, I usually found it difficult, however, to broach the subject of what they had experienced in their home country: indeed, as a recent report by Amnesty International (2019) has shown, the long arm of the regime’s surveillance system reaches into Europe (see also Vincent, 2011). There are many supporters of the Eritrean government abroad, and therefore the fear of informers, nicknamed “mosquitoes,” is anything but groundless (Vincent, 2011). In order to silence those who would dare criticise the regime, the government encourages its supporters to harass, intimidate and even assault dissidents, including their families who have stayed behind in Eritrea. Today, roughly one fifth of the Eritrean population lives abroad, and the outflow of Eritrean migrants increased significantly during the 2010s: it is now estimated that some 5000 to 10,000 people leave Eritrea every month (Jeangène Vilmer & Gouéry, 2015). Neighbouring Sudan, Yemen and Ethiopia are the main receiving countries (Thiollet, 2018), as those migrants who manage to reach Europe are but a minority in the wider Eritrean diaspora. Between 2009 and 2018, 182,000 Eritrean nationals claimed asylum in the EU, with the number peaking at about 35,000 per year in 2014 and 2016 (figures sourced from Eurostat). Women accounted for around 30% of Eritrean asylum seekers. I will return to this issue later in order to examine in further detail the specificity of Eritrean women’s trajectories as well as the reception that they encounter on their arrival in Europe.

Finding One’s Place In contrast to those women and families fleeing war, authoritarian regimes or simply political turmoil, others, whether they are single or wives and mothers, leave “merely” with a view to improving their humble situation.

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They want to find their place in the world, to “position” themselves, as Julienne put it in the second chapter of this volume. The reasons behind women’s decision to leave are never purely and exclusively economic: these economic motivations are bound up with political ones in the broad sense of the term, be they issues related to the position of women in society in their countries of origin or the quest for recognition and autonomy (for a similar perspective regarding men, see Tîmera, 2001). In sub-Saharan Africa, for many women gender-based violence and discrimination—arranged marriages taking place before the age of majority (the age of marriage for women is still very low in countries such as Cameroon and Somalia) and sometimes with an older spouse, polygamy, being at risk of female genital mutilation, performed on either these women or their daughters, domestic violence, and multifaceted abuse resulting from nonconforming sexuality choices, notably premarital sex and sex outside of marriage, as well as LGBTQ+ sexual orientations—are often the key factors influencing the decision to leave, even though such a decision may be reached long after the violence in question first occurred (see the scholarship produced by the research teams at the Institut national d’études démographiques: Hertrich, 2017; Locoh & Ouadah-Bedidi, 2014). Julienne’s story as told in the previous chapter shows indeed that the consequences of her arranged marriage with an alcoholic and much older man led her to suddenly run away ten years later, following a particularly traumatic event as well as her encounter with an intermediary, namely a smuggler. Not all arranged marriages, it should be stressed, inevitably entail violence. However, an arranged marriage can be a factor in increasing vulnerability, creating as it does asymmetrical relations. Besides, an arranged marriage is not necessarily a forced marriage, although in Julienne’s case, the role that coercion and family violence played in making the wedding happen is obvious enough. Some women leave because they have become socially isolated and impoverished as a result of marital choices that are frowned upon in their community, others because their married life has drawn condemnation, leading them to fear for their safety. Others still are driven to emigrate by the social stigma attached to being single, widowed or divorced. There are more and more single women in sending countries for a variety of reasons, including the erosion of the middle class, urbanisation, longer duration of education, etc. (Tabutin & Schoumaker, 2004). In many societies, the sexual life (real or imagined) of single women remains a taboo subject. Such is especially the case in the Maghreb, a region that has undergone

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dramatic changes over the past decades: declining fertility rates, later age of marriage for women, and extended period of single life. The problem is that these demographic trends have not led to a concomitant relaxation of moral and social norms regarding women. These women, seen as supernumerary and stigmatised, are reminiscent of the figure of the Pariah as described by political theorist Eleni Varikas (2003), which encompasses all those who are “excluded from within.” Having fallen into disrepute, these women are sometimes driven to leave their country, and migration then becomes a way of removing the stigma. Indeed, as Varikas pointed out, “sexuality is a focal point in the creation of pariahs […], a key site for the implementation of the classifying logic of modern societies, dictating who is in, who is out, who is credible, who is not credible, who is moral, who is dangerous, who is not dangerous, who is pure, who is impure” (Varikas & Clair, 2012). All in all, the situation of single women, as a borderline case, presents something of a paradox: the status of women in their countries of origin may improve in some respects, thus evolving towards some form of emancipation, but for them this, in turn, means losing the place they were previously assigned in those societies. As a result, these women become somehow superfluous and troublesome, they are barely tolerated and redundant, and eventually they leave. The issue of “surplus women,” and the resulting predicament for these women, seems to be the common denominator in various types of female migration, and there are, indeed, similar situations in other societies, for instance in China and in Latin America. In China, for example, those who have achieved a measure of social success, in terms of their career or education, but remain unmarried and, in some cases, choose to emigrate, are called sheng nu or “leftover women” (Fincher, 2014).

What Does “Mixed” Stand for in “Mixed Migration”? While some women have fled the violence visited upon them by their husbands or by war, they might also say that they have come to Europe to join their neighbours and friends, to make a living and escape poverty, or to find better job opportunities. For migration scholars, there is nothing new about this: for several decades now, and as evidenced by a large body of

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literature, a growing number of scholars have recognised that migrants have mixed motivations for moving, a fact that is sometimes at odds with the approach taken by international law. Although, in most cases, there is a primary reason for leaving, the various motives behind migration are intertwined. Accordingly, scholars talk of a continuum of experience between forced and voluntary migration in order to show that any attempt to draw a rigid distinction between these two categories is problematic (see Richmond, 1993; Koser, 2001; Castles, 2007; Koser & Martin, 2011; Zetter, 2015; Jureidini & Reda, 2017; Crawley & Skleparis, 2018; Erdal & Oeppen, 2018) and, moreover, to emphasise that one may very well be fleeing persecution and still be looking for opportunities—an unbearable truth for the state, tasked as it is with managing migration. Indeed, as Michel Agier (2008) has observed, for both state authorities and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as well as NGOs, the very idea and existence of “the active refugee is a scandalous proposition: at best, he or she can seek the right to live outside the law” (p. 223). From the moment that the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereinafter Geneva Convention) and the subsequent 1967 Protocol established the international regime providing for and governing the right of asylum, the distinction between forced migration, motivated by the threat of persecution, and voluntary migration was set in stone. Under the Geneva Convention (art. 1, para. A2; see United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2010), a “refugee” is defined as any person who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” A sharp line, therefore, was drawn between those who may require international protection under the Geneva Convention, and the others. However, the identification of cases falling within the category of forced migration presented more and more operational problems over the years for the organisations responsible for processing asylum claims and implementing migration control, not least because those individuals forced to move actually used the same routes as those choosing to do so. It was against this backdrop that the notion of “mixed migration” was first used by UNHCR and IOM. Initially, a rather broad and analytical understanding of the notion prevailed: “mixed migration” was used to refer to

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both the mixed motivations behind migrants’ decision to leave and the mixed flows occurring on migration routes. As such, this interpretation was somewhat consistent with the scholarly approach to these issues: indeed, Migration Studies researchers would sometimes find the neat distinction between forced and voluntary migration theoretically unsatisfactory and empirically insufficient when examining migration trajectories in depth. But very quickly, the second, more restrictive, meaning (“mixed flows”) took precedence over the first one (“mixed motivations”), as the concept thus construed was fundamentally easier to make operational in the context of migration management. Distinguishing between various types of flows has, indeed, made it possible to devise and implement a whole set of operations to sort and separate what is recognised as forced, and thus legitimate, migration, on the one hand, from what is considered voluntary and economic, hence illegitimate, migration, on the other hand (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018; Thiollet et al. 2024). The category of “mixed flows” is a performative one: a policy term that is systematically used by UNHCR, the idea has also become common sense and, indeed, it has gained currency among politicians and journalists alike. As such, it is meant, in the name of the defence of the right of asylum, to allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff, thus establishing the fiction that there is such a thing as a clear boundary between forced and voluntary migration, refugees and non-refugees. Such a distinction fuels a discourse—one may even speak of a moral panic—that is particularly widespread among politicians as well as the officials of asylum institutions, from the lowest to the highest level of migration policy-making (see Brice, 2019): in order to save the European asylum regime, we must discriminate between those who are genuine refugees and those who are not—never mind that the resulting migration policy is unfair.

Vulnerabilities: Asylum Claims and Violence Experienced en Route Another way of looking at the tenuous (and unstable) distinction between forced and voluntary migration is to examine how the authorities and institutions deciding asylum claims have dealt with cases of forced migration. For instance, asylum claims from Eritrean nationals have been adjudicated very differently across the EU, depending on the country and the period under consideration, although to date, no meaningful change in

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Eritrea’s political situation may warrant such different decision outcomes (Scalettaris, 2009). The refusal rate for these asylum applications was for a long time particularly high, and it was only as a result of increased public awareness following the (limited) media coverage of the situation in Eritrea that this rate fell. Likewise, there have been many cases of refoulement and expulsion of Eritrean individuals in recent European history. For example, between September and October 2002, Malta deported 220 people, who would later be detained and tortured in the Adi Abeto military prison in Eritrea. Italy, too, sent Eritrean nationals back to Libya on several occasions. Besides such tragic cases of refoulement at sea and deportation (Human Rights Watch, 2009a; Human Rights Watch, 2015), there have been other worrisome events: the presence of emissaries of the Afwerki regime in reception centres and detention centres, as well as the Eritrean ambassador’s attendance at the ceremony organised in Agrigento (Sicily, Italy) to commemorate the victims of the 3 October 2013 shipwreck off Lampedusa,3 which reportedly allowed him to record the identity of those individuals who had fled the country. This incident, which was denounced by the shipwreck survivors accordingly, also put their families still in Eritrea at risk, especially given that to this day, the government expects all Eritreans residing abroad to pay a 2% income tax and, should a refugee or expatriate fail to make such payment, his or her relatives may be arrested and imprisoned. Even today, some European states evidently choose to remain blind to Eritrea’s political and human rights situation, so much so that one could even speak of cynicism. In many EU countries, the approval rate for asylum applicants from Eritrea has increased, but the refoulement and deportation of Eritrean nationals continue nonetheless in flagrant violation of international obligations under the Geneva Convention. More importantly, the externalisation of migration control has had tragic consequences for Eritrean exiles: many Eritreans were forced to stay in Libya, in an ever-­ worsening situation, as a result of the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding (2017) and the creation of a Libyan Search and Rescue Region (SRR) in the Mediterranean Sea, and later the Italian government’s decision to close Italian ports (2018) at the instigation of Matteo Salvini, then Minister of Interior. At the same time, relations between Eritrea, neighbouring states and the EU thawed, especially with the Khartoum Process, which was launched in Rome in 2014 and established a framework for dialogue and

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cooperation between African countries and EU member states with a view to stemming migration flows. In 2017, the European Commission approved a €13-million project designed to reduce emigration by supporting youth employment, job creation, and vocational training activities in Eritrea (Human Rights Watch, 2019, p. 77). The EU’s improved relations with President Afwerki have been achieved at the cost of the criminalisation of migration, and Eritreans are bearing the brunt of such measures. Sudan, meanwhile, received substantial EU funding as part of the very same Khartoum Process, thus allowing then President Omar al-­ Bashir to further restructure and formalise the Janjaweed militias by integrating them, including most of their leaders, into the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). RSF were deployed to patrol the borders with Libya and Eritrea and to combat “trafficking in human beings,” “smuggling of migrants,” and “irregular migration” in accordance with the Rome Declaration (Declaration of the Ministerial Conference of the Khartoum Process, 2014): President al-Bashir brutally cracked down on the Eritrean, Somali and Ethiopian migrants transiting Sudan, as well as on Sudanese displaced persons in Darfur (Prestianni, 2018). It should be noted that many situations of vulnerability or abuse that migrants, in particular persons coming from places deemed safe countries or unaccompanied minors have experienced do not fit the eligibility criteria for asylum. Likewise, the violence that migrants have been subjected to on their way to Europe is seldom taken into account in the asylum and refugee determination process. Yet such violence is a foundational experience and, along with other factors, it makes each of these people, including those who have left their country for primarily economic reasons, an exile. From the desert to the sea, the journey sometimes lasts many years. Women gave an emotional and sensory account of their experience. Some had left with their children: the journey had been all the harder, but occasionally, the presence of their children had protected them from certain forms of violence. Others had set out alone and, if they had children, had left them in the care of relatives (parents, sisters, and aunts). But whichever route one takes, and however lonely one feels, one never travels alone. Firstly, as the journey progresses, migrant women make the acquaintance of many people: not only fellow travellers, who can play a crucial role as they relay information or provide mutual assistance, but also smugglers (both men and women), who may steal from these women, betray them, or force them into prostitution as a means of paying for their

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passage (such a relationship was depicted in the 2014 film Hope by Boris Lojkine). Several of the women I met had relied on men acting as protectors. Such protection had sometimes been traded for sexual favours, but in other cases, these relationships had blossomed into “true love” or friendship along the way. Moreover, women suffer blackmail and sexual abuse at the hands of police officers, soldiers, border guards, and “road cutters” (namely highwaymen). Women have countless unpleasant encounters with the wrong kind of people along the way. Indeed, until recently, the Eritrean women one would come across in the EU had often been abducted and tortured in the Sinai. During their long journey, migrant women contact their relatives and friends when possible to give their whereabouts, tell them where things stand, or ask for money. They rely extensively on hawala and diasporic networks to fund their travels from one stage of the journey to the next.4 In the case of Somali women, the diaspora in the United States is often called on to help. Some women prostitute themselves along the way to pay for the rest the journey. For those who come from West Africa, a stopover in Tamanrasset (Algeria) is often an opportunity to earn a little money before setting off again.

Perilous Land Journeys The journey across Africa is costly, long, spanning as it does anything from several months to several years, and dangerous (Schapendonk & Steel, 2014). The nightmare of the desert only compares with that which is to come, the Mediterranean Sea—hunger, thirst, exhaustion, the loss of one’s travel companions. Every border crossing, every checkpoint is risky. Two particularly important stages of the journey stand out: Libya and the Mediterranean Sea, both having a significant impact on migrants’ personal experiences of the journey, given the violence that migrants suffer and the ever-looming presence of death in these two places. An event that occurred in 2009 illustrates the revulsion that migrants, both men and women, feel towards Libya. On 30 August 2009, a boat coming from Tripoli and carrying 75 people reached Capo Passero (Sicily, Italy). The passengers, including fifteen women and three minors, were intercepted at sea, transferred to a Guardia di Finanza ship, and forcibly returned to Libya. On the return journey, they stated that they would rather go back to the chaos of war in Somalia than to Libyan prisons. Upon arrival in Libya, men and women were separated and moved to detention centres

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(for an overview of the various detention centres, both public and private, formal and informal, that existed in Libya in the late 2000s, see Human Rights Watch, 2009b). Interdicting boats and pushing them back to Libya means sending their passengers back to hell, to a country that does not recognise the Geneva Convention and systematically practices torture. Sadly, that incident was but one of many instances of refoulement, both at sea and at airports, committed by Italy during the period of friendship between then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (the 2008 “Friendship Pact” was suspended in February 2011, following the outbreak of hostilities and the civil war).5 For all the women whom I met, often their most vivid, most painful recollections were of Libya (Ahmed, 1999; Jesuit Refugee Service Malta [JRSM], 2009; JRSM & UNHCR, 2008; Schafer, 2002). Some would talk about it and felt the need to tell the same story over and over again, as though trying to make sense of it and to banish it at once. I was then struck by the accuracy of details, dates, and names of places in their accounts, as if these women had to establish and capture these events, to testify so as to leave a record of the horrors they had experienced. Others would simply give me a short and allusive response, just offering sentences along the lines of “if only you knew.” Given the stigma attached to rape, women often downplayed the abuse that they had suffered. At times, I could discern the unspeakable in their gaze or their silence. On other occasions, they would relate the whole story, sometimes crying, sometimes speaking in a mechanical and detached tone of voice. Some women ended their account by saying: “Now that you are putting it in writing, I never want to talk about Libya again.” Some Somali women, who were of the Muslim faith, told me that they had been stunned when they had found out how Black people were treated in Libya. They made reference to the concept of Dar al-Islam, to the Muslim world understood as an area of solidarity, to emphasise how shocked they had been that belonging to the same religion had had no bearing whatsoever on the way Libyans had behaved towards them. Indeed, testimonies about Libya from as early as the 2000s have described migrants being detained for extended periods of time, held against their will for ransom, undergoing torture as well as surgical operations without anaesthesia, and being kept in overcrowded cells with very little food and drinking water. The only way to get out of prison, then, was to pay up—a bribe to be released from custody could fetch as much as $1000. Once free, however, migrants still risked being re-arrested, and the

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nightmare of the ransom and bribing process could start all over again. Some women had been driven back to the desert by their jailers, sometimes even as far as the other side of the Libyan border. Tripoli, Kufra, Benghazi: Sara, a young Somali woman whom I met in Malta, had been through the detention facilities in these cities. After spending several years wandering from one place to another, she had finally been able to take to the sea. She had been locked up in a small cell, along with tens of other people. It had only been thanks to the help of a cousin living in the United States that she had been able to pay bribes and, after many long weeks of detention and torture, to walk out of prison. Both my fieldwork findings and NGO reports show that many of the women who travel through Libya later continue on their way pregnant, thus bearing the indelible mark of their journey through this country (Quagliarello, 2019).6 Mona, a 25-year-old Somali who had been pregnant when she had reached Malta, was holding her 18-month-old baby in her arms: she told me that she would rather die than see the father of her child again. Some women choose to have a contraceptive implant inserted before they leave in order to avoid an unwanted pregnancy in Sudan or Libya.

When Knowledge Is Not Power: Being Aware of the Dangers of Travel The case of women having a contraceptive implant inserted prior to their departure begs the question: what do they really know of the conditions of the journey and of the destination countries before they leave? Are they aware of what they will be exposing themselves to? In order to answer this question, we must first dismiss the assumption that Europe is these women’s only prospect when they set out on their journey. With respect to migrant women from West Africa, and as evidenced by Julienne’s account (see Chap. 2), the migration journey is first and foremost African in scope and direction—Mali, Ivory Coast, Niger, Nigeria, or North Africa. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, many of the women I met in Italy and Malta had settled in Libya and, despite the mistreatment they had endured, had not considered going to Europe until the outbreak of the civil war. Whether migrants anticipate the risks attendant on migration is therefore a complex question, since the decision to undertake the perilous journey through the desert and Libya, and then across the

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Mediterranean Sea, is not necessarily one that they make in advance, far from it. The mixed motivations behind migrants’ decision to leave change as the journey progresses and regional instability occurs, as abuse takes place and new acquaintances are made. The dangers of migration cannot, therefore, be fully anticipated. Nevertheless, all the women I met had known beforehand some of the risks that they could and would face: most of them had had a television set at home; they had been in the habit of using the Internet and thus had been attuned to the noise of the world; and they had often seen pictures online of the way foreigners were treated in Libya or in Europe, as well as of people lost at sea.7 Besides, both this media coverage and the resulting anticipation of the risks attendant on migration discourage many women from leaving and, indeed, there are fewer women than men embarking on this journey (Belloni et al., 2018). In the 1970s, Abdelmalek Sayad (1975), writing about the Algerian exile, spoke of “the collective ignorance of the objective truth pertaining to emigration, which the entire group strives to maintain (emigrants cherry-picking the information that they report when they visit their home country; former emigrants embellishing the memories that they have of France; potential future emigrants projecting onto ‘France’ their most unrealistic aspirations, etc.)” (p. 66). Today, the “migration lie,” as then described by Sayad, is cracking and peeling: the media, especially television and social media, have exposed it as such. Such knowledge is naturally imprecise, especially where the EU is concerned: to this day, those men and women deciding to emigrate still believe—rightly or wrongly, depending on the circumstances at the time of departure and arrival—that, once the obstacles of the journey have been overcome, the situation will be far easier there. “In Europe, even the poor go the supermarket” (ActionAid & BeFree, 2018), and “it’s worth taking the risk,” I heard many times, but “there is a great deal of uncertainty” (for a concurring analysis, see Pian, 2017). The idea that the European continent provides security is, above all else, what makes it so attractive. Europe is that place where, while bad things can still happen, no serious harm will befall you. It seems, then, that the problem for women is not necessarily whether they know what awaits them, even though such knowledge is always incomplete and fantasised and, moreover, does not result from direct experience. Indeed, this is probably where IOM, whose anti-migration activities are, in large part, based on public information and awareness

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campaigns on the risks of migration specifically targeting women, falls short of the mark (Andrijasevic & Walters, 2011). Besides, women often do not have much to lose. While the journey may be long, the sweet promise of new horizons is hard to resist. There is something here of a drive for autonomy that government and institutional schemes to deter migrants from leaving and to immobilise them can hardly contain. Women’s migration trajectories, as they experience them, are defined by this very tension between “mortification,” “humiliation,” “inhumane treatment,” “degradation,” on the one hand, and “good luck,” “adventure,” “destiny,” on the other hand—or in any case, this is how they were described in these women’s accounts in which phrases that are actually antonymous were juxtaposed (for a similar analysis focusing on sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco and the Canary Islands, see Pian, 2017). In some cases, migratory knowledge can become real power, and this is not the least of the promises held by migration. Indeed, one hopes to someday be able to take advantage of the symbolic, economic, and legal resources accumulated during one’s experience of migration, to benefit from these resources or to share them with others. There is also, and in spite of everything, a myth of emigration that continues to be perpetuated through social media and in which women, in turn, actively participate, as I have observed by looking at the online profiles and exchanges through which they stage themselves. Abdelmalek Sayad’s argument remains valid in this respect, as social media play an ambiguous role, being used as they are to document the horrors of one’s journey, but also to create a record of one’s successful migration project. I will return to this issue later in Chap. 6. Lastly, there is one final important point to consider. The reason that one presses on despite everything is also that, once one has embarked on this journey, it is very difficult to contemplate turning back. This is generally true of all types of migration, but even more so in the case of women who are penniless, who have been abused, who have been raped, especially when they are with child—the ultimate disgrace—as a result of these rapes. To have lost one’s dignity and physical integrity, to have failed to complete one’s migration project, to be unable to repay the debt that one has incurred: these are all so many obstacles preventing a woman from returning to her home country.

