Time-out for the outsider refugees. Ten-years of im-mobility across EU borders and outside the reception systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the process of migration to Europe stressing how human mobility is governed at the global level along differential and racialized lines. Drawing on ethnographic field with a group of refugees moving from Italy to Germany from 2011 to 2021, the paper gives insights on how refugees daily negotiate the European borders and how borders affect their lives in the long-term. The research discusses the theoretical concept of ‘Departheid’ to highlight the structural violence deployed by European and national institutions upon migrants, and add a focus on the temporal dimension stressing the intrinsic relation between the structures of power and the management of time embedded in the governing of migrant mobility. Practices of institutional abandonment and criminalization of refugees intra-EU mobility are affecting the temporalities of refugees, who react through everyday struggles of time re-appropriation aimed to regain control over their own lives and subjectivity.