Sitting in the courtyard of a derelict house in Tripoli, Libya’s capital, IdirisFootnote ¹ was optimistic about his future.Footnote ² Soon, he would make it by boat to Europe. Idiris’ unauthorized journey with human smugglers through Sudan and the Sahara Desert to the house in Tripoli had been shaped by several episodes of confinement and detention imposed by state and other actors, which continued during his life at the house and the many repeated attempts at leaving for Europe by boat. Paying money was often the only way out. Idiris, like many other migrants in Libya, was caught in a landscape of forced immobility where state and other actors extracted value from mobile life. And yet he was determined to move on: one day he would make it to Europe.

A few kilometres away, on the other side of Tripoli, Cynthia and Alain, from Cameroon, had no desire to leave by boat to Europe. They preferred staying on in Libya’s context of fragmented authority, despite being subjected to everyday violence and informal bordering practices visited upon foreigners. At sea, their lives would be at risk, and they would end up in Europe’s strict legal framework where their agency would be curtailed. In Libya, they earned more money than they ever would in Europe. Staying put for Cynthia and Alain was worth it. Theirs was an affective labour of endurance: Cynthia and Alain suspended a difficult present to aspire towards a better future.

Across the sea from Libya, Aziza and Abdikarim, from Somalia, sat outside their container home in a government-run open reception centre on the island of Malta. They had made it to Europe by boat from Libya, but were frustrated. Their attempt to apply for asylum in another EU country had been cut short by being forcibly returned to Malta because their fingerprints had been found in the database, indicating that Malta was their first country of arrival and from where their asylum application must begin in the EU. Aziza and Abdikarim found themselves stuck in the legal framework. This was not the Europe they had expected when they left Libya. They felt that their futures were bleak.

***

This book brings migration, mobility and economy together. It looks at the unauthorized journeys of sub-Saharan migrants along one of the world’s most dangerous routes: through the Sahara Desert to Libya and by boat to Malta in Europe. By tracing migrants’ lives as they move through spaces of informal confinement, government-run detention centres and private houses in Libya; undertake the turbulent Mediterranean boat crossing; and spend time in institutionalized reception centres in Malta, the book provides a new account of mobile life and its attendant economies. Its focus is on journeys: the ways in which migrants experience and inhabit the context of fragmented authority in Libya and negotiate Europe’s state and legal framework, how they navigate bordering practices implemented by state and other actors, and how they shape and participate in diverse economic arrangements that enable and thwart movement. The journey, I argue, provides a new ethnographic and analytical perspective on migration. It fosters a shift from static sites to mobility – the lived experiences of movement that are social and non-linear. It leads to a novel understanding of economic practices – transactions, relations and arrangements emerging from mobility, which form a transnational system of production in the borderlands.

This analytical and ethnographic endeavour brings to the forefront the journey and related economic practices that recast how we think about contemporary migration. Unauthorized migration across the Mediterranean remains among the most mediatized topics in recent years. International migration organizations highlight how the Central Mediterranean Route through Libya to Europe is the world’s deadliest (IOM 2017; 2022). Many academic, media and policy reports label unauthorized migration as a ‘crisis’, positing a linear understanding of displacement and movement (Crawley et al. Reference Crawley, Düvell, Jones, McMahon and Sigona2016). The migrant arriving at the shores of Europe is framed as an exceptional figure, whose identity is determined by categories imposed by the state and by law: the unauthorized, illegal, undocumented border crosser. Such categories become the means through which the lives and mobilities of migrants are accessed and articulated. These crisis and security narratives foster specific policy and humanitarian responses (Lindley Reference Lindley2014). Migration controls have intensified and moved to the EU’s peripheral states through measures such as fingerprinting, but also beyond, extending the EU’s sovereign reach towards North Africa. By mobilizing ideas of fear, security and crisis, border externalization frames the migrant as ‘Other’ and pre-emptively aims to stall movements towards Europe (Andersson Reference Andersson2014b; Brachet Reference Brachet2016; Mountz and Hiemstra Reference Mountz and Hiemstra2014). Policies criminalizing migration in the Sahel region and Libya, search-and-rescue or push-back missions at sea, as well as investment in immigration detention in Libya are pressing examples. However, such bordering violently produces the very ‘irregular’ migrants it aims to police (Andersson Reference Andersson2014a; Reference Andersson2014b; Vaughan-Williams Reference Vaughan-Williams2015). Framing migration ‘as an emergency in need of a security response’ creates an ‘illegality industry’ centred ‘on the “usage” of migrants for purposes of border control, rescue, prevention or information-gathering’ (Andersson Reference Andersson2014a; Reference Andersson2014b; Reference Andersson2015, 24; Reference Andersson2016, 1060). Rather than being a ‘solution’, such an industry becomes ‘part of the problem’ at the border (Andersson Reference Andersson2014a; Reference Andersson2016, 1062).

How might we understand these processes that emerge when mobility, migration and related economic practices interweave? The lives of migrants themselves are a crucial starting point, but often remain elusive in existing accounts. The field of migration studies, by mostly fixating on linear journeys and points of entry, misses out on the complexities of mobile life. Such narratives also serve as ‘a blunt tool of migration governance’ that is ahistorical, elusive of context and often ignorant of the different motivations migrants have (Mountz and Hiemstra Reference Mountz and Hiemstra2014, 388). Developing an account of mobile life that takes the perspectives of those undertaking fraught journeys seriously is important to expanding current studies of migration and mobility. This means departing from the narrative of ‘crisis’ and from macro-level perspectives that inform much work in migration studies to embrace mobility and the set of situated social relations and practices that constitute it. We need to shift focus from abstractions of ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘where’ people move to how they experience, feel and cope with journeys, just as we need to attend to the relations mobility itself generates. This challenges notions of migration as an uninterrupted movement from A to B, which evacuates all that happens in between, and also unsettles binary migrant categories, including those of illegal, legal, refugee or economic migrant, that reify social relations. As such, the book highlights the fragmentations (Collyer Reference Collyer2007; Reference Collyer2010) of migrants’ journeys and extends the work of authors (Andersson Reference Andersson2014a; Belloni Reference Belloni2019; Cabot Reference Cabot2014; De León and Wells Reference De León and Wells2015; Vogt Reference Vogt2018) who are trying to combine a systemic and subjective approach to migration.

A focus on migrants’ perspectives relocates the migrant body and its mobilities as part of transnational systems of economic production in borderlands. Macro-level political economic analysis of migration often posits a singular image of the ‘illegal’ migrant on a linear journey to Europe, who is exploited as the ‘victim’ of the evil smuggler or framed as a ‘criminal’ and ‘threat’ to the nation-state, and around whom a whole industry of illegal movement arises. In an analogous vein, narratives of a ‘migration crisis’ shift attention away from contemporary forms of capitalism that profit from mobile life. A situated, ethnographic evaluation of migrants’ experiences, on the other hand, brings a much more complex set of arrangements and intersecting forces to the fore. Journeys are uneven, constituted by various forms of immobility, both forced and voluntary, which emerge through practices that are often aimed at profiting from mobile bodies, whether in the form of rent, indentured labour or migrants as consumers of clandestine mobilities. These practices lead to transactions and negotiations with other actors, who exploit mobile lives but also foster and enable mobility, thus contributing to the wider dynamic of creating a ‘reserve army’ of workers upon arrival in Europe (cf. Pradella and Cillo Reference Pradella and Rad2021). Here, boundaries between the licit and the illicit, the legal and the illegal are blurred, and the roles and identities of actors, whether as enforcers of law or clandestine agents of mobility, shift and become fluid. An ethnographic perspective thus brings into view what I term ‘mobility economies’, characterized by variegated and intersecting economic practices – clandestine, state-linked or intimate – that shape and are shaped by mobility.