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The Sea Crossing For those women fleeing the Libyan inferno, crossing the Mediterranean Sea is not a decision made lightly. The price varies widely, but it can reach up to $1000 or 1200. As I conducted my fieldwork, I came across an increasing number of women who had not paid for the sea crossing. To this day, the circumstances that had led them to be given free passage are not entirely clear to me, but I found that in many instances, they had been raped before they left. Such was, indeed, the explanation that several NGO workers I met in Sicily (Italy) and in Malta offered: the crossing had been considered already paid for by the prostitution of these women prior to their departure, which could go on for several weeks. Others had had to pay back their passage upon their arrival by way of various forms of exploitation, usually of a sexual nature. But for other women, who had not suffered such abuse, the mystery remains. The sea crossing is a true turning point in the journey of migrant women. Women told me that the success of the journey had been a matter of sheer luck or divine will: various sensations and emotions, conveyed through words such as hunger, heat, thirst, fear, cold, and anxiety, ran through their descriptions of the passage. References to overcrowded boats, violent abuse occurring aboard, the bad weather, and the whims of the sea were interspersed throughout their accounts of the crossing: “While I was on the boat, the sea became wild: we got really scared;” “The sea was very rough, several women fell into the water;” “The journey took five days instead of two as originally planned, it was very hard, people were very afraid.” Several women, who had made the Mediterranean crossing together on the same boat, related the following anecdote: “There were over one hundred people on the boat. Some African men—Nigerians—wanted to dump us, the Somali women, into the water. There was a big fight, but in the end, we all stayed on the boat. When the Maltese coast guard arrived, the Nigerians asked: ‘We’re in Italy, here?’ When they found out it was Malta, they left us, the Somali women, with the coast guard and they took off with the boat to Sicily. As for us, we stayed in Malta.” This story suggests that, even in the most extreme situations, some people have more autonomy than others and are better organised. Compared to the Somali women, the Nigerians probably had other resources available to them, and it is likely that they were expected somewhere in Italy. Or another possibility is that, unlike the other passengers, they were aware of the fate awaiting

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them in Malta, a country whose particular case will be examined in the next chapter, and therefore opted to head for Sicily instead. This anecdote should not, however, lead us to believe that boat passengers actually know where they are going: “Malta or Italy, it’s a matter of luck, not of choice,” Dalila, a Somali woman who had arrived in Malta in 2008, stated. She went on to say: “While I was on the boat, I knew that I was going to Europe, but I didn’t know where exactly. And then, I can’t tell you about the time when I got to Europe, because at first, I was in hospital, in a coma. When they told me I was in Malta, I said ‘OK, that’s fine.’ I couldn’t choose anyway.” The duration of the sea crossing varies considerably. Unlike the journey through Libya, it only takes a few days, sometimes even a few hours, but the wait while on board is always fraught with anxiety. Time had gone very slowly on the boat, especially for those women accompanied by their children, such as Djuma, an Eritrean travelling with her one-year-old twins: “We left Libya in a hurry [in April 2011], because hundreds of Africans had died, killed by the rebels who thought we were mercenaries in Gaddafi’s pocket. With my husband and my twins, we got on a boat. We drifted for ten days; a helicopter flew by and didn’t stop; a NATO ship spotted us, but it didn’t raise the alarm. I gave my babies toothpaste so that they had something to eat.” Finally, the case of women giving birth at sea, on makeshift crafts, NGO boats, merchant or navy ships, ought to be mentioned. François Manuel and Manuela, who were both born in 2016 on the patrol vessel Bettica, were thus named because a midwife called Manuela had cared for their respective mothers. Another migrant woman named her daughter Francesca Marina in a nod to her maritime saga (see the video report by Agence France-Presse on 8 October 2015). Dubbed “The Sea Princess,” Francesca Marina received an unusual amount of media exposure. At the reception centre in Sicily where she was housed, the little girl became a real mascot. Another baby girl, Mercy, was the subject of a song entered and performed in the Eurovision Song Contest 2018. All of this, however, did not prevent Mercy’s mother from ending up in the largest, and probably the worst, reception centre in Italy, the centre of Mineo, which is, moreover, the epitome of the security-driven management of migration and of the corruption pervading the migration and asylum system (on the Mineo reception centre, see Bassi, 2015). Such is the irony of the media coverage of migrants’ cases, which does not stop women from fulfilling their destinies.

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With or Without Consent: The Victims of Human Trafficking Most of the women whom I met were not the playthings of criminal organisations. They had relied on smugglers at different points in their journey—both men and women, with various roles and varying degrees of organisation. In most cases, these smugglers could not be linked to the human trafficking system (on the conflation of smuggling and trafficking, and the resulting criminalisation of travel across the Sahara, see Brachet, 2018). However, among the women taking the land and sea routes to Europe, some are coerced. Those women victims of human trafficking are usually Nigerian nationals. The phrase “trafficking in persons” means “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs” (Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, art. 3, para. a; see United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2004). Given the specific nature of such migrations, and although I met with these women on several occasions, I had few opportunities to talk at length with them about the circumstances surrounding their departure. Some women had entered a protection and exit programme for victims of human trafficking, and as a result, they were closely supervised and monitored; others were accommodated in reception centres for asylum seekers reserved for women, and thus kept away from human trafficking networks, with no guarantee, however, that once out of the reception system, they would be able to free themselves from these networks; others still were held in detention centres when I met them. I probably would have needed more time to establish a close relationship with these women, which, in turn, would have required fieldwork research focusing on the specificity of their situation. Yet I cannot discuss the variety of motivations behind women’s decision to leave without mentioning them.8 Indeed, there are

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many, and ever younger, such women on the road (see BeFree, 2016; Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, 2017): the number of Nigerian women reaching the shores of Italy rose from 1500 in 2014 to 5000 in 2015, and 11,000 in 2016. Like all other migration flows in the Mediterranean, it decreased in 2017, dropping to 5300, as a result of Italy’s policy of cooperation with Libya. In 2017, women accounted for about a third of all adults arriving on the Italian coast from Nigeria. Moreover, 80% of the unaccompanied minors coming from Nigeria, which also represented a large group, were girls. Most of these women hailed from Edo State, whose capital is Benin City, Delta State, and Oyo State. The IOM office in Italy estimated that 70% of the Nigerian women who had arrived in 2015 and 2016 were victims of human trafficking. The modus operandi of the organisations carrying out such trafficking is well documented: threats and violent abuse; practices of subjugation, performed by means of the voodoo rite called “juju” at the time of departure, along the way, and upon arrival; exploitation and prostitution of women, taking place in private homes or in “connection houses,” on the way to Europe or, conversely, protection given during the journey so that the “employability” of these women is not undermined. Once these women have arrived in Europe, “Madams” or “Mamas,” themselves former prostitutes, are expecting them: procurers who will see to it that they are put to work, control every detail of their daily lives, and make sure they repay the debt that they have incurred before they left (Save the Children, 2015), the latter ranging from €30,000 to 80,000, that is, several thousand sexual services (ActionAid & BeFree, 2018). Such control is exercised by various means: through other women, through smuggling networks, and through social media, thus making it extremely difficult to escape this control. Moreover, human trafficking networks have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to geopolitical changes: as a result of the civil war in Libya, these organisations have evolved and linked up with Libyan criminal networks while continuing to smuggle women to Europe. Some women know before they leave what awaits them, but others are much less informed. Yet, despite the violence inherent in the migration processes related to human trafficking, the line between consent and coercion is porous: the poverty and demographic situation prevailing in their regions of origin are key factors influencing these women’s decision to leave, and in a particularly challenging context in terms of gender relations, undertaking migration also reflects a desire for self-assertion,

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empowerment, and social mobility (ActionAid & BeFree, 2018; Plambech, 2017). This chapter has provided an overview of the motivations and journeys of women crossing the Mediterranean Sea. A diachronic approach to migration, which explores migrant trajectories by looking at the ways in which various motives are intertwined and different temporalities overlap, helps us dissolve the dichotomous distinctions between economic migrants and refugees, forced migrants and voluntary migrants, autonomous female migrants and “accompanied” or “follower” migrant women. Women’s experiences reflect the expansion of borders, described earlier in the introduction to this volume: the border is present with these women at every stage of their journey; it puts them in danger or forces them to revise their migration project—a project that is constantly at risk of being diluted, of getting lost in the difficulties, as women get bogged down in the problems that they face in the places they travel through. The violence of borders is, obviously, related to the place of the foreigner—in this particular case, the foreign woman, the African woman, the racialised individual—in transit countries. But such violence is also caused, and further compounded, by the policies of externalisation and criminalisation of migration that have been pursued by EU member states and as a result of which the journey has become increasingly costly and dangerous (Brachet, 2018). For the women whom I met, their experience of the border was an embodied experience, combining direct emotions and sensations: these women were indeed “in the border,” rather than “at the border,” in that the experiences that they recounted were extremely long and traumatic— there was literally, as it were, some depth to these experiences. The difficulties and troubles that women encounter do not end when they arrive in Europe. Firstly, the aforementioned forms of violence— whether it is gender-based in the country of origin or it has been inflicted during the journey—are not systematically recognised by the authorities and institutions deciding asylum claims. This is either as a result of a restrictive interpretation of the law, as in the case of specific gender-related persecutions or a definition of the notion of “safe country” disregarding the gender perspective (Freedman, 2018), or because gendered violence is a blind spot for the asylum system. Such is, indeed, the case of the violence that women suffer during their journey, which is not taken into account in the asylum and refugee status determination process. This creates various forms of vulnerability and insecurity for women, which are exacerbated by the EU’s punitive approach to migration—the subject of the next chapter.

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Notes 1. Although, overall, the number of Schengen visas to the EU issued every year has increased, such has not been the case for most of the countries that the women I met came from. 2. I conducted interviews with Somali women in Malta in 2010 and 2011, first with Anna Spiteri, as part of the EuroBroadMap survey led by Clarisse Didelon and Claude Grasland, then on my own, and finally with Nathalie Bernardie-Tahir. At the time, Somalia was the leading country of origin of migrants arriving by boat, 20% of these being women. Between 2005 and 2015, Somali nationals accounted for 40% of migrants arriving by sea in Malta (around 6,400 people out of a total of 16,000). Over the same period, half of those migrants granted protection (mainly subsidiary protection) in Malta were Somalis. Depending on the period under consideration, women constituted 15% to 30% of this population. 3. The Italian government had announced that a state funeral would be held, but in the end, it did not take place. 4. Hawala in Arabic, or xawala in Somali, refers to a traditional informal payment system. 5. Italy and Libya signed The Treaty of Friendship, Partnership, and Cooperation between the Italian Republic and the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (the “Friendship Pact”) on 30 August 2008. As explained in the introduction to this volume, since 2011, Italy has adopted other institutional measures, providing that African migrants remain in Libya. 6. A survey conducted with Nigerian women who had arrived on the island of Lampedusa in 2016 showed that 14% of them were pregnant and that the majority of them did not know the identity of the father (see Quagliarello, 2019). 7. For further details on migrants’ perception of Europe, both when they leave and while they are en route, see the findings of the survey carried out as part of the EuroBroadMap project (2009–2012) and led by Clarisse Didelon and Claude Grasland (EuroBroadMap, 2012). 8. Therefore, I have relied mainly on secondary sources (reports and newspaper articles) as well as interviews conducted with a few Nigerian women and, mostly, with women involved in migrant reception and in the protection system for victims of human trafficking. In particular, I would like to thank Francesca de Masi, from the BeFree social cooperative in Rome, and Ausilia Cosentini, from the Proxima social cooperative in Ragusa.

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https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/08/08/they-­are-­making-­us-­ Eritrea. slaves-­not-­educating-­us/how-­indefinite-­conscription-­restricts Jeangène Vilmer, J.-B., & Gouéry, F. (2015). Érythrée : un naufrage totalitaire. Presses Universitaires de France. https://doi.org/10.3917/puf.jeang.2015.03 Jesuit Refugee Service Malta. (2009). Do they know? Asylum seekers testify to life in Libya. http://jrsmalta.jesuit.org.mt/wp-­content/uploads/downloads/2011/ 02/Do-­They-­Know.pdf Jesuit Refugee Service Malta, & United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2008). ‘Try to understand’: Outcomes of a project on sexual and gender-based violence among immigrants. https://www.unhcr.org/protection/ migration/50aa032c9/10-­p oint-­p lan-­a ction-­c hapter-­6 annex-­6 13-­t r y-­ understand-­outcomes-­project.html Jureidini, R., & Reda, L. (2017). The convergence of migrants and refugees. Sociology of Islam, 5(2–3), 224–247. https://doi.org/10.116 3/22131418-­00503001 Koser, K. (2001). New approaches to asylum? International Migration, 39(6), 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-­2435.00180 Koser, K., & Martin, S. (Eds.). (2011). The migration-displacement nexus: Patterns, processes, and policies. Berghahn Books. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qcgrf Laacher, S. (2010). De la violence à la persécution, femmes sur la route de l’exil. La Dispute. Locoh, T., & Ouadah-Bedidi, Z. (2014). Du vin nouveau dans la vieille outre familiale : les Africaines en quête de nouveaux rapports de genre. INED. Documents de travail, 215. https://archined.ined.fr/view/ AWlObYLWXMQCvuZmm89v Lojkine, B. (Director). (2014). Hope [Film]. Zadig Films. Mazzella, S. (2014). Sociologie des migrations. Presses Universitaires de France. https://doi.org/10.3917/puf.mazze.2014.01 Morone, A.  M. (2018). La Libye post-Kadhafi : migrations, politiques d’endiguement et conflits. In C. Schmoll, N. Bernardie-Tahir, & Babels (Eds.), Méditerranée : des frontières à la dérive (pp. 121–130). Le Passager clandestin. Pian, A. (2017). Les espaces discursifs de la frontière : mort et arbitraire dans le voyage vers l’Europe. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 33(2–3), 45–62. https://doi.org/10.4000/remi.8728 Plambech, S. (2017). Sex, deportation and rescue: Economies of migration among Nigerian sex workers. Feminist Economics, 23(3), 134–159. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13545701.2016.1181272 Prestianni, S. (2018). La pericolosa relazione tra migrazione, sviluppo e sicurezza per esternalizzare le frontiere in Africa : il caso di Sudan, Niger e Tunisia. Arci. Quagliarello, C. (2019). Salute riproduttiva, genere e migrazioni : il continuum di violenze nei vissuti di donne e madri ‘dalla pelle nera’. Mondi Migranti, 1, 195–216. https://doi.org/10.3280/MM2019-­001011

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Richmond, A. H. (1993). Reactive migration: Sociological perspectives on refugee movements. Journal of Refugee Studies, 6(1), 7–24. https://doi. org/10.1093/jrs/6.1.7 Sassen, S. (2000). Women’s burden: Counter-geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival. Journal of International Affairs, 53(2), 503–524. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24357763 Save the Children. (2015). Piccoli schiavi invisibili : le giovani vittime di tratta e sfruttamento. https://s3.savethechildren.it/public/files/uploads/pubblicazioni/piccoli-­schiavi-­invisibili-­2015.pdf Sayad, A. (1975). El Ghorba : le mécanisme de reproduction de l’émigration. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1(2), 50–66. https://doi.org/10.3406/ arss.1975.2457 Scalettaris, G. (2009). Refugees and mobility. Forced Migration Review, 33, 58–59. https://www.fmreview.org/protracted/scalettaris Schafer, L. H. (2002). True survivors: East African refugee women. Africa Today, 49(2), 29–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/at.2003.0015 Schapendonk, J., & Steel, G. (2014). Following migrant trajectories: The im/ mobility of Sub-Saharan Africans en route to the European Union. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(2), 262–270. Smith, S. (2018). La ruée vers l’Europe : la jeune Afrique en route pour le Vieux Continent. Grasset. Tabutin, D., & Schoumaker, B. (2004). La démographie de l’Afrique au sud du Sahara des années 1950 aux années 2000 : synthèse des changements et bilan statistique. Population, 59(3–4), 521–622. https://doi.org/10.3917/ popu.403.0521 Thiollet, H. (2018). Réfugié.e.s érythréen.ne.s dans le monde arabe : archéologie d’un long exode. Mouvements, 93, 107–117. https://doi.org/10.3917/ mouv.093.0107 Thiollet, H., Pastore, F., & Schmoll, C. (2024). Does the forcedvoluntary dichotomy really influence migration governance?. Handbook of Human Mobility and Migration (pp. 221–241). Edward Elgar Publishing. Tîmera, M. (2001). Les migrations des jeunes Sahéliens : affirmation de soi et émancipation. Autrepart, 18, 37–49. https://doi.org/10.3917/autr.018.0037 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2010). Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. UNHCR. https://www.unhcr. org/3b66c2aa10.html United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2004). United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols Thereto. United Nations. https://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNTOC/Publications/TOC%20 Convention/TOCebook-­e.pdf Varikas, E. (2003). La figure du Paria : une exception qui éclaire la règle. Tumultes, 21–22, 87–105. https://doi.org/10.3917/tumu.021.0087

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Varikas, E., & Clair, I. (2012). Généalogie d’une enquête sur les ‘étranger-e-s du dedans’ : entretien avec Eleni Varikas. Genre, sexualité & société, 7. https://doi. org/10.4000/gss.2384 Vincent, L. (2011). Les Érythréens. Rivages. Zetter, R. (2015). Protection in crisis: Forced migration and protection in a global era. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/ default/files/publications/TCM-­Protection-­Zetter.pdf

CHAPTER 4

Archipelagos of Constraint: Arrival in Europe

Arrival in Europe is initially experienced as a new beginning, the contrast with the country of origin and the harshness of the journey putting it in a positive light. The women I met used to tell me that “the situation is normal here,” “compared to Somalia” or “compared to Libya.” “The Maltese army accompanied me in detention,” said Sumya, a Somali woman. “They [the military] changed my bad life into a good one. I found peace here. I spent two months and fifteen days here but then I got out—they took me to hospital because I was pregnant and losing blood.” Hani, another Somali woman, told me “The Maltese police took us to detention. We stayed there for seven months, all twenty-six of us on the police bus: men, women, children. They took us to safety.” In the same vein, Alia, a Libyan woman, said “I travelled two days and two nights without eating or drinking anything. Finally, the police rescued us when the boat was sinking. They gave us water, they gave us a life jacket. They saved us! After that I spent three months in detention. It was better, different from Libya, we had a mattress, clothes. In Libya, we had no bed or mattress, we were naked. In Malta, we were fourteen women in two big rooms, it was good. Well, you can’t go out, but you have everything you need. They bring us food, I was even able to call my family.” Detention centres are perceived as safe places because they provide “the necessities” (food, bed, hygiene supplies) and even the superfluous (such as toys for the children): this is why some migrants can have a very positive view of them. In detention facilities, many women repeatedly told me, you © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Schmoll, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6_4

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“recover” from the violence of the journey, you feel safe, “you can’t complain.” Other women, however, can no longer bear the deprivation of freedom they have endured for so long: they fall ill or try to get out of detention at all costs. The back-and-forth trips to hospital emergency rooms are thus very frequent, leading centre staff to complain about “women who pretend to be sick.”

Arrival in Europe, from Sorting Centres to Selection Apparatuses In any case, disappointment and anguish soon overtake the feeling of relief and even gratitude experienced upon arrival. The harshness of arrival conditions, characterised by heavy spatial restrictions on women’s lives, plays an important role in their early dislike of Europe. First of all, as soon as they arrive, if they are not immediately hospitalised, women find themselves in places of confinement where they are sorted into those who will be allowed to claim asylum and those who will not. According to Claire Rodier, Emmanuel Blanchard and Michel Agier, these places can be defined as “sorting chambers,” associated with “selection, expulsion or admission” practices (Rodier & Blanchard, 2003; Agier, 2008). It is in these places that the first procedures assessing people’s rights and legitimacy to “be there” take place: identification and registration. This includes fingerprinting, a known European diplomatic issue, since much of the tension between France and Italy until 2016 focused—rightly or wrongly, depending on the point of view—on Italy’s negligence in taking fingerprints. Sorting and selection can be carried out in places that have been converted into confinement sites for the occasion (police stations, hangars, improvised areas set up at ports) or in places specifically designed for this purpose. A great deal of institutional violence reigns there: the constraint of being fingerprinted, the absence of doors in the dormitories, overcrowding, no contact with the outside world, the shortage of drinking water, and not enough beds for everyone. Such deprivation of privacy and bodily hypervisibility have been documented both in Malta’s sorting centres and Italian migration “hotspots.” In this regard, more than functional places for sorting, they are unambiguously carceral places that archetypally illustrate the relationship between the criminalisation of migration and the

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punitive moment being experienced by European societies (Fassin, 2018). Their organisation can be described as gender blind in the sense that distinctions are rarely made between women’s and men’s situations, women receiving no specific consideration. Men, women, and children are usually mixed together and subject to the same constraints, which consequently exposes women to additional risks and increases their vulnerability. The situation is volatile in these places, and violence is not uncommon, sometimes even initiated by staff. The occasional media coverage of such violence breaks the usual silence, highlighting the fact that hiding violence from the eyes of the world is difficult in an age of mass communication and social networks, even when it happens in the most remote and isolated locations. A video taken by a migrant in the Contrada Imbriacola centre in Lampedusa, Italy, in 2013 shows what the media would later call the doccia della vergogna (the shower of shame): shivering men, arms outspread and naked for all to see, being hosed down in the cold. Women received the same treatment. Public authorities fear such exposure of mistreatment: in 2016, the Italian Minister of the Interior proposed the establishment of so-called hotspots at sea (hotspots galleggianti) so people could be identified even farther out of sight before being shipped on. His proposal was rejected at the time, but subsequently even more radical offshore solutions have been chosen, including outsourcing migration control to Libya. People want to escape these Italian sorting and selection sites as quickly as possible. For years, holes in the fence of the Contrada Imbriacola centre in Lampedusa have made it possible for people to leave during the day. This apparent laxity merits a second look; it reflects the existence of another, even more palpable scale of confinement that is the island (Mountz, 2015). The island setting makes it possible to cynically tolerate openings in the detention centre’s fence. This is perhaps what makes it possible to truly speak of the “Lampedusa model” or “Maltese model”: in the management of migration in the Mediterranean, islands are mere laboratories, distinctly special places of political engineering (Lemaire, 2014). Isolated and often small, they allow the implementation of what Anna Triandafyllidou calls the “externalisation of control within the European territory” (Triandafyllidou, 2014). Their small size favours dialogue between the various actors in migration control, especially in small island states like Malta. The island is also a powerful tool that State authorities can use to filter what the public sees of migration management. Depending on

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circumstances, an island makes it possible for authorities to make an emergency visible, or obfuscate migrations they wish to keep hidden. In fact, we could say that islands functioned as laboratories, vanguards of “hotspots,” well before the term and concept were officially coined. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that nine of the ten regional “hotspots” set up by the European Union in 2015 are located on islands: like a Russian doll, island “hotspots” ensure the scalar expression of confinement. “Hotspots” Among all the existing apparatuses of control, “hotspots” have a particular function1 that merits explanation. They are the first harmonised sorting system to be designed on the European level. These centres were ordered by an EU Council of member-state interior ministers on 14 September 2015. They are distinctive for assembling several national, European, and international agencies (national police, Frontex, the European Asylum Support Office, Europol, Eurojust, IOM) participating in the processing of so-called irregular migrants under the same roof. Ranking the relevance of asylum applications in these “hotspots” is obviously in tension—if not conflict—with the extremely limited working conditions, objectives and timeframes allotted to the selection process, and it also clashes with the types of actors present, who are essentially military and police (Actionaid/ ASGI, 2018). Indeed, the principle of the “hotspot” is that one must act quickly, within seventy-two hours: a representative of IOM Italy working at the Pozzallo “hotspot” expressed his frustration in trying to identify victims of trafficking with such drastically limited time and means. This work is complicated, firstly because trafficked women are closely monitored by the traffickers who accompany their journey, making it difficult to reach them while avoiding the trafficking chain. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that there is no place at the “hotspot” where potential trafficking victims can be physically isolated from the others. Secondly, there is little chance that trafficked women will be able to reach supportive organisations after leaving a “hotspot,” since these organisations lack means and clout. The IOM representative gave the example of how he gives women he identifies as trafficking victims the free emergency number of an anti-trafficking organisation whose switchboard he knows is mostly inactive for lack of state-allocated resources. People working for international organisations and NGOs in these centres regularly have to

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deal with such absurdity. Regardless, this IOM employee consoles himself with the fact that he can save one woman from time to time, which is an adequate and valid enough reason for action. Lack of access to legal support and protection in “hotspots” is by no means specific to trafficked women. A November 2016 report from Amnesty International shows how commonplace threats, violence and lack of access to legal support are in “hotspots”: “between late 2015 and early 2016, the Italian police has introduced more aggressive strategies to force individuals to provide their fingerprints, including the use of physical force and extended detention, which have resulted in serious human rights violations. Pressured by EU institutions and other member states, the Italian government has fostered change through arm-twisting, in a metaphorical and literal sense” (Amnesty, 2016a). This report reveals that untrained police officers decide what protection each detained person needs based on a very brief interview. Those deemed ineligible for asylum are issued a deportation notice—often by forced return to their country of origin—which may expose them to serious human rights violations (Amnesty, 2016a, 2016b). Moreover, language barriers compound legal barriers: according to a representative of IOM and Amnesty International, “hotspots” don’t always have interpreters, and even when they do, some interpreters limit their work to translating police pressure to give fingerprints. Although Italy and Greece alone have official “hotspots,” other countries have places with similar functions: in Malta, the Initial Reception Centre (IRC), set up in the Marsa accommodation centre, is a hotspot in anything but name. Since 2015, the law has stipulated that people can only stay there for seven days, the time it takes to be identified and meet with immigration officials, but in reality, the process can last several weeks. Women, men, and children who have gone through the IRC can then be placed in detention or open centres, a system that does relax Malta’s previous systematic detention policy but is still fundamentally brutal and arbitrary, according to migrants’ rights organisations. Once people have been fully processed at EU “hotspots” in Italy or Greece or at the IRC in Malta, one of several possible outcomes awaits them. Those identified as having a specific form of vulnerability or being subject to one of a list of recognised threats have the possibility of applying for a residence permit (in most cases a request for asylum). Depending on how much credibility is given to the person, how vulnerable they are thought to be, and the state of law at the time, their asylum request will

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be filed from a reception facility or a detention centre (see Chap. 5). The second possible outcome is detention, which is often followed with deportation, being escorted to the border, or an order that the individual leave the country on their own. Since some people do not comply with this order, they can be put back behind detention centre bars repeatedly, leading to genuine “careers in detention” (Clochard, 2009). The following sections present the situation in detention facilities in Italy and Malta, while the next chapter explores everyday life in reception centres, where women applying for asylum are retained.

