Sub-Saharan migrants ‘in transit’: intersections between mobility and immobility and the production of (in)securities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that addressing the security threats -and protection needs- of the so-called ‘transit migrants’ requires an understanding of (im)mobility as a politically constitutive force. In doing so, it points to the analytical advantages of expanding critical security studies in International Relations to include the politics of mobility, as opposed to a sedentary focus on the security-migration nexus. Building on the contributions of anthropologists and geographers of migration yet with a specific focus on understanding how (im)mobility and (in)security are mutually constitutive political practices that produce migrants’ travel experiences, the article problematizes the category of transit. By way of empirical illustration, the journey experiences of thirty-one sub-Saharan migrants as they traveled in Spain are reconstructed using a multi-sited ethnography, with the goal of analyzing the specific locations where mobility and immobility intersect, the co-production between (im)mobility and (in)security, and how migrants’ agency is transformed at these intersection nodes.