Such a perspective also highlights the racialized hierarchies of mobility that constitute much of the world today (cf. Besteman Reference Besteman2020). Hierarchies of mobility are key for understanding contemporary capitalism, for, as scholars have argued (cf. Pradella and Cillo Reference Pradella and Rad2021), surplus populations are generated through the policing of migrant bodies in the borderlands. The violence that migrants are often subjected to in Libya propels them to move on, with many ending up labouring under precarious conditions in Europe (cf. Pradella and Cillo Reference Pradella and Rad2021). Racialized hierarchies of mobility and forms of neo-colonialism, including the extraction of oil and resources from countries such as Libya, fuse to form what Ann Laura Stoler calls ‘imperial formations’, characterized by ‘polities of dislocation’ involving ‘systemic recruitments and “transfers” of colonial agents, on native military, on a redistribution of peoples and resources, on relocations and dispersions, on contiguous and overseas territories’ (Stoler Reference Stoler2006, 135–138).

We might push this critique of linear migration and macro-level political economic analysis further. There is a whole body of innovative and exciting work on the biopolitics of migration that attends to the ways in which migrants are constructed as object-targets of governance through borderwork, legal mechanisms and political discourse (see Cabot Reference Cabot2014; De Genova Reference De Genova and De Genova2017; Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019; Tazzioli Reference Tazzioli2019; Tuckett Reference Tuckett2018). However, much of this scholarship remains Euro-centric, focused on and seen through the actions of the state. Deflecting the ethnographic and analytical gaze to the borderlands themselves brings to the fore other modes of migration governance. These are not always linked to a formal biopolitics of the state and its practices of securitization. Rather, they have to do with the outside that biopolitics creates: bodies that are regarded as expendable and whose entry into Europe should be policed and thwarted from afar. Furthermore, the externalization of border controls does not follow a linear transfer of mechanisms of securitization to the borderlands, but they are continually worked out anew. We witness the rise of a range of informal bordering practices enacted by the state, militia and other actors, lines between whom are blurred, and which proceed through tacit channels and not always declared codes.

An ethnography that is comparative and attentive to this outside opens up new ways to revisit the relation between biopolitics and economy, a relation that Michel Foucault hinted at in his initial formulations of biopower but which has been somewhat occluded in the Foucault-inspired work on migration. The normalization and disciplining of bodies, Foucault argued, was inexorably linked to their enrolment into capitalist systems of economic production (Foucault Reference Foucault1998). A close, ethnographic, scrutiny of mobile life in the borderlands reveals how informal bordering practices give rise to a set of economic practices that are not so much about abstract supply and demand logics of a labour market or a formal means of incorporating people into the workforce for a capitalist economy. Instead, such economic practices tap into the migrant body. They derive from a rentier and value-generating form constituted by rendering people into unfree, restricted subjects. At the same time, bodily comportments, social ties and affective intimacies – typically seen as ‘extra-economic’ in mainstream political economy – become vital pivots for the reproduction of the mobile body, upon which various informal practices predate. This goes beyond the view of irregular migrants as principally a source of vulnerable labour, and border regulations thus as economically essential (e.g., De Genova Reference De Genova2002; Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013).

The wider importance of this argument is that it de-centres both biopolitics and political economy from its Euro-centric or state-centric outlook. It brings mobility and economy into conversation. The migration ‘industry’ or ‘business’ in this context extends beyond markets for clandestine mobilities (Andersson Reference Andersson2014a) to include the vitality of mobile life itself. At the same time, mobility economies in the borderlands reveal how contemporary capitalism is more than the biopolitics of profiting from life. It has necropolitical orientations (cf. Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003; Reference Mbembe2019), where accumulation also proceeds through life’s devaluation and disposability (cf. Manjapra Reference Manjapra2019; see also Achtnich Reference Achtnich2022). This book’s ethnographic attention to mobility and economic practices, contexts of different authority, biopolitics and its outside, tells a very different story of how migrants’ lives are experienced, governed and economized. By doing so, it furthers a nascent interdisciplinary endeavour that, at its heart, rethinks both mobile life and the political and economic regimes that sustain and reproduce it.

Mobility Economies

The three opening vignettes at the beginning of this book – Idiris’ account of moving between different actors and his repeated attempts at taking a boat, Cynthia and Alain’s decision to endure fraught conditions in Libya to build their lives, Aziza and Abdikarim’s frustrations after having reached Europe – bring forward a number of themes that underline this book’s emphasis on the analytic of the journey and what it offers up for rethinking economic practices associated with unauthorized migration. First, they point to some of the limitations of framing mobile lives in binary and typologized terms. ‘Borderwork’ (Rumford Reference Rumford2008) authenticates access to state territory through legal documents, making citizens and non-citizens legible to the nation-state and its powers (Abarca and Coutin Reference Abarca and Coutin2018; Cabot Reference Cabot2014; Navaro-Yashin Reference Navaro-Yashin2012; Scott Reference Scott1998). Categories such as forced versus voluntary, illegal versus legal, refugee, asylum seeker or economic migrant, upon which the EU’s legal and asylum framework is based, provide an impoverished understanding of the complexities of mobile lives. They ignore or reify social relations that migrants are enmeshed in, and which play an important role in shaping lives on the move. Second, although scholars have looked at unauthorized migration and pointed to the social constitution of borders and legal status (Abarca and Coutin Reference Abarca and Coutin2018; De Genova and Peutz Reference De Genova and Peutz2010; Reeves Reference Reeves2013; Willen Reference Willen2007), highlighting the need to differentiate between forms of irregular stay in a nation-state through undocumented entry or presence while critiquing typologized migrant categories positing people and their mobilities in binary terms, the focus has been on entry points and sites of arrival. This sometimes ignores all that goes on in between and along the course of people’s journeys. Ethnographies of migrants’ lives in transit (Vogt Reference Vogt2018), of places traversed and created as people move, and events in the wider borderlands, open up new ways of understanding unauthorized migration. What happens in the outside of the strong state and its biopolitical regimes, and how migrants experience and navigate such situations, has deep implications for understanding mobility. It foregrounds a whole other set of social, political and economic relations through which mobility is fostered and mobile lives are led. More precisely, it calls for bringing mobility and economy into the same analytical plane and examining how the two co-constitute one another.