In Malta’s Detention Centre Zahra, a 25-year-old Somali woman I met in Malta in 2011, summed up the circumstances that brought her there. “I was married in Somalia, but my husband was killed, two of my children were kidnapped, and I was shot in the leg. Since then, I’ve had a lot of trouble walking. In 2006 I married Rachid, and in 2007 we left Somalia, crossed Ethiopia, Sudan and arrived in Libya. My son Ahmed was born there. We quickly found a boat and embarked; Ahmed was only a few months old at the time. The crossing took twenty days, we thought we were going to die. The Maltese patrol finally arrested us and the three of us were detained for a month and a half in Lyster Barracks.” Zahra’s story is commonplace. Until 2015, detention was almost systematic for anyone arriving in Malta by sea without any previous screening. The island has long had one of the strictest detention policies in Europe, given its length (up to eighteen months, though it has since been reduced to nine months) and its unconditional nature.2 There is thus a long string of testimonies as to the harshness of arrival in Malta, all revealing how women exhausted by their journeys find themselves behind bars, caught in a new dynamic of vulnerability. Before 2015, the two main detention centres, Safi Baracks and Lyster Baracks, held up to 2000 people.3 As I said at the beginning of this chapter, this was not the first time that the women I met had been deprived of their freedom, as most had already been detained in Libya, but the fate that awaited them in Malta clashed violently with their vision of Europe: “I thought I would reach Europe and all I got was prison,” one of them told me. Some even refused to use the word Europe to describe the hostile rock where they were held. The conditions of detention in Malta have been widely documented by the organisations that have had access to it: these reports are unanimous

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in their assessment of how detention has contributed to the deterioration of women and men’s mental and physical health. Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and lack of meaningful activities are veritable torture for people who had traversed the desert, Libya, and the Mediterranean (Rodier & Teule, 2005; Médecins sans Frontières, 2009; JRS Malta, 2009, JRS Malta, 2008; Médecins du Monde, 2012). Furthermore, it should be noted that Maltese detention policies were long gender blind, entirely ignoring the specific needs and vulnerabilities of women: prison staff were mainly men, and women were not separated from men in the dormitories. In Lyster Barracks, women did not have separate showers or even shower curtains, and many pregnant or breastfeeding women did not have access to bottled water. This situation gradually changed following protests and reports from several NGOs and UNHCR. But from another point of view, it could be said that women were privileged: considered as vulnerable individuals, they were usually released from detention faster, even if the testimonies I collected show that imprisonment still lasted several months. Some women got pregnant in order to leave the detention centre: pregnancy was not a sufficient condition alone, but it could lead to other health problems (bleeding, discomfort) that could facilitate their release. The situation on the outside was not necessarily better for women whose vulnerability led to their leaving detention. Nathalie Bernardie-­ Tahir and I visited the Hangar reception centre in Hal Far in March 2011: hundreds of people who had passed through Libya were crammed into around thirty Red Cross tents. The sanitary conditions were so appalling that the children, most of them quite young, were falling ill one after the other, and some had even stopped eating. This was due to hydrocarbon fumes emanating from the ground and the proliferation of virulent germs giving them high fevers, vomiting and diarrhoea. Some anguished parents told us that they would rather return to detention, where the conditions had been better.

Romeo and Juliet in the Panopticon Detention centres are generally intended to identify, detain, and eventually deport irregular migrants. Since the opening of such centres in Italy in the late 1990s, they have held tens of thousands of people, including several thousand women.4 With the Arab Springs and the intensification of arrivals by sea from Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt from 2013 onward, these

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centres assumed a more significant role as masses of people from North Africa came and went through their gates. Deportation was the most likely outcome for detainees from reputedly safe countries with whom there were standing agreements. Alia, twenty-nine years old, and Ali, thirty-four years old, were nicknamed the “Romeo and Juliet of detention” by their fellow detainees. They arrived in Lampedusa in November 2013, leaving Tunisia because their families opposed their relationship. Alia, promised to a Salafist man, had been threatened and tortured by her brothers. They were taken from Lampedusa to the detention centre in Rome, where they were held for several weeks. Alia and Ali were separated and could not see or speak to each other. Two days before Christmas, after several weeks of detention and terrified by the idea of being sent back to Tunisia, Alia tried to hang herself with her sheets. Her cellmates saved her in time.5 Since Alia’s desperate gesture, the lovers obtained the right to talk to each other for one hour a day, in full view of everyone, because the configuration of the detention centre does not allow any form of privacy. The story of “Romeo and Juliet” received a lot of media attention, particularly because of a protest movement taking place at the detention centre at the same time: the “sewn-mouth revolt” (la rivolta delle bocche cucite), when many Tunisians sewed their mouths shut in protest of their detention. On 30 January 2014, Alia and Ali were released from detention and allowed to apply for a residency permit on humanitarian grounds. The rest of their story is up to them.

In the Detention Centre of Ponte Galeria The place where Alia and Ali were locked up is called Ponte Galeria: it is a 370-place detention centre located near Fiumicino airport in the suburbs of Rome. Ponte Galeria, which opened in 1998, served as a mixed centre until 2015, when the umpteenth mutiny in the male sector led to its closure and conversion into a detention centre specifically for women. Ponte Galeria is both the largest detention centre in Italy and its only centre for women. Looking at the organisation of everyday life at Ponte Galeria in greater detail makes it possible to highlight the micro-policies of immobilisation implemented on women’s bodies, and the situation of uncertainty and suspension in which women find themselves. “A cage within a cage”: this is how Luigi Manconi, then president of the Italian Senate’s Human Rights Commission, described the centre in

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2013. A square kilometre of cement, surrounded by five-metre-high walls, between a river and a motorway. A gate, a corridor behind that gate, then another gate, then a courtyard adjoining a dormitory. The architecture of Ponte Galeria is squalid and similar in every way to high security prisons (Commission straordinaria del senato per la tutela e la promozione dei diritti umani, 2014; Mazza, 2013). It is designed to meet the daily needs, functions, and temporalities of the detained bodies and ensure, in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic prison (Foucault, 1993), an intense and systematic control of those bodies: lights are on day and night, fences are always closed, and video surveillance cameras are permanently activated. For detained migrants at Ponte Galeria, the visibility of their bodies is unbearable. This is starkly illustrated by the words of a detainee who violently took me to task in front of other detainees: “What do you want to see here? Don’t you think you’ve seen enough? To see our bodies like this? Why do you want to see? There is a girl, a researcher from Portugal, who has already been here. She stayed for several days. She looked at everything, she asked everything: how often we ate, how often we shit, how we wiped ourselves … [several inmates burst out laughing]. Aren’t you tired of watching us? What are you waiting for, to do something for us?” Another woman I met there, in a sort of provocation, stripped naked in front of me, then put her clothes back on, put herself in a position of prayer and finally said to me: “Well, what do you have to look at, we’re all the same, aren’t we?” While the women are visible to all, they have no access to images themselves: like in prison, mobile phones with cameras and video cameras are prohibited in the centre, as are any items that could be used against other prisoners or staff, such as mirrors, rope, lighters, shoelaces, bras, and pens. On my first visit in 2014, in retaliation for yet another revolt in the male sector, the televisions had been removed. On my winter visits, the heat was not turned on in the rooms. All this, coupled with the lack of any possibility of connection with the outside world, makes the days extremely long and tedious. Some of the women take drugs to escape the boredom, which the centre’s staff calls “therapy.” A final sign of their dehumanisation: female prisoners were called by their identification number. During my first visit to Ponte Galeria, before the centre closed to men, there was a strict gendered division of space that also corresponded to different customs and rules. The male area was more intensively monitored than the female area. In the men’s dining area, fences separated detainees from staffers distributing food and meals were passed through a secure

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slot, while the interface between women and the staff was more open. The daily schedules followed different paces according to gender, and the available activities were also gendered: men had an artificial football pitch; women could take part in art therapy, Zumba, or origami. The beauty salon opened one day a week, when women could wax their legs and dye their hair. But most of the time, the days were empty. In 2014, I met women in Ponte Galeria who were arrested in simple identity checks or, somewhat ironically, operations to combat the exploitation and trafficking of human beings. For example, a police sting operation against prostitution could lead to the detention and expulsion of several dozen Nigerian women; a tax fraud operation in a Chinese factory could lead to the detention and expulsion of several female workers without contracts. Both scenarios are in total violation of the law against the trafficking and exploitation of human beings. At that time, the centre was mainly used to detain irregular migrants whose status did not allow for immediate deportation. As the lawyers working with the interned women explained to me, the principle of irregularity took precedence over other violations and systematically led to detention. Some women had gone to the police station to denounce their exploiters and had ended up in prison; others had served a prison sentence and were then taken to the centre, ineligible for release because of their irregular status; others still were young Roma women, often from Bosnian families, who had been born in Italy but had been unable to take the steps to obtain a regular residence permit. Some had been locked up in the centre six, seven, or even eight times. But starting in 2015, due to important legislative developments, the centre increasingly became a detention site for female asylum seekers, testifying to the growing intertwining of confinement and asylum processing in Italy. Women were brought to Ponte Galeria from ports, “hotspots,” and police stations within days or even hours of setting foot on Italian soil. This change in the law, coupled with rising maritime migration and the increase in centre reception capacity,6 marked a clear shift towards the criminalisation of asylum-seeking. In 2015 and 2016, with the increase in maritime arrivals, I met several asylum seekers in the detention centre, including Faouzia and Fatiha, the two Moroccan women who passed through Libya mentioned in the previous chapter. Francesca de Masi and Enrica Rigo describe the case of a group of sixty-­ nine Nigerian women rescued at sea in 2015 and immediately transferred to Ponte Galeria (Rigo, 2019; Rigo & De Masi, 2019; BeFree, 2016):

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although they had all applied for asylum, only ten had received protection on humanitarian grounds, after agreeing to participate in a programme to protect and extricate women caught up in prostitution. Twenty others were deported to Lagos before the court had even ruled on their appeal, in total violation of asylum law.

Criminalising Asylum Through Detention The increase in the number of female asylum seekers in the centre from 2015 onwards makes Ponte Galeria the archetype of the shift from humanitarian to security approaches and their entanglement in Italy: as a place for the detention of female asylum seekers, the centre has had to adapt to its new population. New services and associations got involved, helping detainees to prepare for their interviews with the asylum commission. During an interview in November 2016, the director of the company running the centre confided his inability to adapt to this new situation: “We are a security company that usually operates in prisons. We are not equipped to deal with specific vulnerable subjects like these women.” The asylum seekers I met in Ponte Galeria did not understand why they were behind bars. They did not know how long they would have to spend in the centre, or even what kind of place it was: “You feel like you’re in a science fiction film, you think you’re going to wake up from a bad dream,” one of them told me. Their fate was in the hands of a judge and they had little idea of when they would get to speak with him or her. In the centre, access to legal advice was highly problematic: most lawyers, knowing that they would not be compensated for their services, did not spend much time defending these women; others, overwhelmed by the needs, limited their activities to women in greatest difficulty or the most urgent situations, which sometimes put them in irresolvable moral dilemmas (Esposito et  al., 2016). Arbitrariness was the rule: women’s associations could only access the centre on certain days of the week, so the day they appeared in court or were incarcerated determined whether detained women would receive legal help or representation. I have mentioned several types of places in this chapter: “hotspots”, other sorting platforms that act as unofficial hotpots, detention centres. What do they have in common? In all such places, bodily routines—eating, washing, sleeping—become acts of violence because they seem to be stripped of any form of autonomy and privacy. The women I met often told me that the boundary of humanity had been crossed in these places:

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“we were treated like animals,” “it seems that people enjoy punishing us all the time.” Such accounts are reminiscent of the powerless, expendable, power-subordinated bodies described as naked life (vita nuda) by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998). However, what is striking in the interviews conducted with the managers and employees of these detention centres is that they are barely aware of their involvement in this violence: the scalar nature of migration policies seems to allow local actors to shirk or ignore their responsibilities, which corresponds well to Foucault’s conception of a multilocalised, somewhat stealthy power that eludes us (Gill, 2010, Foucault, 2004). Thus, for centre managers and employees the inhumane nature of detention is linked to the firmness of supranational migration policies and the absence of intra-European solidarity, not to their local application: this type of discourse can be found today in almost all European member-states when speaking of the management of asylum seekers in a “migration crisis.” It is always the neighbour’s fault, because they did not apply the law or did not want to reform it. In addition to micro-acts and tactics of daily resistance, migrant demonstrations and mobilisations are actions against the “banality of evil” that occur in detention or reception centres on a daily basis (Arendt, 2006). So while these centres are sites of state-implemented political engineering, they are also places of experimentation in forms of resistance and hybrid alliances for the people who pass through them, sites of the “regeneration of politics by those it has sought to disqualify” (author’s translation). They are spaces where detainees can express their rejection of migration measures and rules that they consider unjust, 7 such as Alya’s desperate act in the detention centre or the demonstrations of 200 Eritrean men, women and children who took to the streets of Lampedusa in July 2013 to demand their right to leave the island without leaving their fingerprints, to the cries of “No fingerprint!” (Lendaro, 2015).

“Voluntary” Return as Governmental Mobility The sorting and selection procedures that take place at the borders are intended to separate those who can benefit from asylum from the rest, who will be sent back to their home country or conducted to the border. There are, however, several institutional variations to this situation, which all heavily constrain the mobility of people caught up in the system: voluntary repatriation, relocation, or return to the European country of entry under the Dublin Regulation. Although they are not new, these various

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forms of mobility are increasingly frequent, to the point that some geographers speak of them as “governmental mobilities” (Gill, 2009; Michalon, 2012). The first variant of governmental mobility provides an alternative to deportation to irregular migrants who have been caught: “voluntary return” to either their country of origin or their first safe country of transit. Such programmes have a long history in Europe and are highly popular with governments and the European Commission (Migreurop, 2014; Maâ 2021). They have taken on new dimensions in recent years, after operating essentially as pilot programmes. The IOM is now a key partner for EU member states, but several associations are also involved in voluntary returns departing from Italy and Malta. Voluntary return is particularly useful for analysing the discrepancy between political and institutional representations of return (which see repatriation as the best solution to the problem of migration) and how migrants see it (their regard usually turned towards mobility and Europe). Migration institutions naturalise return, seeing it as part of the (sedentary) order of things (Lecadet, 2016). This conception of return is in stark contrast with migrants’ plans and aspirations. An employee of an association responsible for presenting this programme to Nigerian women confided during an interview, “It is not very appealing to women—repatriation is experienced as a failure of their plans for migration, a plan that they may have spent years preparing. How are you supposed to deal with such a disappointment? We always propose it, but frankly it is not at all attractive to them.” While voluntary return serves state interests in terms of migration management, some associations consider it as an acceptable alternative when people find themselves with no possibility of regularisation, particularly if they have been denied asylum or ordered to leave the country. For states, this practice is less economically and politically costly than forced return. However, the preconditions making it accessible to women, particularly those staying at detention centres, are rife with problems, including a lack of useful legal information making it possible for migrants to obtain a residency permit, oversights in identifying the risks associated with return, and the frequent absence of assistance in building a new life. A recent report by an Italian NGO highlights the ambiguity of the word “voluntary” in “voluntary return” (Bee Free, 2016). Firstly, the choice of this type of programme is often made in highly constrained contexts: one of the women who benefited from this programme said that she

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chose voluntary return because she had become homeless; another accepted it because the court would otherwise have taken custody of her child. In most cases, the alternative is forced return—that is, deportation. Secondly, there are very few reintegration programmes in home countries. When those programmes exist, they often fail, partly because of the conditions of poverty and instability in home countries. If women are supported in setting up small businesses, they are fragile, so most go bankrupt within a few months of their return (Bee Free, 2016). Voluntary return is not always the end of migratory journeys: in recent years, some women who have benefited from a voluntary return programme can be found on their way back to Europe. This is the case of Janine, a young Nigerian woman I met in Ragusa in January 2017. Originally from Benin City and arriving via Libya with her four-year-old daughter Gloria, Janine had already lived in Europe: she and her two children had lived in Switzerland, where she had been a sex worker. Following an arrest, she agreed to return to Nigeria under the International Organization for Migration’s assisted voluntary return programme. “Anyway, the alternative would have been deportation,” she told me. A few weeks after her return to Nigeria, she made the journey to Sicily again, in circumstances she did not clearly explain to me. What I do know is that she was separated from her eighteen-year-old son in Libya on the way to Italy. On her arrival, she spent two weeks in the Pozzallo “hotspot” while her daughter was hospitalised and underwent a fairly serious operation. On the advice of an association, Janine then applied for a protection programme under Article 18 of a 1998 Italian law for the protection of victims of trafficking. Janine was accommodated in a reception centre, where she had a private room. She was relieved to have this protection, but was still extremely worried about her son who remained in Libya: “There is a war going on there, I am so afraid of what might happen to him.” She wondered how she could raise the money to bring him to Europe. When I visited her, she was often lying in bed talking to him via Skype. The Wi-Fi connection also allowed her to watch Nigerian films on the internet and “try to think about something else.” Although the phenomenon cannot be quantified, Janine’s story shows that some women set off again for Europe (or are sent back—I’m not in a position to assess the degree of coercion involved in her story) immediately after their return home, illustrating both the failure of voluntary return programmes and the increasingly circular and chaotic nature of migration.

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Relocation within the EU The second variant of governmental mobility operates in the opposite direction. It concerns relocation measures within the European space, which—despite the Dublin Regulation—are intended to share the so-­ called asylum burden between member states. The European Commission had strongly desired such a solution in 2015, which it then adopted, proposing to suspend the Dublin Regulation for certain migrants. This relocation plan, which was supposed to allow for a more equal distribution of asylum applications between member states, was rejected en bloc by the so-called Višegrad group countries (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia). Very partially implemented (it ultimately only concerned 33,000 people, about a third of the objective), it was ended in 2017. While this programme’s results are mixed, to say the least, it should be noted this kind of relocation continued sporadically from Italy, Malta, and Spain. In principle, member-state solidarity in the form of relocation is further reinforced with the adoption of a European migration and asylum pact, but in practice, member states are reluctant to increase their share, leading to constant tension between southern member states and the rest. It is often forgotten that such practices have precedents in Europe. For example, in the early 2010s, people arriving in Malta by sea were often redistributed among other European countries, without suspension of the Dublin Regulation causing much uproar. At the time, the Maltese requested such measures because of the island’s small size. France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and other European countries welcomed a quota of people from Malta—about 700 in total—without any real hostility (Easo, 2012).8 In 2010, I met many women in Malta who were about to benefit from this first relocation scheme. I kept in touch with Sumeyye, a young Somali woman relocated to Sweden in 2011. Since her arrival in Sweden, Sumeyye got married, had a baby girl, and went back to school. She emotionally told me how her baby girl took her first steps in fresh snow.

Secondary Movements Despite the Dublin Agreements For some women stuck in the margins of Europe, relocation can be an opportunity for upward social mobility and reuniting with family. But these relocation processes should not overshadow another situation:

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forced return to the first country of entry in the European space, in accordance with the Dublin Regulation. One might wonder why migrant people are willing to continue their journey once they have reached a safe place in southern Europe, but it’s actually quite easy to understand: after having survived travelling tens of thousands of kilometres, it is rather difficult to accept an unstable living situation on the margins of Europe, marked by unwelcoming conditions and the absence of economic opportunity. During my initial research in Malta, many women hoped to be relocated because they felt stuck on the island, “between a rock and a hard place” to use a time-honoured expression particularly appropriate to Malta. For one thing, opportunities were limited on the small island where the population, unaccustomed to African people, can be very racist and xenophobic. While it was possible to find work in hotels as chambermaids, this meant taking public transportation, being in the public space, and risking having stones thrown at them or being spat upon. These open displays of hostility were a major obstacle to leaving the “ghetto” of Hal Far, an area where African people were concentrated at the southern end of the island. Above all, most women could only hope for subsidiary protection in Malta, a form of protection that is shorter and more restrictive than refugee status, which was rarely granted. This status allowed hardly any possibility of family reunification, so Maltese measures were experienced as a “cut-rate protection” compared to the rights women could have enjoyed elsewhere, especially in Scandinavian countries.9 Moreover, as noted in the previous chapter, these women never migrated entirely alone, since their migration was also born of a desire to protect their relatives and as a family project. These women thus hoped to capitalise on their migration and be joined rapidly by their children and parents. Salwa, a Somali woman benefiting from subsidiary protection in Malta, told me: “Everything is fine here, they give me pocket money, my situation is good, but every time I think of my children I cry. I have to go to a place where I can bring my children. Malta cannot help me with that. I will go to any European country as long as it takes my children … If Malta had taken my children, it would be the best place in the world.” Relatives, former neighbours, and friends who could help women rebuild their lives in Europe often live in other countries: the specific country a woman longs for depends on her nationality, the most common being France, Great Britain, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries. Women are in constant contact with their loved ones via their mobile phones, especially through messaging and social

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networks. These connections contribute to expectations of a new horizon, a new stage of the migratory process. This contact spurs women to continue their path beyond southern Europe, to “evaporate,” as institutions like the UNHCR trying to quantify their disappearance euphemistically put it. Everyday life was made hard for the women I met in reception centres given the conditions of linguistic and cultural isolation, poor employment opportunities and social protection systems, multiple forms of exploitation, and racism. For those who finally succeed in obtaining protection, the wait for a residence permit seems incredibly long, and the rights they are ultimately granted very limited, especially under subsidiary protection. All these reasons make it very tempting to resume the road north. Although we have little data on what the European Union calls “secondary mobility,” we know that it is huge. This disenchantment with southern Europe can be approximatively observed by comparing arrival and asylum application figures: although the Sicilian Channel was the main gateway to Europe for Eritreans in the 2010s, the number of asylum applications from Eritreans was much higher in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and the United Kingdom than it was in Malta and Italy. These secondary mobilities are in violation of the Dublin Regulation and are particularly condemned by member states. When women pursue a new phase in their mobility, they are once again escaping the categories of asylum seeker or dependent migrant with no strategy: they indicate by their movements that, even if they had the right to apply for asylum and obtain it, they do not necessarily wish to settle where they are assigned. They thus become suspect in a moral regime that condemns spontaneous mobility and sharply distinguishes voluntary migration (based on a plan) from forced migration (unplanned, by definition, and that should not aspire to reaching a specific country) (Salis, 2018). A concern and source of disapproval for states, secondary mobility is as much an object of diplomatic tensions as it is the driver behind a profusion of ways to send these women back. In France, sociologist Alice Latouche conducted a study at the emergency accommodation centre for female asylum seekers in Ivry-sur-Seine, affiliated with the La Chapelle centre in Paris (Latouche, 2017). She demonstrated that despite the centre’s stated objective of integration, resilience and support for women applying for asylum, it was also a “Dublin platform” for women whose fingerprints had been taken (often against their will) on entry into Greece and Italy and

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who, according to the agreements, should probably leave: “We have not had access to the figures, as these are confidential. However, our exchanges with social workers at the centre tend to show that half of the women migrating alone were subject to a Dublin procedure. The majority of them had not been able to escape the police and some had been forcibly fingerprinted.”