Scholarship on mobility in anthropology has done much to highlight how mobility shapes subjects (Lelièvre and Marshall Reference Le Marcis2015; Salazar and Smart Reference Salazar and Smart2011) and the ways in which mobility emerges from a range of actors and dynamics between sedentariness and movement in situations where power is distributed unequally (Glick Schiller Reference Glick Schiller2018; Glick Schiller and Salazar Reference Glick Schiller and Salazar2013; Salazar and Smart Reference Salazar and Smart2011). At stake here are movements that vary in their ‘motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience, and friction’ (Cresswell Reference Cresswell2010, 17). Nevertheless, underlying this turn to mobility, including the field of transnationalism (Basch et al. Reference Basch, Glick Schiller and Blanc-Szanton1994; Glick Schiller Reference Glick Schiller2018), especially in the context of migration, is still a ‘conceptual framework centered on locally fixed origins and destinations and the connections between them’ (Vogt Reference Vogt2018, 6). Scholars have sought to take into account historical processes that determine decision-making and mobility, but the emphasis has often been on sending or receiving countries, depicting migration as linear from A to B and neglecting everything in between (Collyer and De Haas Reference Collyer and De Haas2012; De Haas Reference De Haas2014). The notion of connection is an abstraction. It is a line connecting two pre-given points, where the line itself becomes subordinate to the point (Ingold Reference Ingold2011). In other words, what gains primacy is the point of arrival or destination. The journey, its events, social relations formed along the way, the situations and actors that migrants navigate and negotiate, in other words, the line, becomes secondary and even falls into oblivion.

A number of scholars advocate for a closer scrutiny of migrants’ journeys, often highlighting their risky and fragmented nature (BenEzer and Zetter Reference BenEzer and Zetter2015; Brigden Reference Brigden2018; Khosravi Reference Khosravi2010; Lucht Reference Lucht2012), which moves beyond linear depictions characterizing movement in terms of departure and arrival (Collyer Reference Collyer2007; Crawley and Jones Reference Crawley and Jones2020; Schapendonk Reference Schapendonk2012; Schapendonk et al. Reference Schapendonk, Bolay and Dahinden2021; Vogt Reference Vogt2018). While drawing upon this work, this book’s comparison of different contexts and its focus on what happens along the journey is unique and forges new terrain. It reveals how mobility is not solely defined by movement. Immobility, characterized by periods of waiting, incarceration in detention centres, or durations of stuckness, becomes a fundamental constituent of mobility. Understanding the dynamics of immobility through migrants’ experiences, this book argues, becomes vital for uncovering some of the power dynamics underpinning contemporary migration. Immobility is also critical for grasping the relations between mobility and economic practices, particularly contemporary capitalism, where the forced immobilization of people and the creation of racialized hierarchies of mobility (cf. Besteman Reference Besteman2020) generate avenues to profit from mobile life. Immobility also reveals how movement rests on overcoming different barriers to mobility posed by the state and its biopolitical apparatus, whether at the doorsteps of Europe or externalized into the wider borderlands.

Furthermore, an attention to mobility and the journey punctuated by various durations of immobility foregrounds mobility as lived experience that involves the migrant body being immersed in a world shaped by many currents. Such currents are not just social but also atmospheric and phenomenological. Much of the literature on migration and the anthropology of mobility evacuates from the analysis atmospheres and the weather world through which movement happens (cf. Ingold Reference Ingold2011). Yet, as this book shows, migrants travel through the world rather than across an already laid-out surface, a world that is at once material and meteorological, and which has bearings on people’s journeys. Most notable is the Mediterranean boat crossing, where social and meteorological forces work in conjunction to heighten migrants’ vulnerability and together operate to generate what some have called a ‘liquid trap’ (Heller and Pezzani Reference Heller, Pezzani and De Genova2017, 108), where people are subjected to lethal abandon.

This adoption of corporeal dimensions of being-in-the-world and bringing it into conversation with the bio- and necropolitics of governing mobility is a unique intervention of this book. Its salience is further highlighted by the ways in which it retrieves the importance of place. Places are not only traversed by migrants but formed through their mobilities. In much of the established and emerging work on contemporary migration, place becomes ‘a mere back-drop to physical journeys’ (Crawley and Jones Reference Crawley and Jones2020, 3228). As a consequence, where social relations are formed, movement is negotiated and economic transactions take place gets relegated to relative anonymity. While scholars have begun to attend to the ways in which spaces are created by migrants’ movements (Hinkson Reference Hinkson2017; Scott-Smith and Breeze Reference Scott-Smith and Breeze2020) as much as they are by actions of the state (Black and Collyer Reference Black and Collyer2014; Coutin Reference Coutin2005; Lindley Reference Lindley2014), they tend to be focused on refugee camps and other ‘techno-borderscapes’ that shape transit zones (Godin and Donà Reference Godin and Donà2021). In this book, I not only look at such exceptional sites but also turn to other spaces that are more mundane but no less important for understanding the dynamics of migration and migrants’ lived experiences, including, for example, private houses in Tripoli through which many migrants move while waiting for the Mediterranean boat crossing.

In doing so, I recover a much richer account of mobility and the economic relations that emerge from and shape it. This speaks closely to earlier calls in anthropology for ethnographies that are multi-sited and which go beyond place-boundedness (Marcus Reference Marcus1995), and for challenging the local as ‘a bounded, self-contained, ahistorical unit’ (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996; Feldman Reference Feldman2012, 183; Hannerz Reference Hannerz1996). While multi-sited in its orientation, the book takes sites to be forged by people’s movements. They are ‘place-binding’ rather than ‘place-bound’ (Ingold Reference Ingold2011, 148), for it is the trails that people form as their lives and journeys move along that give rise to the very locales that anthropologists study. And it is through the tensions between mobility and immobility, the pauses and stops that intersperse journeys, that sites emerge. These pauses, however, are not gaps, evacuated of life and social relations. Rather, they are the very time-spaces through which some of the most poignant insights into the dynamics of migration and its attendant economies can be gleaned. This book, then, overturns the familiar trope in anthropology where the anthropologist is mobile while the subjects they study stay put and remain bound to place (Hage Reference Hage2005; Wimmer and Glick Schiller Reference Wimmer and Glick Schiller2002, in Andersson Reference Andersson2014a, 284). Both inhabit a world constituted by movement, albeit with uneven durations and possibilities, for the capacity to move is linked to a position of privilege and citizenship.

The conjunction between mobility and economy that lies at the heart of this ethnographic and analytical endeavour operates in many ways and includes the lived experiences and engagements of migrants with economic practices. The phenomenological and the economic, drawn together in this book’s analysis, find common ground in the etymology of the word journey. ‘Journey’ entered Middle English from Old French ‘jornee’ and French ‘journée’, which means ‘day, day’s space, day’s travel, work, employment’. ‘Journey’ in its meaning as ‘a day’s work’ or ‘a day’s labour’ relates to ‘in journey’, which would have meant ‘at work as a day-labourer’. Or it could have also signified ‘a day’s doings or business’. Thus, to journey meant being mobile but also engaging in economic transactions. Mobility and economy come together in the word ‘journey’. Furthermore, the polysemic connotations of the word extend to ‘a day’s performance in fighting’, with ‘to keep the journey’ being ‘to keep the field, to continue the fight’,Footnote ³ not dissimilar to the labours of coping and endurance that migrants have to perform as they undertake fraught journeys. As I shall later argue, such labour has important economic consequences.

Journeys, therefore, are much more than just travelling. They are about space and time, about movement and labour, the ability to endure and to reproduce the very conditions encountered in order to move on. The journey is not only the locus of ethnographic work but an analytic that enables specifying what I call ‘mobility economies’ or the variegated and intersecting economic practices that shape and are shaped by mobility. Along migrants’ journeys through Libya to Europe, stretching across contexts of fragmented and strong state authority, the economic is always tethered to mobility. The two form an inseparable dyad. Holding this dyad in sharp focus reveals how formal and informal economic practices intersect in the making of mobilities, and highlights how these intersections are forged through relations between a range of actors, including migrants, smugglers, criminal groups, militia and state authorities. These relations become constitutive of contemporary capitalism beyond the borderlands, in that they are closely linked to the generation of an unemployed and underemployed surplus population that is part of Europe’s cheap labour force (cf. Pradella and Cillo Reference Pradella and Rad2021).