Fingerprinting: Women Subject to the Dublin Regulation and Deportation to the First Country of Entry Fingerprinting guarantees that the Dublin Regulation is applied by all states. This technology makes it possible to establish a register of trajectories (Eurodac) connecting people to the State through which they entered the European territory, and to which they will be returned if they transgress the rules of the game. Thus, the third observable type of governmental mobility is deportation to the first country of entry in the EU in response to secondary mobility. In 2018, 152 people were returned to Malta from other European countries. In 2017, 12,000 people were sent back to Italy under the Dublin Regulation, and another 12,000 in 2018. According to the geographer Jouni Häkli, one characteristic of contemporary societies is that the state can no longer exclusively control its population through containment and immobilisation, so it has to control bodies with technology (Häkli, 2007; see also Adey, 2009; Hyndman, 2012). The border defines deportability, making it a property and characteristic of migrant bodies (Kuster Tsianos, 2013; De Genova Peutz, 2010). The Dublin regime is thus an extension of the regime of deportability, which not only makes it possible to send people back to their country of origin but also returns them to their first point of entry into the European territory. It was in Malta at the end of the 2000s that I met my first “Dublinees”. They told me about their long journey across Africa and the Mediterranean, and then went on to talk about the European countries they had visited: the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark … They travelled thousands of kilometres to reach a close friend, an old neighbour, or a relative. Then they were stopped, either during the filing of a new asylum application or during an identity check, and sent back to Malta, a country they did not recognise as Europe. “Sweden is a good country for us. I had a friend in

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Sweden. We used to email each other, call each other, and she told me to come, that she was waiting for me. I went there for three months, and I asked for asylum. They told me that if I had not left my fingerprints in Malta, they would have taken me, you know,” Hali told me. Women who have been sent back to their arrival point under the Dublin agreement have a word for their situation: they call themselves “fingerprint.” They say “I am fingerprint” to indicate that their mobility is hindered, making no distinction between the technology of the body imposed on them and their situation, thus reproducing the language of the authorities. Women thus incorporate the border, which becomes mobile. In Malta, “fingerprint” returnees are deprived of half of their financial support allowance in retaliation: deprivation of mobility thus becomes economic deprivation. Of course, these returns lead to tears and dramatic separations: “We have several return Dublinees here,” an NGO worker in Rome told me. “The Dublin Regulation causes tragedies of separated families who cannot reunite. It is tragic for everyone, for women, for their families and for the host countries. How can you think that things are going to work out when families are separated—what sense does it make?”

Static Mobility Aslya is a young Somali woman, born in 1987, who arrived in Malta in 2009 at the age of twenty-two (ECHR, 2013). She had been living in Eritrea, where she married and had a child in 2005. In 2008, she left Eritrea, leaving her son in the care of her parents. After travelling through Sudan and Libya, Aslya arrived in Malta in February 2009. She was registered in the fingerprint database and locked up in the Ta’Kandja detention centre, where she was placed in a dormitory with forty other men, women, and children. In May 2009, after having her asylum application rejected, she escaped from the detention centre and managed to travel to the Netherlands, in a type of secondary mobility prohibited by the Dublin II Regulation. But Aslya wanted to try her luck, in order to reunite with her relatives: her father had started a resettlement procedure from Somalia to Sweden, for him and Aslya’s son. In February 2011, Aslya was sent back to Malta in accordance with the Dublin II Regulation and locked up in Safi Barracks. She was two months pregnant at the time. Sentenced to six months in prison for escaping from the detention centre, providing false information, and using false documents, she suffered a miscarriage in

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March, which she attributed to staff negligence and her detention conditions. At the end of her sentence, she was returned to Hermes Block (Lyster Barracks). Aslya fell into a deep depression due to being unable to reunite with her son in Sweden, her miscarriage, and the conditions of detention (twenty-two people crammed into one room, with only one and a half hours of outdoor access per day). Despite her repeated requests to the asylum commission, Aslya was only allowed to leave the detention centre on 30 August 2012, when the eighteen-month detention limit for irregular migrants expired. The story of Aslya, which led the European Court of Human Rights to find Malta in violation of the Human Rights Convention, concentrates many of the elements discussed in this chapter: contrary to her migration plans for Sweden, Aslya underwent a “career of confinement” between forced mobility and immobilisation, within archipelagos of constraint (Case of Aden Ahmed vs Malta, European Court of Human Rights, Fourth Section, 2013). Migration policies operate through the intense and multifaceted control of migrants. They are based on a set of technologies— infrared radar, fingerprinting, systems of confinement—that regulate and discipline bodies through various forms of governmental (im)mobilities (Michalon, 2012; Kobelinsky, 2012). Ultimately, they have effects that make people profoundly vulnerable. Such bodily discipline is also part of the asylum system, which is discussed in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Although arrival by sea is the best-known scenario, since 2015 these places have also taken in people with other scenarios, such as those who arrived by other routes, those who had a visa and became irregular afterwards, and those who were intercepted at Italy’s northern border. For example, in 2018 the Taranto “hotspot” mostly detained people who had entered Italy by crossing one of its northern borders. 2. For a long time, the detention policy was also applied to children and the most vulnerable subjects (Human Rights Watch, 2012); it was recently reformed in 2015, but remains one of the most repressive in Europe. 3. Malta’s detention policy has become notorious for several violent incidents committed by law enforcement officials against migrants. In the summer of 2012, a Malian migrant died at the hands of the armed forces in one of these centres. There have also been several cases of suicide and attempted suicide. 4. The length of detention in Italy has varied according to the period and the situation, ranging from eighteen months to 90 days since November 2014. The reasons for detention vary, too: the Berlusconi administration made

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being undocumented a criminal offense in 2008, this law was repealed in April 2014, and since August 2015 asylum applicants can be detained in centres for up to twelve months, notably when they have appealed the initial rejection of their application (decree-law 142/2015). 5. When I asked the centre’s employees about this incident, they downplayed it, saying that she was just looking for attention. Valentina Brinis, a sociologist from the association A Buon Diritto who works in the detention centre, confirmed my impression, telling me: “Often women’s acts of protest are minimized, they are put down to hysteria, they are not taken seriously.” 6. In 2017, in response to the recent increase in maritime arrivals, the Italian government reinstated the intensive use of detention by legislative decree, providing for the opening of a permanent repatriation centre (centro di permanenza per il rimpatrio, succeeding the CIE: centro di identificazione ed espulsione) in each region. 7. On mobilisations, see Chap. 6. 8. Indeed, it was in the name of European solidarity and reciprocity in terms of “burden sharing” that, in 2016, Malta agreed to take charge of 189 people who entered through Italy and Greece, under the EU’s relocation plan. 9. In Malta, between 2005 and 2015, only 4% of asylum seekers were granted refugee status. More than 50% (mainly from the Horn of Africa) were granted subsidiary protection status, which acknowledges the need for protection of people from regions where their lives are at risk on a daily basis but grants them more limited rights and restricts their international mobility. Above all, people with a subsidiary protection permit are not entitled to family reunification. Finally, about a third (mostly West Africans) had their applications rejected and therefore became deportable.

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Salis, E. (2018). Migranti e rifugiati : flussi misti e procedure di asilo in Italia nella crisi migratoria recente. In M. Carmagnani & F. Pastore (Eds.), Migrazioni e integrazione in Italia : tra continuità e cambiamento (pp.  233–261). Leo S. Olschki Editore. https://doi.org/10.1400/268432 Triandafyllidou, A. (2014). Multi-levelling and externalizing migration and asylum: Lessons from the southern European islands. Island Studies Journal, 9(1), 7–22. https://islandstudiesjournal.org/files/ISJ-­9-­1-­Triandafyllidou.pdf

CHAPTER 5

In the Margins: The Moral Landscapes of Migrant Reception

Until it was shut down in January 2019, the largest Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers (Centro di accoglienza per richiedenti asilo or CARA) in the region of Lazio, and the second largest one in Italy after the CARA of Mineo (Sicily), 1 was located in the district of Castelnuovo di Porto, a municipality of 8400 inhabitants some 25 miles from Rome. Standing in the middle of an abandoned industrial estate, the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto consisted of a huge concrete block enclosed with railings on which laundry was hanging out to dry. Army vehicles were parked all around the building, and in order to gain entry, one had to go through a sentry box manned by four soldiers. Yet the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto was neither a prison nor a detention centre: its residents were free to come and go as long as they signed in on the army register. This reception centre was opened in the late 2000s and, at its peak, it housed up to 1000 people. It received much media attention, especially

This chapter grew out of many meetings and conversations with Simone Di Cecco. In particular, it draws on the ideas that we developed in our paper “Gendered and racialized politics of waiting: A view from Italy” (2019) presented at the 2019 European Conference on Politics and Gender. I am deeply grateful to him for our always intellectually stimulating discussions about the reception of asylum seekers. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Schmoll, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6_5

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because over time several demonstrations regarding this facility were staged. In May 2014, for instance, the centre residents protested against deteriorating reception conditions: the €2.50 daily allowance had been suspended; the shuttle service to the railway station had been discontinued; soap was rationed; the size of the food portions, consisting mainly of rice and eggs, had been reduced. One of the demonstrators sewed his mouth shut. Others locked themselves in the centre and stopped the staff from leaving, until the military was called in to forcefully break the protest. But the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto really gained notoriety in 2015, when it was caught in one of the biggest embezzlement scandals in Italy in recent years, the case dubbed “Mafia Capital.” The social cooperative responsible for managing the centre was directly implicated in this scandal, which was related to the rigging of public procurement contracts to run migrant reception centres and involved a large network of corrupt local politicians, officials, businessmen, and cooperative managers around Rome. Although the cooperative was eventually cleared of all charges, the criminal investigation found serious irregularities in the management of the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto. More recently, in January 2019, the centre of Castelnuovo di Porto hit the headlines again when Matteo Salvini, then Minister of Interior and a staunch opponent of any form of reception of asylum seekers, ordered its closure. The closing of the centre provoked a public outcry from the local community, the employees of the cooperative, and the latter’s supporters in the Catholic Church. At the time, many media outlets portrayed the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto as a model of integration (see Fraddosio, 2019). As the centre’s service coordinator then told reporters (Tommasetta, 2019): […] For the residents, this [the closure of the centre] is something inhuman: they were well integrated into the area, even people from the neighbouring villages liked them; they made themselves liked, we did volunteer work. […] This is probably one of the few centres that are actually working in Italy. People from all of the countries of Europe, and even from outside Europe, came to visit us. The Canadian Prime Minister came, the Pope came. So many delegations came here to learn how [migrant] reception worked. Here, the reception [of migrants and asylum seekers] was genuine, but unfortunately, it’s coming to an end. 2

The centre of Castelnuovo di Porto was held alternately as a model and a counter-model of migrant reception. At the time when it was shut down,

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it had come to symbolise the end of an era, a paradoxical era if there ever was one. This, indeed, had been a period characterised by the existence of mega reception centres, sites that consisted of enormous compounds or mammoth buildings and reflected vague and inadequate reception policies. But at the same time, this era had been marked by a particular conception of migrant reception in Italy, one that involved having many centres scattered all over the country and with a huge reception capacity, thus accommodating a large number of asylum seekers—a conception that did not meet with the approval of the then Minister of Interior.

At the Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers I was granted permission to visit the centre of Castelnuovo di Porto several times, but once there, however, I was not entirely free to move around as I pleased. I was usually escorted while going around the premises and, on my last visit in 2016, I was not allowed in the dormitories. In order to make up for these limitations, I met with some residents outside the centre and I interacted with them on social media. At the time of my first visit in 2014, around 110 people were employed in the centre, which then housed 150 women, 500 men, and some 40 minors. The CARA was obviously overcrowded, with dormitories accommodating up to eleven people each. This high occupancy density was in sharp contrast to the empty space surrounding the facility: indeed, the only people that one would encounter along the nearly two miles separating the centre from the railway station were Nigerian sex workers. Owning a bicycle was the only way for centre residents to have some mobility, to leave the industrial estate. People would become very anxious when they had to go to Rome for an appointment at the prefecture or for a hearing before the Territorial Commission, the administrative authority in charge of making first-instance decisions on asylum applications. An Eritrean couple thus recounted how they had been forced to sleep rough on the streets with their three children because they had not been able to catch the last train in time. The CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto had been run since April 2014 by a cooperative affiliated with the conservative Catholic movement Communion and Liberation. Asylum seekers housed in the centre were identified by a number. Staff members explained that they knew indeed the residents’ first names, but that, as a matter of convenience, they preferred to refer to them by their registration numbers. Such a practice reflected a broader tendency to depersonalise the residents. For instance,

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on my first visit to the centre, I noticed that various small businesses had been set up in a huge room on the first floor—stalls providing money transfer services, selling clothes and food, and offering TV repairs. These stands were very busy, and their very presence served to emphasise the incongruity of forms of exchange (mainly bartering) and circulation in a place where hardly anything else besides these small business activities was going on. A few weeks after my first visit, the stalls were removed in order to “prevent trafficking,” as the director of the centre stated. The issue of trafficking could certainly not be dismissed as mere scaremongering since the centre was evidently a business hub for all kinds of activities: drugs were going around, rooms were being sublet, and many women had been victims of sexual exploitation. However, the allegations of “trafficking,” when made about petty trade, had distinctive overtones: such accusations suggested that taking control of the premises implied not only somehow policing illicit or illegal exchanges in the centre, but also refusing to countenance any type of informal activity. Getting rid of the stalls allowed the managers to monitor all the transactions conducted in the CARA: the residents were therefore forced to spend their €2.50 daily allowance in the shop run by the cooperative, the spaccio, which carried cigarettes, snacks, toothpaste, phone cards, and train tickets to Rome. After the stands were cleared out, the space was converted into a recreation room: a table football was installed, sitting prominently in the middle of a room that looked far too large and empty for it. Indeed, time went slowly at the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto as residents awaited a decision on their asylum claims. In 2014, after several unsuccessful attempts, I was able to visit the room of an Egyptian couple and their three children by myself. Once the social workers had left, the wife asked me to lean out of the window: I saw a heap of rubbish, a few feet away from the back of the building, on top of which rats were scurrying. This woman told me that she was terrified of rat bites and that, more importantly, she feared what might happen to the children living in the centre if they came across strangers, notably men. There were few leisure activities available to children: they could be seen wandering the corridors on their tricycles or drawing on the mildew-ridden walls. These children rarely went out: the parents were too worried that they might meet the wrong kind of people. For this Egyptian family that belonged to the Coptic bourgeoisie of Cairo, sharing living space with Black men was intolerable. The woman was especially wary of Nigerians, whom she characterised as lecherous and violent men who, moreover, spread diseases.

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Their eldest daughter had already been accosted several times, and a man had once tried to break into their room through the window, she related. In fact, the residents were not the only ones concerned about the problems of coexistence and forced proximity: such issues were, indeed, at the heart of the discourses and practices of the staff working in the centre. The conflicts arising in the centre were interpreted in terms of cultural differences between distinct national groups. At the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto, “ethnic group” (in italian etnia) was the term used by the employees, and therefore one spoke of the “Egyptian ethnic group,” the “Nigerian ethnic group,” the “Eritrean ethnic group,” and so on, thus conflating nationality with ethnicity and with the social construction of race. It should be noted that “ethnic group” (etnia) is a term commonly used by the various institutional actors (staff members of reception centres, NGO workers, etc.) involved in migrant reception in Italy: migrant “guests,” when referred to as an “ethnic group,” are defined by and reduced to “their” culture. The discourse of cultural difference often revolved around gender issues. One cultural mediator thus explained that the status of women varied from one ethnic group to another. For instance, in deference to “Arab culture,” one always had to seek the husband’s permission first before coming into the room of an Egyptian family. The staff’s tendency to essentialise the behaviour of migrant women became glaringly obvious in the course of an interview with the doctor working at the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto, with whom I was discussing the issue of African women’s sexual and reproductive health. When I asked questions about the abuse that women had suffered during their journey, he countered with cultural arguments: To understand this properly, you need to know which ethnic group (etnia) you’re talking about. Nigerians are interested in money and they’ll do anything to make some. It’s the lure of profit that prevents them from escaping [sexual] exploitation. Eritrean women, they know they’ll be [sexually] abused along the way, but it’s not a problem for them because it’s part of the deal, it’s part of their culture—like a toll you have to pay. Besides, that’s why they often get contraceptive injections or they have an abortion; others become pregnant just before they leave to be on the safe side [...]. Where it’s really tough, it’s for the Sudanese or the Ethiopians because they were not prepared to go through that. Well, there’s no need to exaggerate either, this violence is widespread but not systematic…

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The Empire of Acronyms What is actually happening in these marginal places where migrants’ lives are in limbo and time stretches out, where the waiting period before an asylum claim is adjudicated is months, sometimes even years, long? In this chapter, I offer a socio-spatial interpretation of the situation of women whose migration trajectories have been interrupted and whose projects are, as it were, “on hold” while they live in reception and accommodation centres, thus showing that their stay in these facilities has a major, and lasting, impact on their journey. This analysis delineates the contours of a political geography of bodies, which I explore by critically examining several key aspects and themes: confinement and the regulation of mobility; the management of forced coexistence and privacy and intimacy policies; the economy of discretion and visibility; enforced idleness as a source of concern and coping mechanisms for boredom. All these topics constitute moral issues and are, moreover, sites of contention and negotiation between the various actors concerned: migrant women housed in centres and staff members working in such facilities have differing interpretations of the role that an accommodation centre should have. Such disagreements obviously reflect their conflicting positions in the reception system, but also reveal the ambivalent role of social workers, oscillating as it does between surveillance and support (Kobelinsky, 2010). We need, therefore, to delve into the ethos of reception and accommodation centre employees in order to understand their commitment, their disillusionment at times, and the meaning that they give to their role in the asylum and reception system. As such, my research is part of an important strand of ethnographic studies focusing on the humanitarian, moral, and legal management of vulnerable persons. This approach has produced a rich vein of scholarship over the past fifteen years and conceptualises reception and accommodation centres as sites that shape subjectivities, a process affecting both the migrants housed in such facilities and the people working in them (Agier, 2008; Agier & Lecadet, 2014; Fassin, 2005, 2010; d’Halluin-Mabillot, 2012; Kobelinsky, 2010, 2012; Kobelinsky & Makaremi, 2009; Makaremi, 2009; Mai, 2018; Pinelli, 2013; Sorgoni, 2011, 2015). While the institutional architecture of migration governance in Italy and Malta is extremely complex, developing a typology of reception and accommodation centres allows us to shed light on several key aspects of migration management policies in these countries. The centres processing, managing, and accommodating migrants have many different names,

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which moreover change constantly, and it is easy to get lost in the plethora of acronyms and designations (CARA, CAS, CIE, CPSA, HUB, Open Centre, Closed Centre, SPRAR, etc.). Besides, such administrative intricacies are not specific to southern European countries. Indeed, France’s labyrinthine asylum and reception system—from the HUDA (Hébergement d’urgence pour demandeurs d’asile or “Emergency Accommodation for Asylum Seekers”) to the CADA (Centre d’accueil de demandeurs d’asile or “Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers”), and including the CAO (Centre d’accueil et d’orientation or “Reception and Orientation Centre”) and the CRA (Centre de rétention administrative or “Immigration Detention Centre”)—has been widely criticised. Furthermore, some centres switch from one task to another—and therefore are renamed and assigned a new acronym in the process—and even perform several functions at once. The centre of Contrada Imbriacola in Lampedusa (Italy) is a case in point: a former army barracks that was converted into a centre for migrants, it has served successively as a detention centre, an emergency reception centre, and a hotspot. The mega centre of Mineo in Sicily (Italy), which Marie Bassi (2015) has researched extensively, also provides a compelling example of the hybrid role of such facilities. This compound, which was closed down in July 2019 and, at its peak, housed over 4000 people, operated simultaneously as a reception and detention centre for several years, thus exemplifying the intimate connection between security and humanitarianism in southern Italy. This maze of acronyms and administrative designations, confusing as it is, deserves serious consideration as such. It denotes an exquisitely complex institutional and normative system, whose very existence shows that migrants are treated, and their asylum claims processed, differently according to a set of elaborate classifications. By examining how reception and accommodation centres actually operate in Malta and Italy, we can distinguish three types of facilities, each representing a particular form of migration management, according to the role that they have in the overall journey of migrants and to the stage of the refugee status determination process to which they correspond: closed or detention centres, emergency reception centres, and integration centres. Differentiating between these three types of centres allows us to demonstrate that a moral and administrative system, based on a hierarchy of immigration and asylum status, a categorisation of vulnerability, and therefore a clear division of labour between various centres, has been established in the southern borderlands of Europe. Furthermore, this typology shows that “emergency reception

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centres” play a key role in this system, occupying as they do an intermediate position between the opposite ends of the asylum determination process, between the twin poles of detention and integration. At one end of the refugee status determination process, then, there are the closed and semi-closed centres discussed in the previous chapter— places of deprivation of liberty, such as detention facilities, police stations, and hotspots. At the other end of this process and, by extension, of the continuum of migrant reception and accommodation, there are centres dedicated to promoting “integration,” a type of reception facility that is rather unusual in southern Europe. I should note that, while I use the phrase “integration centres,” I am cognisant of the debates surrounding the notion of integration—a problematic and controversial notion indeed, and for good reasons. From the perspective of the people working in such centres, integration is nevertheless a valid category: their mission is, indeed, to help migrants find a place, if not “their” place, in the host society. In Italy, these facilities, called SPRAR (Sistema di protezione per richiedenti asilo e rifugiati or “Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees”), were created in the early 2000s and they accommodate both people who have been granted refugee status and asylum seekers.3 There are very few such places in Malta, which reflects the punitive strategy towards migration prevailing in that country as well as the Maltese authorities’ unwillingness to support any initiative to further the integration of refugees into society. “Emergency reception centres”—the focus of this chapter—lie somewhere on the continuum of migrant reception and accommodation, in between detention and integration centres. As such, they fall into a grey area between selection and integration, rejection and reception. They play an ambiguous, indeed paradoxical, role in migration trajectories: while they live in such centres, migrants submit their asylum application and become acquainted with the host society; but at the same time, they remain highly marginalised and, moreover, there is a distinct possibility that their asylum claim will be denied and, therefore, that they will become “deportable.” Emergency reception centres such as the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto were designed to accommodate migrants only temporarily since they are expected to leave sooner or later, but as the average waiting time for asylum seekers to receive a decision on their application has steadily increased, a stay in these facilities is in fact anything but temporary.

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Lives in Limbo, Time Stretched Out Indeed, most of the people making the Mediterranean crossing apply for asylum upon their arrival in Europe. In the case of the women whom I met, they had claimed asylum on the grounds of violence and fear of persecution in their country of origin (see Chap. 3), but also because this procedure was the only way of obtaining a residence permit. Once a person has submitted an asylum application, he or she is automatically granted a residence permit, and therefore no longer, or at least for a while, in an irregular situation, and, most importantly, he or she can avoid deportation. As such, asylum seeking is a legal category that creates and instantiates particular subjectivities, shaped by a very specific institutional process (Sorgoni, 2011, 2015). The period elapsing between one’s arrival at the border and the Asylum Commission’s (the Territorial Commission in Italy) final decision on an asylum claim is an “ordeal,” in both the literal and the sociological sense of the term, as asylum seekers have to testify, often several times, before the commission about their experience—a process that, moreover, unfolds in a climate of suspicion about “bogus” refugees (on the issue of proof and on asylum seeking as a bodily ordeal, see Fassin, 2010, pp.  141–170; d’Halluin-Mabillot, 2012). This phase usually lasts more than a year, sometimes two if an appeal is lodged. And even when one is granted asylum or given humanitarian or subsidiary protection status, one often has to wait another several months before getting an appointment at the prefecture to receive the documents. In Italy, the average waiting time for asylum procedures has kept increasing since 2011 due to a surge in arrivals (Federici, 2012)—indeed, the Italian government declared a state of “humanitarian emergency” in February 2011. Life in reception and accommodation centres combines a “stretching of time with a shrinking of space” (Kobelinsky, 2012, p.  183; see also Hyndman & Giles, 2011; Mountz, 2011; Pinelli, 2013).4 During this waiting period, migrant women are caught in a paradoxical situation: they may, indeed, have “arrived” in Europe, but they remain in institutional limbo. Boredom is arguably the feeling that best encapsulates migrant women’s experience of reception and accommodation centres: “I’m tired of sleeping,” a young Nigerian woman from Benin City, who was housed in the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto, confided. The nature of life in reception and accommodation centres, marked as it is by boredom and waiting, makes it difficult for migrant women to project themselves into

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the future: they may form relationships, but they cannot put down roots. Worse still, as we shall see, as a result of the experience of waiting in these centres, the physical and mental health problems from which women suffer continue unchecked, and new vulnerabilities arise (Quagliarello, 2019). Waiting is, moreover, a highly powerful technology of subjection, in that the people staying in these centres are relegated to a subaltern position and maintained indefinitely in a condition of uncertainty (Kobelinsky, 2012). The managers and staff members of reception and accommodation centres have devised a set of institutional solutions in an effort to manage this specific temporality, this state of exception that has spread to the humdrum of everyday life: it is against this backdrop that “moral landscapes” take shape.

Moralscapes: The Moral Landscapes of Waiting The postmodern era has been characterised not only by a sharp increase in international human mobility, but also by new possibilities of mobility brought about by the rise of transport, information and communication technologies as well as by the growing media coverage of travel, notably on social media, and its globalising impact (Giddens, 1990; on hypermobility and new forms of mobility, see Lévy, 2008, pp. 132–159; Lussault, 2007, 2014; Lussault & Stock, 2003). While the expanding horizons of mobility have created new opportunities for those who can afford to move, they are also a source of deep angst for “the locals and forcefully localized” who have to stay put (Bauman, 1998, p. 99; on globalisation and the loss of ontological security, see also Giddens, 1990, pp. 79–111). The intense moral activity focused on migration and, in particular, on migrants crossing the Mediterranean that we are witnessing today needs to be situated in this context. This moral activity materialises in political and media discourses and practices, and it operates at different levels, from the local to the supranational. It is articulated in the legal instruments designed to regulate, shape, and restrict migrants’ movements. By defining and determining the right and legitimacy (or lack thereof) of certain people to “be here,” it serves to classify and categorise the various types of mobility and immobility—it is therefore a means of ordering migration. This moral activity is performed by powerful actors, such as states and international organisations, but it also involves the staff living or working in reception and accommodation centres. As such, it is an ordinary activity embedded in everyday situations

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and practices, and taking place in sites—reception and accommodation centres—where migrants’ trajectories are interrupted and suspended. This moral activity may be understood as a borderisation process or border work in that, as migration disrupts borders (both spatial and social), in response, international, national, and local actors seek actively to redraw and demarcate these borders and to hierarchise the people crossing them. The term “moralscape” allows me to describe the production of such borders, including their spatial aspects, in a context in which moral sentiments have become “a central driving force in contemporary policies” (Fassin, 2010, p. 7; see also 2005). The concept of “moralscape” is borrowed and loosely adapted from the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996), who coined a series of terms with the suffix “–scape” to explore the complex “disjunctures” and the processes of deterritorialisation caused by globalisation, as well as the emergence of global configurations coalescing across national borders, that is, beyond the confines of the nation-state (pp. 27–47). As such, the term “moralscape” is particularly apposite to describe the production of moral situations oscillating between the ordinary and the exceptional, between sluggishness and emergency. Most importantly, this concept allows me to set the situations that I have observed during my fieldwork in a landscape of waiting, which, indeed, takes shape in specific local and national settings, but is also part of a wider context—the networked and global apparatus that Michel Agier and Clara Lecadet (2014) have characterised as “a world of camps” (see also Agier, 2006). While I have opted here for the rather neutral terms “accommodation” and “reception centres” to refer to these sites, the people living or working in such facilities readily use the word “camp.”5 This suggests that the category of “camp” is not merely an expression part of the activist and academic vernacular and, moreover, that it denotes much more than the spatial layout of these centres, which, besides, often consist of buildings or permanent structures and bear little resemblance to any kind of encampment or humanitarian camp. Rather, the use of the term “camp” implies, I would argue, a global imagination—indeed, the various “landscapes” depicted by Appadurai (1996) are “the building blocks of [...] ‘imagined worlds’” (p. 33)—as well as a form of socialisation into life in and on the margins of Europe. By exploring the moralscapes of reception and accommodation centres, I seek not only to critically examine the distinction, indeed the boundary, between “deserving” and “undeserving” migrants, “real” and “bogus”

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refugees, although this dividing line is crucial and, as explained earlier, integral to the moral activity underpinning migration management policies. I also want to shed light on the ways in which this differentiation combines with other processes of hierarchisation of migrants and, in particular, on the ways in which border work (borderisation or the social construction of borders) is always simultaneously gender work (the social construction of gender difference), defining what is or should be proper masculinity and femininity. Looking at moral landscapes means also showing how migrant women’s spatial practices, the spatial organisation of reception and accommodation centres, and the public spaces of towns and villages hosting migrants have become issues for the management and staff of these centres, and therefore a source of concern and normative production. These spatialities are linked to specific temporalities: the daytime and nighttime, as well as the different hours of the day and days of the week that determine the pace, indeed the schedule, and the legitimate geographies of everyday life in reception and accommodation centres. Finally, moralscapes are also intersectional landscapes: the place that a migrant woman is assigned both in the centre and in the host society is dictated by several interrelated criteria that are as much about race as about gender. In other words, the fact that the migrant women featured in this study are of African origin determines as much as their gender the position in reception centres and in society that they are given or gain through negotiation.

Reception and Accommodation Centres: Places of Opportunity? The Logic of Crisis and the Logic of Emergency Reception and accommodation centres are not prominent sites, landmarks, or strategic nodes in the southern European landscape. These are ordinary places that have been rescued from the status of non-place thanks to the presence of migrants. Such facilities are, moreover, buildings or areas that have fallen into disuse, sometimes even wastelands: as Michel Agier (2008) has shown, accommodation centres are usually places that have been neglected or abandoned by the locals, sometimes only temporarily, sometimes for good. Indeed, whether they are located in towns or villages, in Malta or Italy, the sites that have been chosen to house asylum seekers are part of a very specific European context—a demographic and economic decline that was exacerbated by the crisis of the late 2000s.

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In the southern margins of Europe, old issues resurfaced in the 2010s: growing poverty, increasing unemployment, and renewed emigration, both internal and international. In Italy, the southern question returned to the forefront of public debate as Sicily was, and still is, the region with the highest rate of international emigration in the country and, moreover, southern regions became once again the main suppliers of skilled and unskilled labour to the north, as they had been in the post-war period. It was in this context of crisis, at this critical juncture in the history of southern Europe that countries such as Italy and Malta found themselves facing an unprecedented surge in boat arrivals, a challenging situation that needed to be addressed head on, but in some respects, also proved to be an opportunity. These contextual factors—crisis and opportunity—have all too often been overlooked in the media coverage of the EU “migration crisis” as well as in the reports produced by governmental agencies and think tanks on this issue. Yet a more nuanced contextualisation is key to understanding how migrants are perceived and treated in host societies and, moreover, the way in which border work is informed by local dynamics and embedded in local settings (Casati, 2018). In both Malta and Italy, reception and accommodation centres are funded and administered by the Ministry of Interior, sometimes in cooperation with town councils, and usually with the support and participation of companies and organisations involved in the third sector, that is, the grey area in the social work sector that lies halfway between the profit and non-profit, the private and public sectors, and which is a distinctive feature of the southern European welfare system. The third sector encompasses a wide range of actors—local charities and social cooperatives, foreign companies such as the French GEPSA, leading national organisations, as well as major international NGOs and agencies, notably the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The public and private sectors work closely together in the grey area of migrant reception, and such public-­ private partnerships take a variety of forms. Some centres have been set up in public facilities (usually former schools or army barracks that have been repurposed), are managed by social cooperatives and, at the same time, rely on private security companies, in keeping with the rise of the migration industry (Arbogast, 2016; Gammeltoft-Hansen & Sørensen, 2012; Rodier, 2012, 2019).6 In other cases, the building housing a reception or accommodation centre is privately owned, for instance by the Church or individuals, the latter being landlords to whom the arrival of migrants has been an economic boon.

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In order to fully understand how reception and accommodation centres work in practice, we need to elucidate the role of social cooperatives, since they run most of these centres and thus liaise with different service providers to operate them. These are often highly ideology-driven organisations: in Italy, there are, indeed, “white” cooperatives, which are of the Catholic persuasion, and “red” cooperatives, which have communist or socialist leanings—a distinction that usually reflects the local political history of a given area. They are able to secure public contracts thanks to their political connections with this or that local councillor. At the same time, these competing cooperatives come to arrangements to ensure that some balance is maintained between them at the local level. Indeed, as the director of a cooperative in Sicily told me, “we all have to eat here,” and therefore local actors must somehow find a way to “share the pie,” as he put it.7 The fact that reception and accommodation centres have represented a financial and economic opportunity for those southern European countries confronted with the so-called migration crisis has received too little emphasis. Firstly, the development of migration management created significant employment opportunities for young skilled southerners facing challenging circumstances, especially in the context of the economic crisis that swept through southern Europe in the late 2000s. A report by the Italian General Confederation of Labour (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro or CGIL) found that 65,000 people were employed in the public service sector related to migration (CGIL and Fondazione di Vittorio, 2018), but given that this sector relied heavily on subcontracting, the true figure was likely to be considerably higher. Moreover, with the rise of the migrant reception economy, some buildings were repurposed as reception facilities: for instance, old hotels that could not accommodate tourists anymore because they no longer met safety standards or were not attractive enough, or nightclubs such as the Tropicana in Ragusa (Sicily), where camp beds were set up on what used to be the dance floor. Finally, the opening of reception and accommodation centres for asylum seekers was seen as an opportunity to revitalise some southern town centres and villages experiencing demographic decline (Brault, 2018; Cremaschi, 2014): in southern regions, such as Basilicata and Apulia, or in small towns in Sicily, the creation of reception centres for refugee and asylum seeker families, and therefore the arrival of more children, made it possible to keep some schools open.

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In Italy, the year 2015 was arguably a turning point, as EU directives on reception and asylum procedures were enacted into Italian law then. Under the new rules, all asylum seekers were subject to forced residence in reception centres and, as a result, “emergency accommodation” evolved into a full-fledged business, into the migration industry as we know it today. There was, indeed, a tremendous growth in reception capacity, with the number of available beds increasing from 17,000 nationwide in 2013, 65,000 in 2014, to over 100,000 in 2015 and 2016, and up to 170,000 in 2017 (Campesi, 2018). The transformation of migrant reception into a mass operation had devastating consequences for reception standards. Furthermore, in a context of economic crisis, the creation of reception and accommodation centres in Italy helped attract skilled yet cheap labour from the south. The new wave of emigration from southern to central and northern regions may be explained in part by this pull factor: for instance, in Rome, the cooperative Auxilium, run by a Calabrian man, benefitted from the influx of dozens of workers from Apulia and Basilicata, a process that was consistent with the model of regional labour networks, a familiar concept in Migration Studies. Conversely, thanks to the opening of centres, some regions, towns, and villages were able to retain the workforce. In Sicily, staff members employed in reception and accommodation centres readily admitted that the creation of such facilities had been the reason that they had not been forced to emigrate, but they bitterly criticised their working conditions nevertheless (low wages, temporary contracts, hence little job security, and a lack of recognition for their qualifications). As a result of cost-cutting measures implemented by centre managers, law, sociology, or psychology graduates and postgraduates had become generic and multitasking social workers, regardless of their actual academic credentials. This caused deep frustration among centre employees, which helps understand some of the attitudes that I describe in further detail below. Moreover, due to the administrative and political procedures governing their creation, migrant reception and accommodation centres proved to be a bonanza for their managers. Indeed, these facilities were established through the normative mechanism of emergency, which over time has become “a governmental technique that is cyclical in nature” (Bassi, 2015; on emergency as a discursive strategy, see also Campesi, 2011). To borrow from Maccaglia’s (2013) argument about the waste management crisis in Sicily in the late 2000s, migration management was placed under “a state of permanent exception in which extraordinary public interventions

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[became] the rule” (p.  20). This mode of governance, which has been widely used in Italy to deal with waste management crises and natural disasters (Gribaudi, 2008), is highly effective indeed. Accompanied, as it often is, by “a military and apocalyptic rhetoric” (Bassi, 2015), emergency as a governmental technique is politically expedient, for it allows the public authorities to demonstrate that they are determined to tackle the issue head on and willing to commit the necessary resources. From a financial perspective, the logic of emergency is, moreover, an extremely potent tool since it enables actors to circumvent a whole set of regulations pertaining to property and asset management, tendering and procurement processes, and public-private transactions, and therefore to quickly allocate funds, and sometimes inordinate amounts of resources, to a particular project (Liberti, 2014; Lipsky & Smith, 2011).

Emergency Receptions Centres: Micro-Facilities and Mammoth Buildings Emergency reception centres can be divided into two categories, microand macro-centres. In Italy, the former, called Extraordinary Reception Centres (Centri di accoglienza straordinaria or CAS) up until the 2018 Salvini decrees, are small- to medium-scale facilities scattered across the country; the latter, the CARAs, are megastructures that have a capacity of several thousand people and in which the presence and role of the military and law enforcement are much more prominent. For instance, the centre in Sicily where Julienne used to live is a CAS accommodating around thirty people, whereas the centre of Castelnuovo di Porto, described at the beginning of this chapter, is a CARA that was home to as many as 970 residents until it was closed down. CASs are usually housed in abandoned residential buildings, while CARAs are often located in converted military or police facilities.8 Asylum seekers are sorted and placed in different types of centres across the country, and this distribution is often determined by vulnerability criteria. The status of vulnerable persons is a potent moral device, naturalising as it does the situation of the individuals thus labelled, and this is particularly the case when specific population groups, such as women and children, are categorised as such. While for migrant women, being considered vulnerable persons offers some advantages, notably better reception

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conditions, it may also be counterproductive when, as a result, they are seen as merely potential victims (Agier, 2008; Belloni et al., 2018). Furthermore, when migrant women are assigned the status of vulnerable persons, couples often end up separated and sent to different places, either because they cannot provide proof of marriage or because reception centres are already filled to capacity. As a social worker observed: Husbands and wives are separated: it’s a tragedy, a small trauma, a real heartbreak. These are arguably little things, but this is pain that accumulates. And it undermines [these women’s] integration into this society. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough centres for families. So we prioritise women. […] We don’t ask about their personal histories, we think about the future.

Compounding such separations is the fact that male visitors are rarely allowed in women’s centres and, when they are, such visits are strictly regulated. For instance, in Malta, women cannot receive visits from men or, in the case of married women, they require their husband’s prior approval.

The Spatial Grammar of Waiting: Immobilisation, Remoteness, Captivity In order to understand what happens in these reception centres, I take as a starting point a comment that the director of a centre made as a deliberate provocation during our interview: “There are only two types of centres: detention centres and SPRARs [integration centres]. Anything that’s in between, it’s just a mess, it’s chaos.” I take this provocative remark as an invitation to delve deeper into this “mess.” What is actually going on in the “chaos” of emergency reception centres? Given that this category encompasses a wide variety of facilities, what are their similarities? One commonality is the type of deprivation to which the people living in these centres are subjected. While emergency reception centres do not impose a complete deprivation of liberty, they are places in which free movement is restricted: since these facilities are in remote locations and mobility is governed by a set of rules and regulations, residents can rarely leave the centre and, moreover, find it hard to get around. The movements of residents are, indeed, monitored and logged: one has to sign in a register every morning and evening, clock in and out, and observe the curfew. If a resident fails to comply with these rules (by being absent from

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the centre for too long, for instance), he or she may be punished, which may take the form of legal sanctions (the asylum claim is suspended pending further review), although it does not always come to this. In recent years, migration scholars have used terms such as “containment,” “isolation,” “immobilisation,” and “dispersal” to emphasise the spatial logics of migration governance (Babels et al., 2019; Gill, 2009; Gill & Moran, 2013; Michalon & Zeneidi, 2021; Tazzioli, 2020a, 2020b; Tazzioli & Garelli, 2020). We can therefore speak of a spatial grammar of migration governance. This spatial grammar operates in situations on a continuum from centrality to seclusion, accessibility to remoteness, visibility to invisibility, concentration to dispersal, the inside (domestic space) to the outside (public space). These various criteria intersect, combine, and complement each other in the process of the spatial management of migration. For instance, in Malta, the public debate obsessively revolves around the issues of land use and overcrowding, and in this national context marked by particularly strong forms of xenophobia and Islamophobia, the island’s extremely high population and building density makes for a compelling political argument indeed that is regularly used to oppose migration. The Maltese authorities’ geographical solution to this problem has been to corral asylum seekers in the least accessible areas of the island in order to ensure that they remain invisible and immobile. The Hal Far military-industrial estate is a case in point: it is located near the airport, far away from any residential area and, moreover, poorly served by public transport. We can study this pattern of remoteness, or isolation, on different geographical scales—neighbourhoods, cities, regions, and states. This multi-­ scalar approach allows us to show that dispersal and remoteness are strongly correlated: emergency reception centres are both scattered across the country and located in secluded areas. At the local level, geographic isolation serves as a technique of invisibilisation, confining as it does migrants to a no man’s land, and thus limiting their social interaction with the outside world. One of the distinguishing features of the margins is, indeed, that those consigned to such places are excluded and treated as outcasts (Agier, 2008). Geographic isolation is gender-specific, and therefore relative. For instance, men and women do not have access to the same means of transport, since the latter are more likely to own a bicycle or a car. Isolation, moreover, carries racial connotations. The few buses running through Hal Far often refuse to pull up at the stop when only racialised people are waiting.

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The location of reception and accommodation centres in remote corners of the country is not necessarily something that has been deliberately planned by the Maltese or Italian authorities, but rather a circumstantial outcome of the fact that vacant buildings happened to be available in some areas. Nevertheless, in some cases, the remoteness of a centre turns out to be profitable situation as it somehow creates a captive labour force of migrants, especially when fields or factories are in the vicinity (Di Cecco, 2020, 2021a, 2021b; Dines & Rigo, 2016). In Hal Far, for example, migrant women worked in the nearby Playmobil factory, also located on this industrial estate. Reception centres, moreover, often operate as recruitment offices where women are hired as domestic workers: prospective employers come directly to the centre to “take their pick,” or staff members themselves offer migrant women to work for them and their families.

Women’s Mobility as a Source of Concern Migrant women’s mobility is governed by particular forms of regulation compared to those applying to men. Women’s movements are limited to certain hours and subject to specific conditions, and therefore restricted to a smaller area around the centre. For instance, women are often advised not to go out alone or in the evening. What concerns the staff of reception and accommodation centres is not so much that these women may be raped or assaulted as that they may engage in prostitution. Such concerns are understandable since some of these women have arrived in Europe through sexual exploitation networks (see Chap. 3), but they translate into control and discipline practices, whereby women’s movements are monitored, the visits that they receive are strictly supervised, and sometimes even their incoming calls are screened. In that regard, the question of migrant women’s visibility in public space is a fundamental one: from the perspective of centre workers, the key issue is that women should not meet men and thus be exposed to the male gaze, in keeping with the deeply entrenched stereotype of African women as particularly “available” and alluring creatures, and of their bodies as highly sexualised objects. Indeed, I heard on several occasions sarcastic comments made by some centre employees about African women’s supposedly irresponsible and unbridled sexuality: “We don’t really know what they’re capable of, how far they can go,” a social worker thus told me. Other staff members, on the other hand, emphasised these women’s

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inability “to defend themselves against the men of their group,” meaning African pimps. The aforementioned stereotype, and the resulting essentialisation and infantilisation of women portrayed as such, implies and serves to construct another, albeit related, stereotype—the figure of the decent and deserving migrant woman. Variously labelled as victims, whores, and sometimes both, then, migrant women are highly stigmatised, reflecting racial and gender prejudices. The concerns expressed by staff members about the mobility and visibility of migrant women pertains to racial and “sexual humanitarianism,” a concept introduced by anthropologist Nicola Mai (2018) and which he defines as a form of migration governance combining notions of sexuality and gender to construct, hierarchise, and categorise vulnerabilities (p. 2; see also Andrijasevic & Mai, 2016; Giametta, 2017). Yet such concerns about “women who go out,” and the practices oscillating between protection and surveillance that stem from this narrative, are not specific to migrant women, as evidenced by the extensive scholarship on the topic of gender and the city. Indeed, in Europe since the nineteenth century, the place of women in public space has been determined by social and moral imperatives, whereby they must exercise restraint and discretion. The (marginal) position assigned to women in public places reflects the social construction of insecurity as well as a conception of masculinity as a threat outside the home (Coutras, 1996; Lieber, 2016; Perrot, 1997): women ought to be modest and reserved in their outside interactions and movements, which, moreover, should be kept to a minimum, in order to avoid unpleasant encounters. But at the same time, in reception and accommodation centres, migrant women are subject to competing demands between control and empowerment. The practices disciplining, and thus limiting, women’s mobility sometimes conflict with the need to encourage greater interaction with the outside world so that they may become more autonomous: “It’s up to them to go out, they need to get out of welfare dependency, they have to get moving,” a social worker argued. The centre staff are, indeed, clearly concerned that, as a result of the restrictions placed on their movements, women residing in reception centres will end up deprived of agency and unable to take charge of their lives. Migrant women’s idleness is therefore highly stigmatised, and inactivity is viewed as a form of laziness. Women’s cleanliness and tidiness are also considered a cause for concern: they are criticised for not being capable of putting their things away and not knowing how to clean their room properly.

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This is the latest iteration of the age-old trope of the “indolent” and “passive” African woman, part of the long history of the colonial and exotic imagination. Indeed, when I asked one manager why the women housed in his centre could not find work outside, he retorted: “What do you want them to do? Cleaning lady? They are African, not European: they can’t even clean their own rooms! That’s a job for eastern European women, not Africans.” Such stigmatisation, whereby the idleness of migrant women is reduced and ascribed to their origins, is rather paradoxical since the policies of waiting implemented in reception and accommodation centres are actually what causes this situation of inactivity and boredom in the first place. To mitigate the adverse effects of boredom and encourage women to project themselves into the future, activities are organised in the centres to prepare them for their future lives, which also helps pass the time: cooking and nutrition lessons, sewing classes, hairdressing and body care workshops, training workshops on personal care, and so on.

Privacy Policies and the Politics of Intimacy Control of migrant women’s movements is rooted in the belief that the centre’s private areas are a “safe space.” Yet the forced coexistence of residents in reception and accommodation centres (whether mixed or women-­ only) is not without its pains and difficulties. Arguments, thefts, and violent incidents are not uncommon. Moreover, by severely limiting the possibility for women to escape the confines of the centre, the restrictions placed on their movements further exacerbate tensions within the domestic sphere. Access to everyday household appliances, such as washing machines and stoves, then becomes an issue and a source of conflict, which, in turn, can lead women to withdraw from the communal areas and retreat to their dormitory. As a result of these tensions, the centre staff readjust or tighten the rules governing everyday life: limiting laundry to one load per week per resident, setting up a cooking rota, with each resident taking turns to prepare a meal based on a set menu, and so on. Centre workers often reduce these conflicts to ethnic tensions and attribute women’s unhappiness to cultural differences between the various groups forced to coexist in the centre. To minimise the risk of conflict, then, residents are kept separate and, wherever possible, divided into groups by country of origin, sometimes even by language.