Mobility economies, especially when gleaned from the wider borderlands, must also take into account a suite of informal practices through which migration is governed. Much existing work that reveals the arbitrariness of bordering practices and the meaning of documents or asylum applications and legal status (Abarca and Coutin Reference Abarca and Coutin2018; Cabot Reference Cabot2014; Coutin Reference Coutin2003) is concerned with strong state-led bureaucratic and formal legal systems. Although they draw attention to the ways in which migration governance thrives by ‘working the space of ambiguity between life and law’ (Reeves Reference Reeves2013, 509), not much has been said about lived experiences of documentary uncertainty in contexts of fragmented state authority. Migrants’ journeys and related economic practices in Libya pose new questions on what happens to biopolitics in those situations where the law has limited reach and meaning. They shift some of the arguments centred upon the state, borderwork and migration governance – typically focused on securitization and regulation of populations in European biopolitical contexts – to a range of other practices that are hybrid, which straddle the legal and the illegal, and emanate from a blurring of the licit and the illicit, the state and non-state.

This shift also prompts a closer reading of the migrant body and its affective relations, concerns that have largely been neglected by work on the biopolitics and political economies of migration. Mobility, as Wendy Vogt (Reference Vogt2018, 7) reminds us, ‘is not an abstract process; it is a material and embodied one’. Legal categories are relational and performed, with legal status being contingent on actors, bordering regimes and the multiple bordering practices in which migrants are entwined. As this book shows, informal borderwork and the policing of migrants is in many ways corporeal, taking the racialized body as the object-target, and working to generate affects of uncertainty and ambiguity. One can therefore go further to argue that mobility is a process of ‘enmeshment’ rather than one of embodiment (Ingold Reference Ingold2011), in that the body is always in relation to, and affected by, other bodies, materials, atmospheric and meteorological currents, abstract categories and things. It is less about internalizing or somatizing an external attribute, as in the ‘embodiment’ of a legal category, and more about a relational configuration of identity, which is forged as the journeys of different actors, the cartography of borders, documentation and surveillance, as well as racial inscriptions and the marking of particular populations, interweave. This makeover of mobility as a bodily, affective and enmeshed process becomes pivotal for understanding mobility economies, notably when turning to predatory formations that tap into the vitality of the mobile body.

Three key aspects of mobility economies emerge here. First, attending to informal bordering practices and contexts of fragmented state authority reveals how the predatory extraction and generation of value, financial or otherwise, taps into mobile ‘life itself’ (Rose Reference Rose2007, 3; also see Andersson Reference Andersson2018, 417). As others, taking inspiration from work on the confluence of biopower and economy (Cooper Reference Cooper2008; Rose Reference Rose2007; Sunder Rajan Reference Sunder Rajan2006), point out, there is an emerging human ‘bioeconomy’ surrounding migration where migrants’ bodies and vitality are being rendered into material for accumulation ‘beyond their labour power’ (Andersson Reference Andersson2018, 414, 424). This book pushes these analyses further. It draws attention to how mobile life itself is brought into the ambit of accumulation. By doing so, the book expands an anthropological arena of inquiry on the bioeconomy that has primarily been confined to the realms of biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry (Cooper Reference Cooper2008; Rose Reference Rose2007; Sunder Rajan Reference Sunder Rajan2006). Furthermore, the quest to profit from mobile life itself is not always through formal channels (whose parallels in terms of migration governance are to be found in arguments regarding state-imposed biopolitics). Rather, it also proceeds through a range of hybrid practices that involve the collusion of state and other actors, and often emerge from the outside that state-led biopolitics creates. Here, migrants become bodies that are transacted as commodities or are rendered into ‘raw material’ that populate detention centres. In other words, vulnerable human mobility becomes a source of revenue in transnational systems of economic production in the borderlands. This argument, developed through an ethnography of the borderlands and outlining some of the logics through which the extraction of profit from vulnerable lives takes place, further extends Ruben Andersson’s (Reference Andersson2018) exposition of the human bioeconomy. What one witnesses in Europe’s borderlands as well as the more regulated context of Malta is not just a biopolitics of governing life, replete with economic consequences (cf. Andersson Reference Andersson2018; Rose Reference Rose2007), but a necropolitics as well, where profit is also generated from the disavowal of life (cf. Manjapra Reference Manjapra2019; see also Achtnich Reference Achtnich2022).

Second, and further developing the analytic of the journey, this book attends to such dynamics of accumulation ethnographically. More specifically, it highlights what I call ‘accumulation by immobilization’, a violent process of value-generation that operates by forcibly thwarting movement. Accumulation by immobilization is a process that emerges through predation upon fragile, mobile lives: as unfree labour in conditions of detention and as sources of revenue through the seeking of rent and payments to move on. Accumulation by immobilization becomes discernible when we focus on the journey. It goes beyond some of the more sedentary analyses of political economy, for it shows how violent, extra-economic accumulation not only operates through displacement at origin, or what has been termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey Reference Harvey2003) that creates a landless, surplus population compelled to move on (Sassen Reference Sassen2014), but unfolds continually along journeys, in a staccato stop-and-go rhythm. It takes place ‘in the process of migration itself, that is, the in-between phase of mobility and enforced immobility’ (Andersson Reference Andersson, Elliot, Norum and Salazar2017, 90; Collyer Reference Collyer2007; Hage Reference Hage and Hage2009; Jefferson et al. Reference Jefferson, Turner and Jensen2019). Accumulation by immobilization is a rentier form. It highlights how, contrary to much work on migration and capitalism (De Genova Reference De Genova2002; Mezzadra and Neilson Reference Mezzadra and Neilson2013), the exploitation of wage labour is only one part of the story of economic arrangements stemming from mobility.

The analytical categories developed in this book draw from migrants’ experiences. They stem from an endeavour of holding political economic and phenomenological approaches to migration together. Migrants’ own terminologies of feeling like ‘goods’ or ‘livestock’, traded and exchanged by smugglers and other actors, become powerful means for understanding how economic practices unfold in the borderlands. In a similar vein, migrants’ lived experiences and narratives of their journeys become crucial for understanding what constitutes ‘the economic’ in mobility economies. By doing so, not only do we retrieve the where of value-generation but also the how, drawing attention to several transactions, negotiations and bodily and affective practices through which mobility and economy converge.

To this end, and third, this book also brings work on affect and affective labour into conversation with mobility. Although there is a rich literature on migration and affect (Laszczkowski and Reeves Reference Laszczkowski, Reeves, Laszczkowski and Reeves2018), the emphasis is largely on documents and migrants’ relations with the state. Mobile, corporeal as well as economic dimensions of affect are somewhat underplayed. As this book shows, to endure journeys and cope with immiserating circumstances, including the informal and racial policing of migrants, the performance of affective labour becomes crucial. Together with forming families and the labour of social reproduction, affective work is important for the rejuvenation of the mobile body, its ability to labour and to carry on despite arduous circumstances. This is a key lesson one can draw from the work of feminist political economists who bring to the front stage the importance of affective and reproductive labour in the expansion of capitalism (Federici Reference Federici2010; Fortunati Reference Fortunati2007). I further argue that such relations constitute ‘intimate economies of mobility’ (cf. Vogt Reference Vogt2018, 16). They are a set of practices, typically considered ‘extra-economic’ by mainstream political economy, that are vital for the very reproduction of migrants’ time and lives upon which extractive economies predate. To better understand how a transnational system of economic production centred on migrants’ mobilities takes grip, we need to turn to the ethnographic, historical and political context of Libya in more detail.

Mobilities and Bordering in Libya

This book is not about migrants from or in one single location but about the experiences of migrants from different countries along their journeys, and how these experiences shape their mobile lives. Migrants I met in Libya and Malta came from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Niger, Cameroon, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal. They mostly moved in an unauthorized manner with human smugglers or criminal actors, but also at times independently, through Sudan or Niger and the Sahara Desert to Libya, and either stayed or moved onwards to Italy or Malta by boat. Some stopped for years en route, others made it to Europe in a few weeks. The book focuses on migrants who moved through the two main transit points of Khartoum in Sudan and Agadez in Niger, with the former route being longer and mostly used by migrants from East Africa and the latter by migrants from West Africa.

While in contexts like the Mexico-US route migrants often depend on individual smugglers to navigate landscapes (Vogt Reference Vogt2016), journeys through the Sahara and Libya are fragmented (Collyer Reference Collyer2007; Reference Collyer2010), characterized by localized hierarchies and a division of labour by different actors (Campana Reference Campana2018). Moreover, in contrast to EU states like Malta, where bordering operates via typologized and binary categories of illegal versus legal or refugee versus economic migrant, migrants’ mobilities in the context of fragmented authority in Libya are shaped by often informal bordering practices implemented by different actors, including human smugglers, criminal groups, militias, police, immigration officials, border guards and Libyan citizens, and primarily aimed at extorting money (Campana Reference Campana2018; Micallef Reference Micallef2017). These actors become embroiled in governing migration and have multiple identities, with potentially shifting allegiances or interests that allow them to act on their own initiative in harassing, arresting and detaining migrants (see also Campana Reference Campana2018; Lucht Reference Lucht2012; Micallef Reference Micallef2017; Schapendonk Reference Schapendonk2018). Such practices have developed in a context where state institutions, the formal state-run economy and the rule of law have mostly collapsed, with different groups, including militias, competing for control over territory and political power since the 2011 political uprisings (Lacher Reference Lacher2020; Micallef Reference Micallef2017). Wolfram Lacher (Reference Lacher2020, 4) defines ‘fragmentation’ in the context of Libya as ‘the processes through which a multiplicity of competing political and military actors emerge and continue to proliferate, preventing the maintenance or establishment of a credible claim to the monopoly on the concentrated means of violence’.

The 2011 uprisings were then ‘a pivotal point for the development of organized crime’ in Libya and its southern neighbouring countries, allowing for ‘new criminal industries’ such as kidnapping for ransom to emerge, and also for ‘established criminal markets’ such as drug trafficking and human smuggling to expand (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a, 51). Organized crime in southern Libya, also including trafficking of narcotics, arms and pharmaceuticals, for example, was linked to the centuries-old trans-Saharan trade routes, which ‘provided foundational logistical infrastructure for the large-scale movement of contraband, people, narcotics and various other illicit goods’ (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a, 52). As large parts of this economy were ‘tolerated’ and ‘even encouraged’ by the Gaddafi regime, the system developed into a ‘hierarchical criminal ecosystem’ (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a, 52). The 2011 uprisings removed the control of the state over this ‘black economy’, but the resulting decentralized power structure meant that ‘multiple actors’ or ‘armed factions’ then had control over it (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a, 53). Within the broader ‘organized-crime dynamics’ in Libya since then, ‘taxing and protecting the criminal economy is a major revenue-generating activity for Libya’s militias, and a fundamental aspect of the predation economy that characterizes the west, east and south of the country today’ (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a, 53). While human smuggling was ‘a relay-race conducted by loosely connected groups’ prior to the 2011 uprisings, it then became a ‘new financial backchannel’ (Micallef Reference Micallef2017, 7). Smuggling routes in Libya continued to evolve in the years post-2011, shifting in line with a fluctuating regional and local political landscape, and including the entry of ‘armed gangs and militias’ who often receive a percentage of the business conducted on territory they control, a form of rent extraction paid to them as protection money by the smugglers (Micallef Reference Micallef2017, 8).

Muammar Gaddafi governed Libya from 1969 to 2011, when he was killed during the 2011 uprisings. The National Transitional Council (NTC), established by the rebel groups in Benghazi in February 2011, struggled to incorporate the newly emerged power structures into its own framework, and the General National Congress (GNC), the NTC’s successor, allowed Libya to move towards ‘chronic instability’ (Pack Reference Pack2013, 8). Tribal politics contributed to the emergence of local institutions (Hüsken Reference Hüsken2019; Lacher Reference Lacher2020), with many disparate actors including regionalists, Islamists, liberals, political elites, centralizing technocrats and decentralizing militiamen struggling for dominance (Pack Reference Pack2013). More recently, two governments have been competing for control in Libya: the interim government based in Tobruk in the east, and the Government of National Accord (GNA), recognized by the United Nations Security Council and the EU, in Tripoli. Militias belonging to both sides have frequently clashed. In March 2021, Libya’s interim unity government, the Government of National Unity (GNU), was sworn in.

The situation in Libya has been difficult for migrants, but also for Libyan citizens, as Asim, a man from Sudan who had been staying in Libya since well before 2011, described during one of our conversations in 2014: ‘[It’s] dangerous, also for the Libyan people. Not [only] for us.… Now Tripoli is not good place, Libya is not good place now.’ He pointed towards the seafront square next to where we were sitting and explained that before the 2011 revolution the place used to be ‘full of girls, boys, men, women’, but that now families were afraid of being outside.

Harassment towards migrants is not just specific to the period post-2011. For many years, Libya has attracted migrants from other countries in Africa, partly because of labour shortages in sectors such as agriculture and construction. Migrants from West African countries, in particular, often had good education and skills, allowing them to settle in stable jobs in Libya, eventually obtaining residence permits. Others, including migrants from East African countries, would engage in precarious daily labour, including in the domestic sector. Gaddafi put in place a set of migration policies that furthered his domestic and foreign-policy interests, including framing the ‘migrant other’ within a discourse of security and fear (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). He saw migration as a threat to his process of nation-building and forging of a national identity based on Arab nationalism (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010).

The discovery of oil and demands for labour in Libya contributed to an increase in migration from the Maghreb throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Brachet Reference Brachet, McDougall and Scheele2012b; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). After isolation by the international community through the air and arms embargo imposed by the UN Security Council from 1992 to 2000, and disappointed by the perceived lack of support from Arab countries, in 1998 Gaddafi turned from a policy of pan-Arabism to pan-Africanism, allowing more arrivals from sub-Saharan Africa and establishing the Community of Sahel-Saharan States for the movement of migrants (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). The idea was to fill gaps in the labour market and to aim for leadership ‘in the international arena’ to offset isolation and to reward African states for their support during the embargo era (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010, 86). This led to an ‘integrated migration system’ in the central Sahara, characterized by greater numbers and a growing diversity of migrants, as well as migrants returning from North Africa spreading ‘the image of a Libyan and Algerian “El Dorado”’ (Brachet Reference Brachet, McDougall and Scheele2012b, 244).