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Taken together, the rules governing everyday life in reception and accommodation centres amount to privacy and “intimacy policies” (Berrebi-Hoffmann, 2009): there are no single rooms; there are no locks on the doors; wake-up and bedtimes are set and fixed. Women find it extremely difficult to cope with the resulting forced visibility and proximity—ultimately, an imposed “extimisation” indeed (Lussault, 2003, p.  562). As Michel Foucault (1975/1993, 2001) has demonstrated in many of his works, transparent space can be used as a technology of power. Feminist geographers have also shown that visibility and the male gaze are intertwined (Rose, 1993, pp. 41–61 and 137–160). Conversely, the possibility of escaping the public eye, avoiding publicity, and withdrawing from the public realm is a condition of autonomy (Arendt, 1958/2018; Lion, 2014, pp. 968–969), as we shall see in the next chapter. In order to fully understand the privacy and intimacy policies at play in reception and accommodation centres, we also need to address the issue of migrant women’s access to healthcare, especially sexual, reproductive, and mental health services. There are several factors explaining the difficulties in access to healthcare services that migrant women encounter. Firstly, in the context of Italy’s competitive “migrant reception market,” cooperatives vying for public contracts to manage centres are encouraged to provide low-cost services: as a result, the range of social and healthcare services offered by reception and accommodation centres is limited. Furthermore, in certain towns or localities, there is sometimes fierce political opposition to the provision of adequate services to migrants, thus restricting their access to healthcare. Finally, as reception and accommodation centres are geographically isolated, healthcare facilities are difficult to reach, especially in areas such as Italy’s southern regions where, moreover, there is a general shortage of such facilities. Indeed, in the course of my fieldwork, centre workers repeatedly described their daily efforts to get an urgent gynaecological appointment for migrant women or to arrange their emergency admission to one of the regional obstetrics and gynaecology services. Migrant women’s access to abortion in particular is a major challenge. In Malta, abortion is prohibited altogether, whereas in Italy, it is legal, but the small number of doctors willing to perform abortions (many are conscientious objectors) is a significant factor hindering the provision of abortion services. For instance, in 2017, there was only one doctor performing abortions in the entire province of Ragusa (Sicily). In addition to this practical barrier, the Italian law (194/1978) allows abortion on request

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only up to the first twelve weeks (ninety days) of gestation unless there is a risk to the woman’s health or life: for migrant women who are already pregnant when they arrive in Italy, access to legal abortion is therefore not always possible. The fact that in most cases, migrant women have to pay for all medical expenses related to the procedure serves to further discourage them. As a result, some women resort to clandestine abortion. The physical and mental after-effects of the sexual abuse that migrant women have suffered require special care and regular follow-up, making the problem of the shortage of healthcare facilities and the resulting lack of access to healthcare all the more serious. Indeed, sociologist Chiara Quagliarello (2019) argues that in the reception centres in Sicily and Lampedusa, pregnancy serves as a “bodily reminder” of the abuse to which women have been subjected, which can increase the risk of severe complications and lead to depression (see also Grotti et al., 2018). As a social worker whom I met in Rome commented: They travel all this way, they flee their country, they are sold, trafficked; they travel by sea, they arrive here and they think they’re safe…And then they experience so much violence. [...] We don’t have the resources to attend to all of these women’s problems, especially psychiatric care. Everyone here needs psychiatric care now, even us!

There is no denying that, as a report by the CGIL, Italy’s largest trade union, shows, reception centre employees are confronted every day with situations in which their personal and professional ethics are challenged (CGIL & Fondazione di Vittorio, 2018). But while the social worker quoted earlier felt genuine compassion for migrant women and their difficult journey, other workers distanced themselves from them, downplaying the physical pain and discomfort that they experienced or the sexual abuse that they had endured. Migrant women were sometimes judged harshly for the choices that they made—to keep a child (a barrier to integration) or to terminate a pregnancy (an insult to nature). I observed this way of disregarding or distancing oneself from the plight of migrant women on several occasions: for instance, at the time of a flu epidemic compounded by a vaccine shortage, I heard a social worker ask the local doctor for flu jabs for her children, stating that those women at the reception centre who were also mothers could very well wait. Another social worker declared: “I’m against giving women drugs. If you’re walking around half-naked, then you shouldn’t be surprised if you fall ill.”

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In the context of the privacy and intimacy policies governing everyday life in reception and accommodation centres, which, as shown earlier, is fraught with conflict, children play a particular, pacifying role in the relations between migrants, staff members, and the locals. The walls of these centres are covered with pictures of babies born en route or in Europe. The birth of these children usually receives media coverage on the Internet or in the local newspapers. Furthermore, the local residents are often invited to the centre to celebrate the birth or the baptism of a child, to parties or special events, sometimes shows, as well as to bake sales or craft fairs where women sell what they have made. Publicised in the media and showcased at these events, migrant women and children are thus held as a symbol of the merits and success of humanitarian work (see Di Cecco, 2020, 2021a, 2021b), much like the babies born or rescued at sea (see Chap. 3). They also, and quite simply, help legitimise the existence of reception and accommodation centres in areas where there is sometimes hostility to the arrival or presence of migrants. Women and children therefore play the familiar role of symbolic mediators, a role that, indeed, they often assume as they are considered less “intrusive” or “threatening” to host societies. As a social worker noted: “Families are less scary. When there are families, people are more willing to get to know them. Some people spontaneously bring pushchairs, toys, bicycles.” This goes to show that the issues surrounding the presence of migrant children involve much more than mother- or parent-child relations, since children have become, as it were, part of the public domain. In some centres, volunteers come to help women with childcare, thereby allowing them to leave to take a shower or attend a language class. In other centres, weekly visits are organised, giving the local families the opportunity to meet those residing in the centre. As time goes by and bonds of friendship are formed, these visits sometimes develop into a form of mutual adoption between the families. These relationships, however, can be a source of concern when they involve only the children instead of the family as a whole, as an NGO activist explained in relation to the accommodation centres in Malta: Some families occasionally come on Sundays to visit the families [housed] in the centre. It’s a bit like a trip to the zoo. Some take the children out to play, to take a walk on the beach. It’s a kind of part-time adoption, if you’d like. But it concerns me: we don’t really know in fact what they’re doing with

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them. And [I’m also concerned that] they could take someone else’s child away.

Centre employees, too, feel that they have a responsibility to act as mediators between the migrants accommodated in the centre who need to be socialised into this new society, on the one hand, and the outside world that has to become accustomed to this foreign presence, on the other hand. During my fieldwork interviews with staff members employed in reception centres, many often opened up about the difficulties that they faced when trying to justify their work with migrants to their relatives or neighbours. As the manager of a centre in Malta recounted: When I come home, my grandmother tells me: ‘Get changed before you sit down, you’re coming from the illegals.’ It’s hard for me, but I’m always trying to explain to her that there’s no reason for me to change and that my job is just like any other job.

Finally, the potential for child abuse is closely monitored. At the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto, for example, the director argued that migrant women had to learn to take care of their children “the European way,” that “they [couldn’t] let them hang around the streets like in Africa.” Women’s relationship to motherhood is assessed and analysed: much of the tensions between staff members and migrant women revolve around the issue of breastfeeding, for instance. A social worker thus stated: It’s unbelievable, after all they’ve been through, they ask you for powdered milk [to prepare infant formula]. All the time. There’s really a problem with newborn care. There’s malnutrition, and it’s related to cultural issues. For instance, they run into town to buy cornflour and then they complain that their children have stomachaches. And this obsession with powdered milk…There’s a woman who wanted to keep her child at all costs. She was offered a therapeutic abortion at 16 weeks and she refused. In the end, she had the baby and she doesn’t even breastfeed it. I can’t understand it.

This sort of remark, which reflects the normative and prescriptive assumptions underlying the concept of “good” motherhood, is highly ambivalent, giving the impression that centre employees want to make women aware of their responsibilities as mothers while infantilising them.

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The Micro-Politics of Internet Use Malta, December 2013, a rainy Sunday afternoon. It has been over a year since I last came to the Hal Far camp. Following the mass arrivals in October, the site has been reorganised, and people have been gathered together in containers set around the Hangar. I have found asylum seekers from Syria and West Africa there. I see them wandering around the huge lot, holding their mobile phones, their eyes riveted on their smartphones. Others are squatting, engrossed in their Facebook profile. I am struggling to make contact with them, to get their attention. This is because since my last visit to the Hangar, a Wi-Fi connection has been set up: it has become, it seems, an absolutely essential component of everyday life here. A Syrian mediator told me indeed that, when the survivors of the October 2013 shipwreck arrived in Hal Far, the first thing that they requested was to be given Internet access: it was imperative that they get in touch with their relatives and try to locate or identify the people lost at sea.

This excerpt from my fieldwork notes is telling in that it shows what the Internet has come to represent for migrants waiting indefinitely in reception and accommodation centres. There is nothing original or unique about this since our digital life has arguably become integral to the construction of our identities and to our access to information (Aim et al., 2013; Casilli, 2010). Accordingly, when migrants are denied Internet access, they experience it as a painful loss and, moreover, denounce it as a real injustice. Conflicts and negotiations over Wi-Fi access are therefore a part of everyday life in reception and accommodation centres. “I have a lot of friends and neighbours in Europe. I used to contact them via the Internet, but the connection was shut down. It’s really sad,” a young Somali woman, whom I met in 2010 at the Hal Far centre for single women, lamented. There may be several reasons that centre managers decide to restrict Internet access. Firstly, the Internet may be used to disseminate information or pictures casting the centre in an unflattering light, which the staff are obviously keen to avoid, and yet cannot entirely prevent. Furthermore, cost may be a consideration: offering Wi-Fi can be expensive and thus strain the centre’s already limited resources. But more importantly, from the perspective of centre employees, limiting Internet use and making residents stay offline serve an educational purpose. At the Marsa reception centre (Malta), staff members and social workers were highly critical of the

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amount of time that residents spent online, and indeed, I found the following motivational advice on posters plastered on the walls: If you’re looking for a job…don’t give up! With courage and determination, you’ll eventually get there! Stay positive: don’t be negative, as it won’t help. Don’t remain passive, don’t simply sit and wait: playing with Wi-Fi is a waste of time when you need a job.

In the same vein, the manager of the CARA of Castelnuovo di Porto told me that, much to the dismay of the residents, he had turned off the Wi-Fi: “Screens are bad,” he claimed, “and if you really need the Internet, you buy a card.” But “without the Internet, the days are empty,” two young Eritrean women whom I met in Castelnuovo di Porto countered. The decision to restrict Internet access often stems from genuine concern for the well-being of residents. In Ragusa (Italy), I thus had a long conversation with a social worker who said that she could not fathom why migrant women spent what little money they had on electronic devices instead of using it to search for a job or to get around by public transport. Given that the Internet is seen as encouraging prostitution, she also worried that women might meet the wrong kind of people online—a legitimate concern indeed since it is not unusual for pimps to contact women through the Internet. Yet, from the perspective of migrant women who find themselves stuck in these remote places, far from urban life and, moreover, in a context in which their movements are closely monitored and curtailed, the Internet is a means of maintaining contact with the outside world. This dispute between staff members and residents over Internet access has unintended, and paradoxical, consequences: as a result, some women seek out and befriend men (a “good friend,” a “boyfriend,” or a “date”) in order to get a smartphone—and therefore an Internet connection—as a present. Meeting men outside the centre is, among other things, a way of procuring a smartphone—this little convenience that helps migrant women cope with boredom. But it should be noted that for migrant women, the outside world beyond the confines of the reception centre is a resource that entails far more than “economic-sexual transactions,” to borrow Paola Tabet’s phrase (2004). For example, during the two years that she stayed in a village in Sicily, Julienne started attending church regularly: “The church people came every week to pick me up to go to Mass, they were good to

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me,” she recounted. The sympathetic and generous local priest helped her get a tablet: I play online games, I play on Facebook, I watch videos: I can do anything I want, I’m fine. There’s WhatsApp. We watch soap operas from Cameroon because here, in the [living room of] the centre, there’s only Italian on TV, and we’re tired of Italian [laughter]… If you’ve had enough, you go to your room, and that’s it, you log in.

All in all, the issue of Internet management exemplifies the kind of misunderstanding and disagreement that can arise between staff members and residents about the nature and purpose of reception centres. For migrant women housed in such facilities, the centre is nothing more than a place that they hope to leave as soon as possible, whereas for the staff, it is these women’s residence, a living space and, as such, it serves an educational purpose. From their perspective, reception and accommodation centres are, indeed, meant to be places of transition and socialisation where migrant women not only familiarise themselves with the receiving country’s labour market, its language, and its way of life, but also learn the various aspects and techniques of femininity, the latter encompassing motherhood, conjugality and, ultimately, through the control of women’s sexual and reproductive life, sexuality (on the camp as a place of learning, see Pinelli, 2016; Sorgoni, 2015). Social workers struggle to reconcile this comprehensive educational project with the limited resources available to them in reception and accommodation centres, and the cynicism or indifference that they sometimes display towards migrant women may be understood in this light.

In the Margins, Towards a “Politics of Resistant Life” In this chapter, I have attempted to sketch out the moral landscape of reception and accommodation centres, using a gendered and spatial approach that is attentive to the many boundaries drawn and redrawn every day in these facilities. This borderisation or border work is related to, and stems from, the very nature of reception and accommodation centres: these are places of deprivation, located in the margins, and remote, where the space is overcrowded, and residents are subjected to heavy surveillance and control. The predicament of migrant women living in such

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centres is that of a twofold marginalisation: they are held in the “useful margins” of Europe, whose express purpose, as mentioned earlier in the introduction to this volume, is to sort out, select, and contain migrants; and, moreover, they find themselves in a situation of isolation, waiting, and boredom in which their agency is constrained and their ability to shape their migration trajectory severely limited. Reception and accommodation centres may therefore be understood as places in which migrant women lead an enclosed life in forced proximity with others, or following Marie Bassi’s (2015) fruitful analysis, as “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961/2017, p.  4) where barriers to social intercourse with the outside world are erected (pp. 14–16), and residents undergo a process of “mortification of the self” (p.  21). As such, centres are sites of discipline designed to reshape migrant women, socialise them into a subaltern position in society, and prepare them for the challenges that lie ahead. But reception and accommodation centres are also sites of resistance. Indeed, as the African-American feminist bell hooks (1990/2015) has argued, the margin is both a place of oppression and “a space of radical openness” and possibility (p. 145), that is, a space where counter-powers and counter-spatialities are conceived and developed (pp.  149–153; see also Crenshaw, 1991; Hancock, 2017). For migrant women, then, the margin becomes a place of experimentation with new practices and with a new relation to the self and to space during migration, the site of “a politics of resistant life” (Agier, 2004, p. 135), and the location of “autonomy in tension”—the subject of the next chapter. I explore the concept of autonomy in sites and at scales that have remained understudied, and therefore relatively marginal, in migration studies and mainstream political geography—the body, the domestic space, and the digital space—in order to show that for migrant women, moving from one scale to another opens up a new horizon of possibilities.

Notes 1. The CARA of Mineo was shut down in July 2019 and, at its peak in 2014, it accommodated over 4100 people (see Bassi, 2015). 2. Simone Di Cecco’s research (2019, 2020, 2021a) on the issues that volunteer work by asylum seekers in Italy raises and on the instrumentalisation of such labour is most illuminating. 3. In Italy, the capacity of SPRAR centres was increased, reaching 26,000 beds by November 2016. This programme was undertaken in cooperation with

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town councils, which then were responsible for subcontracting the management of these centres to charity organisations and cooperatives. 4. It is worth noting here Doreen Massey’s (1994, pp. 146–156) critique of the concept of “time-space compression” championed by David Harvey (1989, p. 284). For Harvey, time-space compression involves a shortening of time as a result of the transition to a new form of organisation of capitalism based on instantaneity, and therefore the acceleration of the pace of everyday life (pp. 284–307). However, as Massey (1994) points out, time-­ space compression is not experienced in the same way by everyone, depending on whether one is in charge or at the receiving end of such processes: it affects people differently according to a complex “power geometry,” that is, the fact that “different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections” (p. 149). In contrast to the shortening of time described by Harvey, reception and accommodation centres are, indeed, places where time stretches out. 5. Those who are more politicised refer to these centres as “Lager,” that is, the archetype of the concentration camp. 6. Thanks to Claire Rodier’s (2012, 2014, 2019) and the Migreurop network’s (Arbogast, 2016) seminal work on the migration business, the key role that private security companies play in the management of all kinds of centres across the EU is now well documented (see also Gammeltoft-­ Hansen, 2015; Lemberg-Pedersen, 2012). Moreover, a large body of literature has accumulated on the migration industry (Gammeltoft-Hansen & Sørensen, 2012). 7. Although the law on public procurement rules specifically prohibits that kind of practices, they are nevertheless widespread in Italy, as evidenced by the criminal investigation into the case dubbed “Mafia Capital,” which was launched in 2014 and concerned the awarding of public contracts to manage migrant reception centres. 8. In Spring 2016, there was a total of 3090 CASs, with a reception capacity of 70,918 and widely distributed across the country, as well as 13 CARAs with a capacity of 7290, which means that the majority of asylum seekers were staying in these facilities. This distinction between micro- and macro-­ emergency centres also applied to Malta, with the mega compounds of Marsa, Hal Far Hangar, and Hal Far Tent Village, on the one hand, and micro-reception centres scattered across the island, on the other hand. In 2012, there was a total of 1505 adults, including 355 women, residing in such centres in Malta.

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CHAPTER 6

Scales of Autonomy: The Body, the Domestic Space, the Digital Space

The Bellatana reception centre was opened in a derelict tourist hotel in an isolated village in Sicily, 26 kilometres far from the nearest small town. “A camp in the bush” is the description given by the women I met there. Aïcha arrived in January 2015. She had to wait six months for an appointment with the asylum commission, then another year before it granted her subsidiary protection. When I saw her again in 2017, she had been at the reception centre for two years and was still waiting to be summoned to collect her residence permit at the prefecture. In Bellatana, the days dragged on in a routine orchestrated by the management team: the menu was determined in advance (usually pizza or lasagne), but each resident had to take turns contributing to the cooking and cleaning. Apart from these tasks, the women did not do “that much,” as they used to say. While the men were employed in the nearby fields harvesting onions, it was difficult for women to find a job in such a small village, except for some housecleaning from time to time. A social worker did send them to harvest tomatoes some 30 kilometres away, but the opportunity only arose once, and only lasted a week. It was also difficult to go out, as public spaces were far and few. Men were frequently invited to take part in village life, play in football tournaments, or dress up for the living nativity scene at Christmas. But women tended to remain on the sidelines of public life in town. An association had arranged Italian classes in the village, but they stopped after two months because the asylum seekers’ skill levels were too varied for the teacher to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Schmoll, Women and Borders in the Mediterranean, Mobility & Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45097-6_6

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manage. On Sundays, some women went to mass, the Pentecostals a few kilometres away and the Catholics in the village. But Aisha is a Muslim, so she prayed alone, in the privacy of her bedroom. The director of the reception centre, Ranaldo, wanted to set up a vegetable garden to keep the residents busy and to encourage the consumption of local products. During my first visits, a few chickens and hens were running around, and there were fresh eggs every day. Then the chickens disappeared. When I asked the director about it, he told me that a fox had eaten them, but when I asked Aïcha and her friends the same question, they laughed and replied, “A fox, yeah right! We had a good time eating the chicken!” When it is not too cold, Aisha spends her time braiding the other women’s hair and chatting with them in the garden. For a long time, she shared her room with a Nigerian woman who had been expelled from another centre, where “she had caused problems.” The woman was mentally unstable and the roommate experience was difficult. Since then, Aïcha has managed to get the director to share her room with a friend, a “sister,” a French-speaker like herself. When I last visited Bellatana in January 2017, the heating was not working and it was cold. Residents heated bottles of water in the fireplace to heat their beds, and I observed mould starting to form on the walls. Six newborn babies were living in the centre, all wrapped up to their noses in coats and blankets. On the other hand, the Wi-Fi worked quite well. Aisha locked herself in her room and buried herself under her covers, watching her new tablet. I commented that she didn’t have one when I last visited, and she explained that as soon as she had been able to put some money aside, she asked some friends in Rome to get one and mail it to her. Aisha was illiterate, but the fact that she could neither read nor write did not prevent her from making intensive and creative use of social media: she took pictures of herself all made up and well-dressed in outfits that invariably matched the colour of her handbag, posing in the reception centre’s garden or next to a car. She filmed herself laughing, dancing, and singing, and sent these images to her friends in Rome, Paris, and Abidjan. Some of the short movies she made were specifically for a young man she met online: she sang in playback and showed herself in particularly nice outfits and more sensual poses. After sending him her videos, she’d reassure him, “Honey, even though we are far from each other, it doesn’t matter to me. Be patient, my darling, we will meet one day.”

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Autonomy in Tension In the previous chapters I described the different types of places where women live. Be they detention or reception facilities, they are all marked by coercion and deprivation (Bernardot, 2005). These places can be seen as universes of ordinary exception or, in Foucauldian terms, heterotopias (Agier, 2010; De Dardel, 2013), which are places unlike others in that they concentrate and engage dynamics and power struggles related to the presence of a sociological minority. While the previous chapters examined the organization of everyday life in reception and detention centres, the views of their staff, and migrant women’s trajectories and experiences of daily life in these places, in this chapter I wish to shed light on the practices of “escape” (Mezzadra, 2011) or “resistance” that these women engage in on a daily basis, from the limbo waiting. Passage through reception and detention facilities is unquestionably a transformative ordeal (Conlon et  al., 2017). Some women come out angry, some have lost all hope, and some have found husbands or met hosts who helped them get out. They have all revised their migration plans while staying and waiting in these places. Regardless of whether the centre is closed or open, a detention or a reception facility, it is always a place of passage in two meanings of the term: people pass through them, but they are also transformed by the encounters and experiences that occur there. In Foucauldian terms, the passage through these places constitutes women as “migrant subjects,” between subjection and subjectivation. How to highlight women’s initiatives and acts of autonomy in such a context? They are generally shrouded in two forms of silence. One is that the events of these women’s daily lives are typically minimized, even by themselves: “We don’t do anything,” or at least “nothing interesting,” they tell me. Yet a gendered regard sees that the “not much” or “nothing interesting” of the domestic and the ordinary is in fact very significant. Furthermore, everyday life in women’s reception or detention centres is largely neglected by research on contemporary migration. This is firstly because there are fewer women than men among migrants. Secondly, it is because women mobilize in less striking ways than men, for reasons that deserve further investigation, connected to the construction of gendered identities. Thirdly, shedding light on the forms of micro-resistance in which women engage might seem to be at odds with the imperative to recognize the status of persecuted women or appear to be tantamount to minimizing the hardship of the situations in which they find themselves.