In the 2000s, Libya’s relationship with the EU improved, in line with the country’s slow reintegration into the international community (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). Migration was strategically relevant to foreign policy, and the political discourse in Libya highlighted the ‘security dimension’ of migration (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010, 97). Since the 2000s, and with increasing boat migration from Libya to Europe, migration has become a political concern among African and European governments (Brachet Reference Brachet2018), resulting in bilateral agreements between Libya and the EU, and the implementation of restrictive policies towards sub-Saharan Africans. While Libya has not signed the 1951 Convention on the status of refugees, or the 1967 Protocol, it has signed the Organization of African Unity (OAU) 1969 Convention on the situation of refugees in Africa. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been tolerated and allowed to conduct refugee status determinations in Libya under an informal mandate that allows it to issue asylum seekers with letters of attestation, which, however, are not always recognized by the Libyan authorities (Amnesty International 2013; Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010).

From 2004, nationals from Arab states, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, but not including Iraqis and Palestinians, could enter Libya without a visa, whereas all other non-citizens had to obtain a visa (Global Detention Project 2015). In 2009, further security policies were implemented, including fines for undocumented foreign workers, which led to foreigners leaving the country and to the detention of those without documents (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). Two laws then address the recent situation of non-citizens in Libya: Law No. 6 (1987) Regulating Entry, Residence and Exit of Foreign Nationals to/from Libya as amended by Law No. 2 (2004), and Law No. 19 of 2010 on Combating Irregular Migration, criminalizing violations of migration provisions, including indefinite detention, forced labour, a monetary fine and deportation of people considered to be irregular migrants, thus not distinguishing between migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, victims of trafficking or others who need protection (Amnesty International 2013; 2015; Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012; Global Detention Project 2015; Human Rights Watch 2019; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). Under the 2010 law, foreigners in Libya had to legalize their stay within two months; otherwise, they were considered to be ‘illegal migrants’, subject to penalties (Global Detention Project 2015, 4–5). Article 10 of the 2011 Constitutional Declaration promulgated by the NTC stipulates that the ‘state shall guarantee the right to asylum by virtue of the law’, but this principle has not been reflected in national legislation (Amnesty International 2013, 9). By the end of 2012, mostly for security reasons, the GNC decided to close the borders with Algeria, Chad, Niger and Sudan and empowered military personnel in the south to engage in arrests and deportations (Amnesty International 2013). In 2013, the Ministry of Interior announced the introduction of visas for all foreigners wishing to enter the country, and the Ministry of Labour promised ‘tough measures against any foreign national found to be in Libya “irregularly”’ (Amnesty International 2013, 5).

In the early 2000s Italy and Libya entered into a series of bilateral agreements including on the funding of closed immigration detention centres, training and sea patrols to monitor land and sea borders, sea-rescue missions, voluntary return programmes and cooperation with embassies to evacuate their citizens and increased surveillance in the Sahara (Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012; Brachet Reference Brachet2016; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). A five-billion-euro ‘friendship treaty’ was signed between Berlusconi and Gaddafi in 2008, which outlined efforts to combat illegal migration and foresaw Italy financing reception camps, return flights, joint border patrolling, provision of border control equipment, police training, exchanges of information and ‘push-backs’ at sea (Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012; Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). In 2009, Libya and Italy launched joint naval patrols in Libyan territorial waters, after the Italian parliament had approved legislation making irregular immigration illegal and authorized direct deportation via ‘push-backs’ to Libya at sea (Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012).

Through institutions like the International Organization for Migration (IOM) – whose Libya office opened in 2006 – the EU has been funding migration activities in Libya in the form of various programmes securing Libya’s borders, implementing voluntary return programmes, policing migration in the Sahara, conducting training sessions, as well as collaborating with embassies to help evacuate their citizens or free them from detention (Brachet Reference Brachet2016). In neighbouring Niger, a law to criminalize migration in 2015 to curb flows has resulted in a ‘manufacturing’ of the figure of the smuggler (Brachet Reference Brachet2018). Julien Brachet (Reference Brachet2016, 284) argues that this ‘comprehensive apparatus of surveillance and control of international mobility’ that the EU has established in Libya and neighbouring countries like Niger seems to be based on the recent ‘crisis’ narrative, when in reality it had been planned long before. Mostly in line with EU policy and preventing migrants from reaching Europe, IOM’s activities in the Sahara, based on a ‘current succession of “crises”’, have transformed the region ‘into a security belt to enable EU migration management’, establishing a ‘new geography of control’ based on ‘international crisis management’ (Brachet Reference Brachet2016, 284, 287).

Since 2015, the EU has worked more closely with the GNA in order ‘to outsource responsibility for migration control to countries outside the EU’, including funding to strengthen the capacity of Libya’s border control by its coast guard and to address problems in detention centres (Human Rights Watch 2019, 20). From 2014 until 2020, the European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI) was ‘the key EU financing instrument for bilateral cooperation in Libya’, with the EU assisting Libya under the ENI with €98 million (European Commission 2022). The EU’s cooperation from 2021 until 2027 is framed by the new Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI) (European Commission 2022). At the Valletta Summit on migration in 2015, heads of state and government from Europe and Africa came together to address migration issues and formally launch the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) (European Council 2019). The EU has allocated around €455 million under the North Africa window of the EUTF to support actions in relation to migration in Libya (European Commission 2022). The EU also provides assistance to the Libyan Coast Guard through the European Union Border Assistance (EUBAM Libya) and European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) missions (European Commission 2022). EUBAM Libya, established in 2013 and still active, is aimed at building the capacity of the Libyan authorities to enhance the security of Libya’s borders (European Union 2021). In 2013, Operation Mare Nostrum was launched by the Italian government as a €9-million-a-month sea rescue mission. In 2014, it was replaced with Operation Triton, a border surveillance programme on the Italian coast coordinated by FRONTEX, and not designed to rescue people (European Commission 2014). In 2015, as a result of a major migrant shipwreck off Libya, the EU approved the Crisis Management Concept for a military operation to disrupt the business model of human smuggling and trafficking networks in the south-central Mediterranean. EUNAVFOR MED was started as Operation Sophia (EU Naval Force Med Operation Sophia 2016). Most recently, in 2020, Operation Irini was launched to enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya and contribute to the training of the Libyan Coast Guard and Navy (European Council 2022). Since 2015, an increasing number of humanitarian search and rescue missions have also been launched in the Mediterranean, at times on private vessels (Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019). By supporting the Libyan Coast Guard in intercepting and detaining migrants, the EU migration cooperation with Libya is accused of ‘contributing to a cycle of extreme abuse’ (Human Rights Watch 2019, 3). The GNA’s control of power has been fragile, and violent clashes have shaped the lives of people in Libya in recent years, as well as increased the risk for migrants, including in detention (Human Rights Watch 2019). UNHCR and IOM have been involved in recent EU-funded assistance to migrants in the country, through voluntary return to home countries or evacuations to other countries and transit centres, including resettlement through Niger (Human Rights Watch 2019).