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This last point is important: my aim in this chapter is to restore political meaning to women’s situations by highlighting little everyday negotiations and subversion tactics, while momentarily shifting away from the focus of the previous chapters—the precarious and coerced situation in which women find themselves. This chapter thus examines women’s use of what Laurence Roulleau-Berger (2010) refers to as “microbial tactics,” approaching women’s autonomy in a way that is attentive to their everyday experience. I probe the notion of “autonomy in tension” to shed light on the troubled space-time of the migration process, pulled between vulnerability and projection towards a better life and a new horizon. Recently, feminist and gender studies have renewed discussion on the notion of autonomy, based on a critique of the Kantian conception of autonomy. Kant defined autonomy as the ability to give oneself the law that one decides to follow (Kant, 2012). In the Kantian oeuvre, there is a strict and clear separation between affects and desires, on the one hand, and moral will, on the other. Autonomy is then read as an expression of the morality of a free and rational individual. The feminist work proposes a different approach, based on a refutation of the radical and absolute opposition between autonomy and heteronomy. These feminist approaches situate autonomy in the field of relationality and the affirmation of a subjectivity that is also made up of desires, feelings, passions, and attachments. Such a relational approach to autonomy shows that autonomy can be born of encounters with others and new situations caused in particular by mobility. It is congruent with the intersubjective and relational vision of migration defended by feminist literature (Jouan et al., 2009; Pratt & Hanson, 1994; Miranda, 2004). Éléonore Lépinard advances feminist understanding of autonomy by proposing a shift from a subject-based conception to one centred on relationships with structures. She reminds us that autonomy is not a capacity possessed by the individual and manifested when faced with external constraints, but rather the product of social structures, relationships, and practices: “The displacement of the locus of autonomy from the self to social relationships—market, state, bureaucracy, law, institutions, private and intimate bonds—in which the self is embedded, requires rethinking the very essence of autonomy. Such a reformulation of autonomy is an urgent task to pursue for feminist theory” (Lépinard, 2011, p. 217). This reference to structures and power reminds us that empowerment is a dialectical process. It is in this sense that I speak of “autonomy in tension”: autonomy is embedded and must be understood in the context of

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the forms of power and social relations that orient and structure the migration process. From this perspective, autonomy is reminiscent of how scholars such as Judith Butler (2004, 2006) and Joan Scott (1986) have theorized “agency” in reference to Michel Foucault’s notion of power, a power that makes people exist as much as it subjugates: We need to replace the notion that social power is unified, coherent and centralized with something like Foucault’s concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal relationships, discursively constituted in social “fields of force.” Within these processes and structures, there is room for a concept of human agency as the attempt […] to construct an identity, a life, a set of relationships, a society with certain limits and with language—conceptual language that at once sets boundaries and contains the possibility for negation, resistance, reinterpretation, the play of metaphoric invention and imagination. (Scott, 1986, p. 1067)

The notion of “autonomy in tension” also supports a vision of the migratory process that is transformative and reflexive. This is in line with a trend in migration scholarship that aims to shed greater light on the “autonomy of migration” while highlighting and investigating the subjectivities that are constructed in and through the border (see, for instance, Rodriguez, 1996; De Gourcy, 2005; Ma Mung, 2009; Mezzadra, 2011; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Heller et al., 2019; Tazzioli et al., 2018). For some authors, starting with the Foucauldian conception of insubordination facilitates theorization of the autonomy of the migrant subject, considering that there is a primacy, an autonomy of subjectivation in Foucault’s work (1982): “While Foucault has often been considered as the philosopher of power and discipline, we contend that, on the contrary, his conception of power relations grounded on the idea that there cannot be power relations without ‘intransigence of freedom’ is precisely what enables inverting the gaze of the relationships between power and resistance, subjection and subjectivation” (Cremonesi et al., 2016, p. 2). In line with such approaches, this chapter starts with this inversion of the view of power, taking “resistance as a starting point for analysing forms of power,” while revealing “the excesses of resistance over power.” But how and where do these insubordinations manifest themselves? For a geographer like myself, the question of “where”—the spatial dimension (visibility, locations, scale)—is fundamental. I would like to propose a view of “autonomy in tension” that is attentive to localized tactics and

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micro-geographies of power and to the inscription of evolving political subjectivities in places and spaces. Such a view is in line with current efforts by feminist geographers to investigate the spatial dimension of agency (Caillol, 2018) and advocate for a scalar approach to migration and gender (Silvey, 2004a, 2004b, 2017).

The Spatial Dimension of Autonomy: Three Nested Scales In order to observe and comprehend the spatial dimension of migrant women’s “autonomy in tension,” I propose a scalar perspective, meaning one that is attentive to the interplay of scales and how individuals can play with (or jump) scales to achieve their goals or resist constraints. Scale was a subject of intense debate in geography in the 1990s and early 2000s. A vast literature on the social construction of scales and the processes of rescaling showed how power was embedded in multiple, intertwined, and sometimes contradictory scalar processes in tension (Smith, 1992a, 1992b; Marston, 2000, Marston & Smith, 2001). This work highlighted the need to focus on discrete or incongruous scales of power, to “get down the scale” (Collignon, 2012) to show how microlevels—often neglected by mainstream geographical thinking—were just as important as regional or global spaces in analysing the spatial tactics of individuals, especially the most disadvantaged. In this literature, domestic space, neighbourhoods, public spaces, and bodies became sites of observation on par with the country or region for understanding the spatial embedding of power and its circumventions (Marston, 2000; Nagar et al., 2002; Silvey, 2004a; Hyndman, 2004; Staeheli et  al., 2004; Mahler & Pessar, 2006). This was not a plea for a systematic “micro” perspective on the world, but rather a call to study a variety of nested scales and reflect on how the observation of microscopic dynamics allows us to see macroscopic dynamics in new ways. In this context, “scale jumping” refers to the action of moving from one scale to another: it is a commonplace operation carried out by geographers in their readings of social space (they have a “trans-scalar perspective”) and by social actors themselves—be they individuals, groups, companies, institutions—in their daily lives. This operation, which allows one to move from a “micro” to a more “macro” scale or vice versa, can be described as a “geomethod,” like what ethnomethodologists have called

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“ethnomethods”: a tactical use of space to carry out practical actions in everyday life. In the work of many geographers, the notions of “scaling up” and “scaling down” have been used mainly to describe the strategies implemented by large-scale actors such as transnational companies and the military-security complex. States, for instance, will “scale up” to macro-­ regions or “scale down” to microregions (Brenner, 2004). Marxist geographers use this approach to show how capital chooses to relocate accumulation to an urban or regional scale rather than a national scale. Others, especially feminist scholars attentive to spaces of reproduction, argued that we should take account of ordinary actors’ ability to jump scales to implement spatial tactics and strategies. While states or large corporations often make these jumps of scale at the macro-regional level, less powerful actors may also invest in micro-scales when deploying scalar tactics and strategies: at the scale of the body, for instance (Smith, 1992a; Jones et al., 2017). In their quest for autonomy, the women I met act on three particular scales: the scale of the body, the scale of domestic space, and the potentially global scale of digital space. My intention here is not to demonstrate the epistemological and methodological interest of these scales for geography or migration scholarship. Others have already done so brilliantly in books and thematic journal issues, rehabilitating the study of long-­ neglected scales such as the body and domestic space, and examining the geographical properties of the digital space. Furthermore, many migration scholars have turned their attention to one of these three scales (on the digital space, see for instance Dana Diminescu (Diminescu, 2008, 2012a, b), Koen  Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi (Leurs & Ponzanesi 2018); on domestic space, Rubah Salih  (Salih, 2000, 2002, 2017), Paolo Boccagni (Boccagni, 2018, 2022a, b, c; Boccagni & Giudici, 2021), and Alison Blunt  (Blunt, 2005a, b; Blunt & Bonnerjee, 2019, Blunt & Dowling, 2022; on the body, Jennifer Hyndman (Hyndman, 2001), Alison Mountz  (Mountz, 2003, 2004, 2018, 2021), Claire Hancock (Hancock, 2011) and Rachel Silvey (2005), among many others). As rich as the migration literature’s explorations of these three scales have been, they have usually treated each scale separately. More than studying them as such, I wish to explore how they are nested in order to understand the shaping of migrant subjectivities and the scalar tactics they may develop. These scales are interlocking and intertwined: the body lives in domestic space, and the body and the domestic space both participate in making the digital space in a variety of ways. Sometimes one scale

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becomes more significant than another: the deprivation or limitation of the use of one of these scales can lead to a shift in balance to the others. These interactions and shifting balances can sometimes be striking and bear witness to the situations of violence suffered by some migrants, who jump from one scale to another: the Internet can become a space of withdrawal or refuge when the intimacy and dignity of the body is hindered, while the body can become a resource when the security that should characterize the domestic space is threatened.

Resisting with One’s Own Body Bodies are critical sites for gaining ontological security and exerting control over one’s trajectory when the broader environment and personal circumstances are insecure (Giddens, 1984). Bodies are also the primary locus for fighting—asserting rights, mobilizing abilities, and planning individual or collective resistance (Staeheli et al., 2004). Migration is an indisputable ordeal for the body. Often wounded and increasingly vulnerable due to the hazards and violence of the migration path, the body is also transformed and sometimes even strengthened by the migration experience. Facilitating as well as constraining, the body can become an escape, a place of healing, pleasure, care, and concern for the self. This makes the body a resource, a site of aesthetic and kinetic techniques, the site of plans—in other words, a whole string of activities intended to master one’s identity that prove to be of great importance in a context of constraint and insecurity (Mauss, 2006; Foucault, 2001a, 2001b). This is why we must observe activities of the body, from the most ordinary to the most overtly political like hunger strikes. Women’s bodily techniques are first and foremost observed in their routines, particularly religious ones: prayer paces the long days of boredom in reception centres and gives them strength to carry on. Research on religion in prisons has shown what a resource religious routine can be in a context of deprivation of freedom, and it was often the case for the women I met (Béraud et al., 2016). Other women perform food or body rituals to attenuate the wait or to ward off bad luck: an example of this is fasting, which I frequently observed and which, according to the women who practiced it, gave them some influence in what they felt was a disgraceful or stagnant situation. Bodily techniques can also be used in exceptional moments and act as a medium of rites of passage. At the Balzan centre in Malta, I attended a party organized by Nasrin, a young Somali woman who had just learned of her imminent resettlement in the US, in spring 2011. It was a very emotional day, because her family would be leaving the other residents

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that very night. Nasrin devoted her day to beauty and body care (hair, clothing, etc.) while her husband carried out the final formalities and other women looked after her children. Nasrin wanted to become blonde before leaving for America. I had the privilege of donning rubber gloves and brushing the lightening product on her hair. Her suitcase would be packed in a rush, at the last minute, after laughing and dancing into the wee hours. Another way of looking at bodily techniques concerns the biological and reproductive dimension of women’s everyday life. The position of women with regard to reproduction evolves along the migratory path and varies, of course, according to their individual histories and situations, but all the women I met had experienced the violence of physical aggression, illness, and exhaustion. Some of them gave birth: as mentioned earlier, children were born at sea, in the desert, on arrival in Europe. For some of the women I met, being pregnant and having children meant taking ownership of their bodies in order to move forward. Even when these children resulted from rape, their birth was experienced as a strength, a far cry from the moralizing speeches I often hear claiming that migrant women’s birth rates are a hindrance to their mobility and emancipation. Care of the body during pregnancy and at birth also sets the pace for life in the reception and detention centres, and from many of these women’s perspective, giving birth in or on the way to Europe is a form of resettlement, a way of putting down new roots. Pregnancy and birth thus go well beyond the family sphere and are intertwined with migration politics. Taking care of oneself does not necessarily mean expanding the family, however. Other women told me how contraception, abstinence, or abortion helped them to keep control of their lives. Jamila, a 22-year-old Somali woman I met in Malta, explained that she did not want to marry her fiancé because having children would prevent her from undertaking the studies she wanted to pursue in the US. Postponing her marriage was the only way she could imagine avoiding having sex and getting pregnant. All of these situations, whether they involve having children or not, highlight the vital importance of access to gynaecological care, which is a crucial condition for women’s reproductive autonomy. As mentioned in the previous chapter, however, such care is currently alarmingly inadequate. Another bodily technique of reassurance that women use to resist to loneliness, anxiety, and boredom is the intensive use of selfies and videos. For those who have access to a smartphone, the construction of bodily images can be used to resist the anxious atmosphere of reception centres. In detention facilities, though, the use of smartphones is severely prohibited. The ban on using any device to produce an image of oneself is a

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major source of suffering. In places such as the detention facility of Ponte Galeria (see Chap. 4), women get particularly depressed and this has strong implications on how they relate to their bodies: some women remain in their pyjamas, and some even stay under their blankets in bed all day. In Ponte Galeria, a beauty and hairdressing salon was set up to provide a space for women to care for their bodies, but it was left largely unused. I nonetheless did see some women implement a series of gestures and body rituals that allowed them to fend off the risk of “letting themselves go,” as one of them put it, and helped them pass the time. Gymnastics, yoga, and hair braiding were common practices. Other women I met at the Ponte Galeria centre chose to sunbathe topless in the courtyard, under the uncomfortable gaze of the security guards. In detention centres, women frequently used their bodies to protest (self-mutilation, suicide attempts, and suicides), although men’s strikes and mobilizations are often better known and covered more extensively by the media. For instance, in February 2017, eleven Moroccan women who had come via Libya and were detained at the Ponte Galeria Centre went on a hunger strike, but the media accorded it little attention. Other bodily techniques are based on distancing oneself from other bodies that are considered impure and contaminating. This is the case of Jovana, a Serbian woman I met in the Ponte Galeria detention centre in 2014: she had left her country four years earlier in search of a better life. Jovana insisted on the legitimacy of her choice: it was not a matter of fleeing poverty, she said, even if the lack of work in Belgrade precipitated her departure, but rather of claiming her right to mobility and, by the same token, an improved situation in terms of learning, knowledge of the world, and maturity. Jovana made the conscious and affirmed choice to speak only in English, although she spoke perfect Italian. By speaking English, which most of the detention centre staff did not speak, Jovana distinguished herself from them and from the other residents, thus performing that she was “out of place.” She said she refused to speak the language of the country that imprisoned her, and insisted that I should interpret it as a form of “strike” or “protest.” Jovana had been in Ponte Galeria for five days when I first met her. The centre’s employees told me that her deportation was imminent because of her “refusal to cooperate.” She was terrified of being infiltrated by what she called “the bad energies of the place,” so she refused any physical contact with the other women held in detention (she left the room whenever another woman arrived). Above all, she exercised a lot and ate everything she was offered, “to build up her strength,” she told me.

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Controlling the Domestic Space Now a jump in scale, from the body to domestic space. Though the way that domestic space is organized and where it is located varies along a spectrum of constraint and choice, the need for domestic space seems to be an invariable of the human condition. Jean-François Staszak insists on the duality of domestic space: it is both a place of control governed by mechanisms of power and a place of autonomy because of the control it allows over personal space and time. The tension between distance and proximity that is characteristic of any human interaction is particularly salient in domestic spaces, due to their modest size and the effects of forced proximity induced by cohabitation (Simmel, 1971; Goffman, 1977). During the migration process, domestic space is the site of simultaneous political, sexual, and family transformations, the scene of new forms of proximity, like the occasional and circumstantial cohabitations imposed in reception centres. As mentioned in the previous chapter, proximity is often experienced as a threat in the domestic configurations I have observed: there are the danger of being attacked or robbed, the encroachment of privacy by overly intrusive roommates, and being disrespected by staff and people in adjacent rooms. Consequently, migrant women implement a variety of distancing mechanisms and tactics to create their own space. But in other instances, women experience distance as an imposition, especially in situations of extreme constraint like detention centres or centres where women’s relatives are not allowed to join them. There are many studies on the living conditions of people in situations of extreme constraint and insecurity, and they are helpful in understanding women’s tactics for gaining control over a domestic space and making it home. Sociologist Gaspard Lion’s work on homeless people’s tents and shacks in Paris’s Bois de Vincennes demonstrates how much one can hang on to oneself and maintain oneself socially in limited living conditions, creating a place that offers the qualities of home, a privileged place of intimacy and safety, to gain autonomy when confronted with the miserable and stigmatizing treatment offered by certain institutions such as charities or the State (Lion, 2014): “The shacks and tents are not simply places of relegation, stigmatization and insecurity, the people who live there really do live there. Far from being deprived, they apply skills to live in a context of very strong constraints” (Zeneidi, 2002). Furthermore, feminists have long thought of domestic space as a political space. Often considered the place of oppression and exploitation par excellence, it is also seen as a place

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of appropriation and even emancipation. African-American feminists in particular have seen domestic space as a potential place of retreat from the violence of white society (Hill Collins, 2000; hooks, 2015; Blunt & Dowling, 2022). This diverse body of research teaches us certain questions that we have to ask if we wish to understand the everyday forms of control and negotiation of domestic space: Who organizes the space? Who dictates the rules of everyday life there? The micro-politics of immobilization and cohabitation correspond to acts of micro-resistance in defence of intimacy, which ranges from the arrangement of dormitory spaces to reception and detention facility revolts. Reception centres allow for ways of creating intimacy: transforming a bed into a private space using blankets as curtains, placing clotheslines to mark the separation between tents, strategically positioning objects to recreate intimacy where there is none. Migrant women who are with their families (especially their children) feel an especially strong need to develop and preserve their privacy, so they create micro-borders around the children with objects such as bikes or strollers. Such a concern for others, especially the most vulnerable, structures how one organizes a space for oneself or one’s loved ones. But for those who migrate alone, family may be differently present, as in the form of photographs affixed to the bedroom wall. Indeed, as I said in Chap. 3, whatever the journey, nobody really migrates alone: those who stayed behind accompany migrants in many different ways. One finds the same decorative elements in most of these women’s domestic spaces: beauty products, a mirror, and the necessities for eating (a burner, dishes); colourful stuffed toys donated by associations or gifts from staff or visitors. When they have the economic means and there is an Internet network, they have a computer allowing them to keep in touch with distant family and friends. Television is also important. Finally, suitcases are a promise and an indication of preparation for a new journey, feared or hoped for. Suitcases can also be used to conduct informal trade, because goods can be more mobile than bodies. In some cases, carving out religious spaces can also be an attempt to make space more intimate, by laying a carpet in a corner of the dormitory or placing icons on the walls and furniture to create a space for prayer. All these elements in the organization and structuring of everyday space seem to fulfil the function of a “dwelling” as is it defined in phenomenology: the building of a place of ontological security (Malpas, 2014). If arranging a domestic space amounts to providing some elements of

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security in a context of uncertainty, recreating intimacy in detention centres is obviously much more difficult. Admittedly, there are some strategies for arranging the space, such as moving sheets from the bed to clotheslines or drawing and signing one’s name on the walls to leave a trace of one’s passage, but they are limited. In fact, the passage through detention is an extreme episode in which migrant women’s bodies and minds are put to the test—an episode that renders them even more vulnerable, their suffering accentuated by their feelings of injustice, uncertainty over how long they would be in the centre, and the lack of private space. Several of the women I met in Ponte Galeria detention centre refused to sleep with the others to protest their situation. They settled on the ground outside their rooms for the night. Forced by the police to spend subsequent nights indoors, some managed to be placed alone in a single room and refused to use the mattresses they were given. These reactions can be interpreted as a refusal to normalize the space of detention. “I don’t belong here with these women,” one of them told me. Domestic space is a central issue, at the heart of migrant women’s negotiations and tactics for gaining in autonomy. These tactics can be observed through the prism of proximity and distance, hybridization of the private and the public, and the creation of “niches of intimacy.” However, when the possibilities for using domestic space as a resource and place of intimacy are limited or non-existent, women can fall back on other places: an obvious one is the body, as mentioned above, but there is also the digital space. Over the last fifteen years, many scholars have commented on the emergence of a new significant scale in the lives of people in migration: the Internet (Ponzanesi, 2019).

Making the Internet a Safe Space? What is left for migrant women when the places of privacy are restricted? What role can the digital space play in maintaining emotional and spiritual security and building collective identities and subjectivities in difficult or insecure situations? Can it replace material space? The social networks and communication platforms that migrant women use regularly can be considered as a privileged field of exercise for the inner life, made more or less visible according to the extent to which one promotes one’s image, blended with an (often polyvocal) narrative of the migratory experience that includes peers as well as those remaining in their country of origin. It also makes it possible to reach other people.

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As an emotional resource at the intersection of affect, the political, and technology (Witteborn, 2014; Madianou & Miller, 2012), the digital space is all the more important in contexts of immobilization, isolation, and ostracism. It is the site of a wide range of feelings and emotions, from love to anger, devotion to piety, laughter to despair. Messages and posts, especially declarations of love and tenderness, are a favoured way of maintaining bonds tested by distance and separation. This is the case with the many expressions of affection that migrant women send to their mothers, partners, brothers and sisters, and friends. The semi-public nature of some of these messages also generates a form of security, in the sense that it reassures the migrants by reaffirming a family role of daughter, sister, mother, or partner that absence and distance might diminish. The frequent publication of spiritual messages and icons seems to play a comparable reassuring role. Many of the women whose activities I follow on social networks re-post and comment on adages, sermons, prayers, and religious videos. Digital routines are attempts to soothe the anxiety and insecurity of migration and physical separation, and transnational communication allows women to better cope with the fragility of everyday life far away and on their own (Leurs, 2014). Women rarely post messages expressing forms of direct political mobilization: information on revolts and protests is relayed by militant organizations and activist networks, but not the women I met. They use the digital space more as a space for the “suspension of suffering”: it is about putting a (re)empowering image of oneself online (and on the stage). It would thus be erroneous to conclude that the images posted are apolitical; they simply play a role in reconstituting and constructing a different image of the migratory path. The only exception I have observed to this rule of silence on the suffering of migration is the circulation of documentary films on the atrocities suffered by African people in Libya, which women use to inform and even discourage their relatives from starting a migratory journey. Far from evacuating the use and importance of the body, the digital space has become a place for staging, reconfiguring, and exalting it. As I mentioned earlier, migrant women use selfies to construct this self-image: it has an eminently social dimension insofar as it aims to convey a discourse on migration. For instance, they document each new location along the migratory path in Europe on the Internet, through photographs and stories. Those who are still held in reception centres will efface this depressing experience in favour of photographs taken in public spaces and wearing

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flattering clothing. Outdoor photography is especially used as a way of compensating for the lack of control over the domestic sphere. In other words, there is an erasure of the most degrading and dehumanizing experiences in favour of curating the most rewarding aspects of the migration experience. Of course, these photographs correspond to a double social injunction: online visibility and documenting a migratory success. However, they also indicate that individuals are taking control of their physicality by constructing a personal digital sphere and a positive self-image. The staging of physicality on the Web must arouse desire, and women practice the art of assemblage: they use outfits, make-up, decor, and photographs superimposed with texts to create incarnations of themselves, thus hybridizing places (“here” and “there”), situations, and relationships (friends, lovers, employers, etc.). When the staging is successful, emoticons and comments fly: “Wow what a go (“go” being a bambara expression meaning “girl”!” “Very beautiful, my dear.” As Antonio Casilli wrote, “Bodily traces of the Web are ways of expressing and achieving the autonomy, control and effectiveness to which individuals aspire. They also become acts of citizenship by adapting themselves to the current context” (2010, my translation). As a “space of coexistence” deployed on a transnational scale (Beaude, 2012), the digital space allows access to information (spatial information in particular) and makes it possible to forge an online performative image and gendered identity. The Internet offers migrant women numerous resources: “Through uses and practices linked to the Internet, virtual space becomes a medium for social relations mobilized in migration, a space for socialisation (through communication, community) and a space of resources (cultural, economic and social), with concrete manifestations in physical space” (Marchandise, 2014). The digital space is thus an observatory for the autonomy of migration: it shows both the resources mobilized in migration and individual and collective narratives of the migratory experience. Far from being a space of alienation, as some describe it, the digital space is a way to escape a daily life that sometimes suffocates women by, for example, soothing anxiety over absent relatives or the lack of information on what is to become of them.1 Moreover, the use of the Internet no longer appears to be the prerogative of the most educated or richest migrants: the digital space plays an important role for all migrants, even when they have little command of reading and writing. This was evident early in this chapter in the case of

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Aisha, who is illiterate and uses mainly video. That being said, the digital space is indeed socially clustered and differentiated by the social class, status, and educational level of users. In the variety of examples developed here, the digital space emerges as an intimate and yet deeply relational site where privacy and image work are coordinated in gradual and segmented ways, as users play with different levels of intimacy and extimacy.

Autonomy in Tension and the Restructuring of Intimacy: Some Concluding Remarks This reflection on the different scales of autonomy in tension leads me to re-examine the intimate/extimate connection and postulate that we cannot reflect on autonomy without reflecting on intimacy. Intimacy is a central value in our societies: many studies on late modernity have emphasized that the individuation process is accompanied by a form of democratization of intimacy (Giddens, 1992), a right to intimacy, but also an intensification of a tyranny of intimacy, which is fatal to the public sphere (Sennett, 2003). Whether we speak of democratization or tyranny of intimacy, they necessarily lead to the exclusion of some; while the right to intimacy is self-evident for the privileged, it is less so for the rest, even if they actively seek it. Intimacy is thus a privilege and an intersectional experience. For migrant women even more than others, the relationship between the intimate and the extimate is embedded in political and economic structures such as migration policies (Zelizer, 2005). Even in the most insecure situations—detention centres, streets, camps, shelters—individuals do not have equal rights to intimacy. Migrant women thus have a specific but ambivalent position, since they, as women, are simultaneously protected and controlled, as we saw in the previous chapter. Finally, access to intimacy is played out in a spatial tension between proximity and distance: women may desire and request certain forms of distance or cohabitation (sometimes all-female), or they may spurn and avoid them. The violence of certain spaces is thus not due to the specificity of the forms of distance and cohabitation they establish, but due to who defines them and how they are influenced by migratory status. The issue of intimacy also raises that of visibility. We can distinguish places according to how well women can manage to establish spaces of

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intimacy, according to various regimes of visibility. To do so, however, we have to see how this intimacy may be projected into non-domestic spaces, playing with scales from the micro level (the body) to the macro (digital space) and the public or external spaces in between, thus subverting the oppositions between private and public, here and there, near and far. In this context, intimacy is a sine qua non condition of autonomy. Far from merely being a private matter or a women’s issue, it becomes an eminently political issue (Pain Staeheli, 2014).

Note 1. It also marks my radical shift away from the paradigm of the uprooted or doubly absent migrant, as astutely signaled by the sociologist Dana Diminescu. Dana Diminescu, “The connected migrant: for an epistemological manifesto,” Migrations société, No. 102, 2005, pp. 275–292.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: What Migration Does to Women, What Women Do to Migration

Most of the women I followed over the course of this research still live in Europe, whether they settled in Italy and Malta or continued on to Germany, the Netherlands, England, Switzerland, France, or Scandinavia. The history they forged with Europe over the years is one of endless waiting, due to an overburdened asylum system and the lack of alternatives for regularisation. These women endure and wait. Their “suspended lives” can improve thanks to the help of associations, the support of networks of acquaintances, and, in a few cases, a happy encounter with someone who somehow takes care of them. Other will be able to be regularised, thanks to a permanent job, a marriage, or a civil union. However, such unions do not systematically lead to their regularisation (far from it), or even a stable life. Women’s lives remain fragile and insecure and the boundary that separates those who can be regularised from the others is inconstant, fuzzy, and circumstantial. Some of these women even fall back into irregularity after having had valid papers for a while. Throughout this book, I wanted to show how the marginalisation of migrants, the hardening of migration policies, and the current policy obsession with borders and control harm the cause of women, although these policies may be packaged in feminist values. In turn, women respond to these situations by developing resistance tactics and strategies that may be relational and emotional, individual and collective, and implemented through installation or circulation.

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The concept of autonomy, which I borrow from recent feminist writings, denotes processes that are far more complex and contradictory than those implied by emancipation. Autonomy is a moving, relational, reflexive experience, always partial and subject to contradictions. Using the methodological and analytical perspective of “autonomy in tension” makes it possible to show how these women resist, project, rebuild, or imagine new horizons on their migratory route. More than a threshold, autonomy is an aid and a horizon for migration plans. “Autonomy in tension” also implies accepting the paradoxical character of space, which is both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, emancipatory and subjugative, binding and a vector of “ways to escape” (Mezzadra, 2015). Meanwhile, in southern Europe, maritime arrivals continue but constantly evolve in terms of number, orientation, and fate. Arrivals to Italy and Malta have decreased in the past few years, dropping from 120,000 in 2017 to 15,000  in 2019. Since 2021, however, the number of central Mediterranean crossings have started to rise again. The Channel of Sicily is still and again the most perilous migratory route in the world, and its danger has increased with the establishment of a Libyan rescue zone at sea. The majority of boats are now handled by the Libyan coastguard, when their departures were not already impeded earlier in the crossing. The situation of foreigners in Libya has continued to deteriorate: torture, imprisonment, and slavery are their fate, especially for those who tried to flee the country, who are systematically punished for it if they are caught. Although it is amply documented by the media and NGOs, such violence did not change the repressive approach of EU member states. On the contrary, the Italian-Libyan agreements were renewed on 2 February 2020, held up by other EU members as an example of effective action, while the work of NGOs at sea continues to be the subject of smear campaigns (Pécoud & Esperti, 2020; Esperti, 2020; Heller & Pezzani, 2017). At the European level, political decisions that could have brought improvements for migrants and refugees make little headway, as can be seen in the successive failures of the recast of the Dublin Regulation, or the failed vote on a parliamentary resolution on Mediterranean Sea rescue, on 21 October 2019. The recent adoption of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum will eventually make it harder for people on the move.

Researching Migration. A Politically Heated Issue I would like to reflect briefly on the place and role of research in the current political situation. Over the past twenty years, migration scholarship has focused on the EU’s repressive migratory regime and the situation at

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its borders, in order to denounce and critically question the discourses of fear coming from political and media spheres. Researchers, often in collaboration with concerned others (such as artists or grassroot organisations), have joined forces and engaged in the production and dissemination of knowledge on migration, to counterbalance the effects of exclusion and repressive policies and to testify to the increasingly difficult conditions of migratory journeys. This new generation of critical research, which has been developing since the early 2000s, has focused its efforts on the dimensions of constraint and control in the migration process and the role of politics and power, but also on the marginalisation of specific social groups—in the framework of a moral economy of asylum, for example. In this regard, there has been an epistemological turn in migration studies towards more critical approaches (Lacroix et al., 2021). Compared to the more optimistic stances of the 1990s, when research claimed migrant groups had transnational agency, migration specialists have since had to note the repressive turn at Europe’s borders and bear witness to this moment while keeping their work academically sound and robust (Schmoll, 2019). There is no denying that it has sometimes been difficult to maintain the independence of our academic agenda when faced with the tyranny of these repressive policies. The hardening of migration policies, culminating in the war on migrants that is playing out in the Mediterranean, has certainly fueled this critical trend in research. It should not, however, prevent us from seeing the bigger picture of a world of mobility and relations, whose status and place should not be trivialised, today as in the past. This is precisely what the global and transnational turn in the social sciences has been working on in recent decades. From this point of view, the Mediterranean migratory movements that are discussed in this book are but a small part of the big picture of global circulations and movements. This book is therefore far from reflecting “the” migrant condition, or even that of migrant women today: female migration is not a homogeneous phenomenon, because migration is a polymorphous process, just as the situation of women in migration is plural. Instead, the migrations studied in this book are tied to specific orders of representation that institute and oppose legitimate and accepted migrations—less sensationalised because they are more obvious, people who have the right and moral licence to move—to other migrations, designated as reprobate, condemned, and illegitimate. What characterises and distinguishes the wretched of the sea is therefore not the exceptionality of

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their movement but rather the fact that they transgress their assigned immobility. The situations and journeys documented in this book are also part of a larger and still-incomplete history, that of women in migration. My plea is for feminist reflection integrating the critical turn we are experiencing in migration studies, starting with two common threads: feminising the gaze and repoliticising the question of gender. But first we must measure the work that’s already been done, so let’s look backwards for a moment, to briefly review forty years of research on migrant women and see what we still have to do, in which directions.

Taking Women into Account: Three Waves of Research on Women and International Migration This book was an attempt to shed light on the stories and history of women who crossed the Mediterranean. Women represented the majority of international migrants in 2021, or 51.6% of migration to Europe, according to the UN, a percentage that grew in 2022 by Ukrainian migration. Women also accounted for about 30% of asylum seekers in Europe in 2021. We also know that proportionally, more women migrate internally within their own country or their home regions. Although it is difficult to ignore their presence, there are still many deep-rooted stereotypes in research on the migration of women (Marchetti, 2018). The most persistent is thinking of female migration as a recent trend. The expression “feminisation of migration” sanctions this idea and has become commonplace in many books and textbooks on migration studies, including some of the most famous.1 Although it first came from academic research, this common belief has met with great media and institutional success thanks to the 2006 publication of a report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on migrant women. The report was intended to draw attention to women, but had the paradoxical consequence of entrenching the stereotype that this was a new phenomenon because it linked female migration to contemporary labour market transformations and globalisation (Donato & Gabaccia, 2015). However, many researchers such as Katherine Donato, Nancy Green, and Donna Gabaccia used major examples like the slave trade and European transatlantic migrations to remind us that the presence of women in international population movements is by no means a novelty.

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In France, for example, women already accounted for 47% of the immigrant population in 1911. Thus, as Mirjana Morokvasic writes, “opposing a ‘contemporary feminized’ model and another, ‘situated in the past’, from which women would have been absent, does not stand up to scrutiny over a long period of time and in different countries of the world […]. The feminization of migration considered a novelty today is in fact insignificant compared to the feminization that has been going on in the past” (Morokvasic, 2011, p. 28; see also, among others, Zlotnik, 1990, 1995; Kofman, 1999; Willis & Yeoh, 2000; Green, 2002, Green & Reynolds, 2020; Miranda, 2008; Donato & Gabaccia, 2015). Other studies have argued that if current female migration differs from the past, it is in the form it takes: women of the past were “following”— that is, accompanying or joining—their husbands, while contemporary female migration is a more “autonomous migration,” less connected to men than before. Again, this analysis does not stand up to comparative examination of places and periods. If family reunification has been the dominant form of female migration in western Europe since 1973–1974, it was mainly because it was one of the only ways to migrate legally. This does not tell us much about previous family and female migrations, which could occur in other legal ways or irregularly. As for the figure of the so-­ called autonomous or pioneer migrant, it is hardly specific to the contemporary period: there were single migrant women—servants, workers, farm labourers—in the cities and countrysides of Europe in previous centuries. Like the present, the past saw the coexistence of several types of family and individual migration (Bertrand & Boucheron, 2019). Finally, as I have said repeatedly in this book, even if women go alone, their migration trajectories are nevertheless embedded in family, village, and community structures. We therefore have to critique the very notion of “autonomous” or “independent” migration by showing that even the most independent migrations are never completely individual and isolated, for both men and women. Since the 1970s, feminist researchers have been working for the acknowledgement of the “share of women” in international migration. They showed that referring to migration as a primarily masculine phenomenon was a pitfall, a sign of a dominant masculine gaze that has long made the presence of women invisible. This mechanism of invisibilisation of women is well known in gender studies. It may have been accompanied by a minorisation of their own mobilities by women themselves—a form of self-invisibilisation that I have witnessed several times during fieldwork:

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for various reasons, women cannot or don’t want to draw attention to their movements and activities. There have been three phases in academic writing on women and international migration. The first wave of research on women migrants started in the 1970s, and was devoted to the recognition of migrant women and sought to shed light on their role as workers, not just wives, mothers, or followers. As early as 1984, a major issue of the International Migration Review paved the way for a flurry of research on the proportion of women in global migration and their participation in labour markets. Mirjana Morokvasic signed a landmark editorial: “Birds of passage are also women.” This first phase of research on female migrants coincides with what is usually called the “second wave” of feminism, sensitive to the interweaving of the spheres of the productive and the reproductive. This is why this initial research paid particular attention to the recognition of migrant women’s work. The 1990s marked the beginning of a second phase of research, during which the role of the family and family networks became central in reflections on the causes and modalities of migration. This research opened the black box of the home as a place of exploitation and oppression. In sending countries, women’s family contexts push them towards emigration and embed them in “counter-circuits of globalization,” in Sassen’s words (2000). In receiving countries, households need migrant women to work as carers and domestic workers within a globally segmented labour market. The two most common figures of female migration in the literature of the 1990s are the domestic worker and the sex worker, both racialised and minoritised in the host societies (Boyd, 1989). This work highlights the dark side of the current phase of capitalism, which is based on the work of the “servants of globalization” (Parreñas, 2000, 2001, see also Anderson, 2000; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003). By analysing the interconnections of the productive and the reproductive on a global scale, this work addresses the gendered and international division of the labour market according to mechanisms of domination associating class, race, and gender. Within this period of research, work on southern Europe was particularly prominent, since southern Europe is one of the regions of the world most in demand of female domestic work due to specificities of its welfare model, delegating care responsibilities to households-as-employers (Parreñas, 2001; Scrinzi, 2013). In reaction to optimistic approaches to transnationalism, this phase of research also shows that transnational mobilities are neither emancipatory nor necessarily transgressive (Pratt &

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Yeoh, 2003). These scholarly developments were in line with a new wave of feminism, influenced by intersectional approaches, putting minority women and women of colour at the heart of its concerns. The third and most recent phase of research on women and migration has uncovered other forms of migration. Part of this work has focused on recognising the share of women in the most skilled migration. They point to the process of dequalification caused by migration for women who pass, for example, from the status of doctor to that of nurse (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). “If there is feminization, it is above all in the sense that women have become the majority in the total immigration of higher-­ education graduates in OECD countries,” write Speranta Dumitru and Abdeslam Marfouk (2015). For these two researchers, the visibility of the most marginal or subordinate women, “prostitute, mother, wife, housekeeper or victim of trafficking” should not overshadow the presence of the most qualified, who work in the health or high-tech sector. Similarly, the share of female student migration has long been overlooked in student migration research (Raghuram & Sondhi, 2021). Finally, other studies highlight the presence of women in many situations of exile and forced displacement, which increasingly contribute to global migration. This research, discussed frequently in this book, cultivates the demands of feminist and political approaches attentive to the interplay of scales, from the bodies of migrant women to global geopolitical issues and stakes (Hyndman, 2013; Mountz, 2018). As Gillian Rose argued in her seminal Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, we need “to represent women as social subjects without referring to the figure of Woman” (p. 235). Similarly, the past forty years of research on the migration of women have made it possible to speak of women as social subjects without ever referring to the figure of “Woman” (or the Migrant Woman, in this case) (Rose, 1993). Research on women and international migration has demonstrated the need for situated analysis of female migration, the diversity of which precludes any generalisation. It shows the need for a comparative and intersectional approach to women in international migration. Comparative, because the linking of different regional and historical contexts makes it possible to restore the complexity of migrations and their variation according to places, time, origins, destinations, contrary to any naturalising and unequivocal vision of migrant women. Intersectional, because, women’s positions are entwined with multiple power relations. This means, for instance, recognising women’s diversity in terms of legal status, race, age,

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and class. Intersectionality is contextual and must be “situated” (Yuval-­ Davis, 2015), inscribed in a specific context, a “here and now.” In this book, “situated intersectionality” manifested itself in situations of ethnographic observation, sometimes when I least expected it: this was the case when the shelter manager mentioned in Chap. 4 told me that African women were not able to clean their rooms or work in Italian homes. Without intending to, in my eyes he provided testimony to the historical reversal evoked in the introduction of this book that made African women “leave” Italian homes, replaced as domestic workers by other immigrant groups, and go work outside, in the streets or agricultural work. The intersectional approach must thus be connected to consideration of the historicity of the moment, comprehensible through the postcolonial perspective, by remembering (as I did in the introduction) how the situation and position of African migrant women is also part of the long history of relations between Africa and Italy, which unfortunately is often downplayed to this day (Proglio et al., 2021). The legal dimension of power relations is also fundamental when dealing with situations: according to the moment and place in which a woman finds herself, she could be an irregular migrant, an asylum seeker, a rejected asylum seeker, subject to the Dublin regulation, a refugee, or yet something else. The limbo in which women are held can take several forms, in tension between deportability and undeportability.

Feminising the Gaze I suggest that we use the notion of the “feminisation of the gaze” to see how concentrating on women’s migration experiences casts migration in a new light, from a feminist perspective. The findings and perspectives provided by the previously summarised forty years of research on female migration have been crucial to our understanding today. They show the interweaving of family and State economies and the connections between the productive and reproductive spheres and various forms of exchange: material and immaterial, emotional and practical, economic and sexual. “Feminising our gaze” allows us to be attentive to the complexity and multiplicity of the drivers of the migratory phenomenon and the connections it implies, between public and private, between here and there. Feminising the gaze is not adhering to a myopic and ahistorical scenario of a recent feminisation of migration. Feminisation of migration proposes,

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instead, a change of approach to international migration to provide a more complete view, augmented by the presence of women. My aim with this book was to continue restituting the share and roles of women in migration flows, which is still neglected in mainstream academic publications (Dahinden et al., 2007; Green & Reynolds, 2020). Feminising our gaze is a matter of recognition: despite all the aforementioned work on the importance of women in migration, in many respects women are still erased or minimised from the general picture of contemporary mobility. In other words, writing their history isn’t enough to make them part of great History. One wonders where this invisibility comes from: perhaps “bringing women to the fore of the migration picture” seriously endangers the usual narrative of migration based on disturbing and threatening male figures. Moreover, in sending and receiving societies alike, taking account of women as migrants destabilises local orders based on a symbolic distribution of roles between sedentary lifestyle and mobility, between active mobility and passive circulation. Didn’t structural anthropology describe the circulation of women as the prerogative of men, to preserve and ensure the reproduction of the group? Observing migration issues from the vantage point of women makes it possible to consider sending and receiving societies differently. This stance is not always comfortable. It ultimately amounts to granting power to women, a feminine power that could change everything. It amounts to establishing women as political subjects of their history: even when they suffer the worst violence, they escape control and cause scandal through migration. This is especially so for women who go alone, leaving children and husbands behind. Migration can be a way out for these women, what Deleuze called a “line of strength,” against the hard lines of apparatuses of power (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980; Fanon, 2002). Feminising the gaze is also a way to investigate—and destabilise—the universal masculine, to give another version of the migratory experience that is differently situated and incorporated, to make gender a central dimension in understanding migration processes. Paying attention to women’s lives and experiences sheds light on rarely addressed aspects of migration, such as the politics of intimacy and the role of emotions or bodies; it lifts the veil obscuring scales, places, and processes that are rarely shown or explored. For example, throughout this book I have tried to consider migration as a bodily experience with several key moments: passage through Libyan prisons and sexual violence; crossing the Mediterranean; arrival in Europe. Julienne’s story in Chap. 2 attests to this.

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Feminising the gaze means giving more value to bodily existence as an essential element of the human experience of migration and its government: women’s bodies are sites of sensations, passions, and desires through which the sensory, affective, and emotional experience of migration takes place. The physical subjectivity of migration—the experience of sexuality (including sexual violence), death, pregnancy, childbirth, violence, ageing—must be taken seriously. All these material and embodied aspects of the migration experience bring us back to physicality without necessarily implying a return to biological essentialism. To think of the body as an experience, Tori Moi and Iris Marion Young propose the expression “lived body,” which “corresponds to a unified idea of a physical body that acts and experiences in a specific sociocultural context; it’s a body-in-situation” (Young, 2002; Fortier, 2006; Shilling, 1997; Fassin, 2015). In our case, the body-in-situation corresponds to the mobile or immobilised body (depending on the time and place) whose subjectivity is directly connected to the experience of the EU border regime. Lastly, feminising the gaze emphasises the complex relationship between migration and emancipation, which involves much more than the clichéd binary opposition of the “migrant victim” and the “migrant heroine” (Bilge, 2010). It rejects a linear and equivocal vision of migration as an automatically emancipatory process.

Rethinking the Equation “Female Migration=Emancipation” The figure of the female migrant as a victim is the woman who is caught in the meshes of modern slavery and trafficking, the woman who is vulnerable regardless of what she does or what happens, the woman who should not leave, who is told to remain sedentary or, if she hasn’t, to return. This is the figure addressed by IOM campaigns to discourage female emigration by performatively staging the violence that awaits them at the end of the road, and by the nuns who try to convince Nigerian women held at the Ponte Galeria detention centre to return home permanently. This figure, which only reconstructs one facet of women’s history, is part of what Nicola Mai defined as “sexual humanitarianism.” Conversely, the figure of the migrant-heroine is the woman freed by migration, the one who espouses the free market and sees migration as personal business. In the

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end, these two images are facets of the same cliché, constitutive of the same moral landscape. Most often, women are in between: there aren’t radical and unequivocal transformations, because migration is an ambivalent process that can accelerate some changes and foster resistance (concerning gender, for example), but also reinforce certain vulnerabilities. Migration is a product of redefined femininity: one becomes someone else when one becomes a migrant. Migration policies themselves socialise to new gender norms, producing visions of women and men that are modified and negotiated over the course of their journeys, through countries of departure, transit, settlement, movement. This takes us away from approaches that see gender as related solely to family and kinship structures, in the context of societies of origin. On the contrary, gender is also closely integral to the repression to which most migration is subjected today by the EU border regime. The gendered socialisation that takes place through migration is thus a political process, and restoring women’s autonomy is an ethical and political issue.

Repoliticising Migration, Repoliticising Gender: A Feminist Approach On 25 November 2018, Frontex, the European organisation responsible for border protection, tweeted: “Today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. How can border guards help protect women and girls? Frontex officers identify victims of trafficking in human beings, who often are women exposed to abuse, violence and sexual exploitation.”2 This statement is indicative of how gender can serve as a veneer for a pseudo-humanitarian discourse that aims to repress as many as possible. It highlights the interconnection of humanitarian and security objectives at the borders of Europe today, although it is difficult to understand how they coexist. We know that Frontex’s primary objective is to prevent and block so-called irregular crossings, in a context where this is often the only way to migrate. In fact, Frontex’s declarations—and more broadly migration policies today—raise questions for researchers who document the hardening of borders, the rise of constraints and controls, and their effects on the lives of migrants. So much so that one wonders how long this mix of compassion and repression will be able to hold and

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function to analyse migration management, and whether it may give way to the simply repressive. The approach adopted here is critical of the narrative that frames migration policies as a way of “saving women.” One might legitimately wonder what a benevolent policy in terms of gender might look like in a context of strengthening borders, if not a fig leaf. Migration policies are today saturated by the ambivalence of gender mainstreaming, a mechanism for addressing gender issues in all public policy that advocates the centrality of gender while reducing gender to gender equality. In doing so, this approach downplays the continuum of violence and other power relations, including those enmeshed in the border regime. Indeed, rather than saving women, current migration policies play a key role in the social construction of women as vulnerable. Given that the present context is dominated by the imperative of strengthening borders, one might even wonder whether a policy claiming to be benevolent or gender-friendly is nothing more than a fig leaf for a system geared towards migration containment. Current migration policies are fraught with the ambiguities of gender mainstreaming, which does make gender paramount, but reduces it to gender equality and so-called traditional violence against women, such as female genital mutilation. Consequently, gender mainstreaming glosses over other power relations that are integral to the intersectional position of women and, in our case, minimises the violence of migration policies. There are many debates agitating feminism: the approach defended in this book moves away from currents designating the minority woman as irreducibly submissive to an ethnically marked man, perceived as inevitably macho, domineering, saturated in rape culture. Far from being the prey of an abstract patriarchy or, worse, “the men of their community,” these women are threatened and constantly hindered by these policies that contribute to making them inferior and a minority. Women stranded on border islands, for example, find themselves unable to heal wounds inflicted along their journeys because of measures that immobilise them and deprive them of the ability to act, much like the (near) impossibility of obtaining a residence permit for women who fled “Libyan hell” makes it impossible to heal the wounds to their gender. A “slow” and diluted violence is thus exerted on these women, within a border that expands and spreads (Nixon, 2011). A few years ago, at a conference on femininity, the famous philosopher Alain Badiou declared that feminists were the rearguard of a movement doomed to extinction because of the significant and progressive

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improvement of the status of women. I do not share his optimism and am even firmly convinced of the opposite: feminist and gender studies will have grain to grind for many years to come. My approach is anchored in a feminism that rejects a version of male domination as transhistorical (Patil, 2013) and prefers to reflect on its variations, its evolutions, and its contexts. Above all, my approach denies the primacy of gender vis-à-vis other forms of oppression, and sees in the oppression of certain categories of migrants today a tool of the repression of women. Lastly, the feminism that I defend sides with a conception of circulating power, seeking to work on resistance and modes of subjectivation within a broad repertoire where mobilisation is understood in all its forms. There are indeed ever more obstacles standing in the way of women, but they are battered by their desire for autonomy and the force of their dreams. One thing is certain: they won’t stop moving.

Notes 1. Most notably, in perhaps the most famous of all: Stephen Castles, Mar J. Miller, Huh De Haas, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 2. I thank Cristina del Biaggio for drawing my attention to this Tweet.

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