Direct interventions and marine rescue operations have also increased, including from NGOs and actors such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Migrant Offshore Aid Station, Sea-Watch and Greenpeace (Cuttitta Reference Cuttitta2018; Stierl Reference Stierl2016), in particular, since 2015, when more than one million migrants are estimated to have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe (UNHCR 2015).

Since 2016, the industry surrounding human smuggling in Libya, which had grown rapidly since 2011, has contracted, linked to the migration policies introduced in Niger and Sudan and the retreat of some coastal militias from the business (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a; Reference Micallef, Horsley and Bish2019b; Micallef Reference Micallef2019). This was also accompanied by a shift towards gaining financially from the movement of migrants through detention and other sites of confinement (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Farrah, Bish and Tanner2019a). The retreat of coastal militias ‘from the protection of human smuggling’ meant that ‘smuggling dynamics changed fundamentally’ and involved ‘smaller clandestine gangs’ (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Herbert, Horsley, Bish, Fereday and Tinti2021, 14, 16). Militias had been the ‘primary driving force’ in the expansion of human smuggling between 2014 and 2017, and their retreat was ‘the principal reason for the collapse seen after 2017’ (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Herbert, Horsley, Bish, Fereday and Tinti2021, 14).

This recent history and increasing bilateral cooperation between Libya and Italy has shaped migrants’ experiences in Libya and at sea. In 2017, the Italian government signed an EU-sponsored Memorandum of Understanding with the Libyan government, which was renewed for a further three years in 2020 (Amnesty International 2020), and is accused of undermining migrants’ rights, as agencies such as Médecins Sans Frontières, for example, highlight: ‘Under this agreement, Italy and the EU have been helping the Libyan Coastguard to enhance their maritime surveillance capacity, providing them with financial support and technical assets.… This help comes at the expense of migrants and refugees’ human rights, as virtually everyone intercepted at sea by the Libyan Coastguard ends up in a Libyan detention centre’ (MSF 2022). Investments by the EU, and particularly Italy, thus strengthened the Libyan Coast Guard’s capacity (Micallef Reference Micallef2019). Since then, the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Rome started ‘directing requests for assistance to the LCG [Libyan Coast Guard] rather than coordinating rescue efforts directly, as it had in previous years’ (Micallef et al. Reference Micallef, Horsley and Bish2019b, 19). The political economy of outsourcing migration control is riven with neo-colonial dimensions, in that it goes hand-in-hand with imperatives of accessing Libya’s oil wealth (Pradella and Rad Reference Pradella and Cillo2017). At the same time, securitizing borders against migrants increases conditions of their exploitation. ‘Libya has come to play a role of labour reserve for Italy’, Lucia Pradella and Rossana Cillo argue, thus pointing to a trans-territorial system of economic production where the borderlands or Europe’s outside become a crucial terrain in which a surplus population is created (Pradella and Cillo Reference Pradella and Rad2021, 491).

The context of political fragmentation in Libya meant that, while not all migrants from sub-Saharan East and West Africa I met in Libya had the intention of moving on to Europe by boat, and some – in particular, from Sudan or West Africa – had been living in the country for decades, they often faced harassment and violence in their daily lives, including the danger of being imprisoned in government-run immigration detention centres. Many migrants I met perceived their vulnerability to be less because of their papers – some had passports, residence permits or other legal documents – but more because of their darker skin colour and easy identification as foreigners. In this environment characterized by informal bordering practices, where there is almost no safety, order or protection to be provided by the state, where legal documents often have no meaning, and different actors can take on changing roles, migrants are as safe and mobile as the strength of their own bodies allow. Navigating this context shaped migrants’ journeys and onward movement. For those who took a boat to Malta, the EU legal and asylum framework often presented a contrast to what they had experienced in Libya. Unsettling notions of mobility and movement, but also of the economy, state, law and migration governance, the chapters in this book tell the story of migrants’ journeys across two contexts of fragmented and strong state authority in these wider EU borderlands.

Ethnography along the Journey

Writing a book about migrants’ experiences has not always been easy, and the following pages might be difficult to read. Migrants’ vulnerabilities and mobility decisions are dependent not only on where they came from and why they left but also on the experiences they make along their journey, thus complicating the familiar story of ‘displacement’ via expulsions (e.g., Sassen Reference Sassen2014) and arrival at a ‘destination’. Generalizations about why people leave are difficult, but my interlocutors had embarked on their journeys for a wide variety of reasons, including political, in particular, from Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea or Ethiopia (RMMS 2014); economic, particularly from countries in West Africa such as Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, Senegal and Niger; or a combination of both. They therefore had very different trajectories and aspirations for onward movement. While generalizations are difficult to make, and not always fitting, migrants from Eastern African countries were often more vulnerable and intended to move on to Europe by boat. They had fewer social networks and connections in Libya, apart from the smuggling networks. Migrants who came from Western African countries, however, often arrived in Libya with the intention to work and not always move on to Europe. Many had larger social networks and long-term communities established in the country.

As will become more evident in the following chapters, migrants from different Eastern and Western Africa countries frequently also had diverging outcomes of their asylum applications in Europe. Asylum applicants from Eastern African countries had often left behind situations of conflict and violence and thus had a higher chance of obtaining protection in Europe, whereas the asylum applications of Western African migrants often got rejected. Throughout this book, however, I refer to my interlocutors as ‘migrants’, to describe their mobilities and experiences without referring to migrant categories used in bureaucracy and law – refugee, economic migrants, asylum seeker – that are politicized, vary across time and space and do not capture migrants’ lived experiences along their journeys (see also Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019).

Mobility and migration are hard to confine and difficult to grasp, especially with the tools of traditional anthropological research, developed to look at relatively stable, static and site-bound social groups. They are even harder to study in contexts of fragmented authority like Libya. Many reports on migration in Libya are based on interviews conducted with migrants who arrived by boat in Italy (see Amnesty International 2015). Snapshot representations of the situation, often used by journalists and at EU border ‘entry’ points, play into the idea of specific vulnerabilities linked to static contexts.

Researching mobility thus does not come without its challenges. Methodological difficulties of focusing on the journey include a limited time frame or the researcher’s need to be ‘mobile’ (Brachet Reference Brachet2012a, VI; Brigden and Mainwaring Reference Brigden and Mainwaring2016). Such a focus might also run danger of being used as an artificial methodological research tool rather than ‘a preexisting logic of migration’ (Mainwaring and Brigden Reference Mainwaring and Brigden2016, 251). If I did not want to reproduce binary and linear thinking on movement, origin and destination in my research, but wanted to focus on migrants’ experiences along their journeys, I had to adapt a flexible and mobile methodology, shifting between different sites, actors, scales and methods. If I listened to the stories migrants in Malta told me about detention or a shared house they stayed at in Libya, I had to try to go there too. If migrants in Libya told me about their expectations of Europe while waiting to take a boat, I had to find out how people in Malta felt after arriving. Only when I traced migrants’ journeys across different contexts did the full extent of how the state, other actors, legal frameworks and social relations shaped migrants’ mobilities begin to emerge. In adapting this approach, carefully focusing on migrants’ perspectives and experiences across contexts rather than moving along with them, I follow De León and Wells’ (Reference De León and Wells2015, 13) suggestion ‘that we as ethnographers need to be more critical regarding the contexts where participant observation is deployed and more reflective about how we write about the act of witnessing other people’s trauma’. Mobility was not evenly distributed in this multi-sited endeavour: I inhabited a position of privilege because of my ethnicity, passport and citizenship. As Katherine McKittrick (Reference McKittrick2011) reminds us, some people are deemed placeless, while others have access to the privilege of place. My fieldwork showed that mobility, whether in the form of movement, stillness, waiting or being stuck, was never outside a web of power relations nor outside a history of dispossession and violence.

This book then mainly draws on independent multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with migrants of around six months in 2013 and 2014 in Libya and Malta,Footnote ⁴ as well as some brief follow-up work in Malta in the years since then. The sites I went to in 2013 and 2014 emerged from migrants’ journeys and the access I was able to obtain. They stretched from detention centres to large houses, from reception camps to people’s private accommodation. Having Libya and Malta as two field locations allowed for comparisons to be drawn and divergences to be discerned, but also came with certain difficulties in terms of varying access and legal and state frameworks. During the main two fieldwork trips to Libya in 2014, I was based in Tripoli, travelling to relevant places throughout the north-west of the country. While I conducted my fieldwork on my own, independently, and without the support of any international agency in Libya, a small Libyan NGOFootnote ⁵ working with migrants and refugees very kindly helped me to establish initial contact with the Department for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM) within the Ministry of Interior, who issued me with an official permit to access a range of government-run immigration detention centres throughout the north-west of the country. I also conducted fieldwork in private houses and other spaces of everyday life in the capital of Tripoli, as well as briefly in Ghadames, an oasis town in the Sahara Desert on the Libyan border with Algeria and Tunisia. The political situation, security and travel concerns, as well as the fact that I was a woman on her own conducting independent research on a sensitive topic, meant my access to certain places was limited, and also that I was not able to travel to the south or east of Libya at that point in time. In Malta, my research was also independent. Besides working with migrants living in private accommodation, I obtained permission to access government-run reception centres via the Agency for the Welfare of Asylum Seekers, under the responsibility of the Ministry for Home Affairs and National Security. Staying in touch with many migrants, I followed their onward movements.

I traced migrants’ experiences through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, group discussions and informal conversations in these different spaces. Narratives provided information on areas I could not access, such as the desert or the sea. While I interacted with many more people throughout my research, I particularly studied the experiences of around seventy individuals in depth, often meeting them several times. Most of the semi-structured interviews were recorded and transcribed. I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork in English, at times in French and on very rare occasions in Italian or very basic Arabic. I translated a small number of conversations into English to be used in this book. Due to safety and ethical concerns, I did not use an interpreter or a research assistant. Where necessary, and only rarely and if participants volunteered and agreed, I had people’s friends translate on an informal basis from Somali, Arabic, Tigrinya or Amharic. Migrants I engaged with were above eighteen years of age, and most were single men in their twenties, although I also worked with many couples, single women and families, in particular in Malta. In addition, I conducted background conversations with a range of migration experts connected with governments, NGOs, EU agencies, humanitarian agencies and international organizations in Libya and Malta, as well as the coast guard and navy in Libya.

While my aim was to make migrants’ voices heard, this also came with certain challenges, particularly in Libya. Security and safety were an issue, as were access and the presence of other actors, such as the journalists and international agencies that were also interested in these themes. I took extra care to ensure that everyone involved in my work gave informed consent and was not put at risk through participating in my research. All names have been changed in this book and the utmost precaution has been undertaken to remove any data that might directly identify people. As participants were often adamant that their voices be heard and asked me not to change their names, the decision to change names was at times my own. At a practical safety level during politically tumultuous times, precautions in Libya included making sure to frequently change taxi drivers, travel routes and accommodation, following the local security situation, avoiding certain areas, never staying in one place for too long, and always being ready to leave at short notice. These measures meant that I was able to establish different connections with migrants in Libya than in Malta, which allowed for a broader spectrum of comparison.

While working with vulnerable migrant populations in general presents certain difficulties (Düvell et al. Reference Düvell, Triandafyllidou and Vollmer2010; van Liempt and Bilger Reference Van Liempt and Bilger2009), engaging with individuals along a journey poses additional challenges (Brigden and Mainwaring Reference Brigden and Mainwaring2016), particularly in relation to the reliving of potentially traumatic experiences. I considered it to be important to shine a light on migrants’ experiences at a time when few other people were doing so, rather than simply looking at the situation from a distance. In Libya, in particular, where humanitarian agencies and other actors rarely had access to migrants, including those in detention centres, and where migrants often felt unable to share details about their experiences even with one another for safety reasons, many people told me that being able to talk to me helped them to better cope with the situation. As Francis, a man from Niger I met in Malta, explained:

The Chapters: Through Libya and Malta

How might we characterize the unauthorized journeys of migrants from countries in Eastern and Western Africa as they make their way to or through Libya to Europe? What kinds of mobilities and immobilities come into relief when we deploy a multi-sited approach that foregrounds migrants’ voices and goes beyond the familiar vantage point of the border or Europe’s ports of entry? And what does this tell us about economies that shape and are shaped by mobility? What this book seeks to do, through the analytic of the journey, is to rethink economies underpinning and emerging from migrants’ mobile lives. It adopts an approach attentive to lived experiences, which is phenomenological, reflective of lives on the move through a sentient, affective world, while paying close attention to economic practices that involve migrants’ lives.

The six ethnographic chapters unfold across different spaces along the journey, beginning with a context of fragmented authority in Libya and moving on to the EU legal framework in Malta. Each chapter explores a specific set of conjunctions between mobility and economy, drawing attention to variegated practices and situations. Together, they are an attempt to look at the journey as a totality. Chapters 1–3 are centred on Libya. In Chapter 1, ‘Detained’, I look at migrants’ experiences in informal sites of confinement and in government-run detention centres. I argue that forced immobility becomes vital for extracting value from migrants’ lives, producing a dynamic I call ‘accumulation by immobilization’ where mobilities themselves become a locus of generating revenue. In Chapter 2, ‘Staying On’, I describe how migrants who decide to stay in Libya navigate informal bordering practices through forms of affective labour, revealing how the latter plays a crucial role in the making of people’s mobilities. In Chapter 3, ‘Waiting’, I describe the experiences of migrants at a house in Tripoli where they wait to take a boat to Europe. I show how a clandestine economy surrounds their lives and the ways in which this intersects with intimate economies that reproduce the mobile body. Chapter 4, ‘Turbulence at Sea’, traces movements from Libya to Europe. It describes the turbulence experienced by people at sea when taking a boat. The chapter brings to life how the affective and the meteorological interweave to configure mobilities and people’s futures. Chapters 5 and 6 are about migrants’ lives in Malta. In Chapter 5, ‘Stuck’, I describe the experiences of migrants in Malta’s government-run institutionalized reception structures, and how those who arrived by boat from Libya find themselves stuck in a legal and asylum framework. Chapter 6, ‘Moving On’, describes how migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system, to show how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a tight bureaucratic landscape. In the book’s Conclusion, ‘Mobile Lives’, I open up the space for reflection on rethinking the experiences, economies and governance of mobile life by shedding light on aspects of comparison between migrants’ experiences in the fragmented context of Libya and in Malta’s legal framework. The book and its comparative gesture reveal how migrants are not passive actors but active participants in forging their own mobilities. I conclude with reflections on what the analytic of the journey and a focus on mobility economies offer up for a new anthropology of mobility and economic life, and how it opens the possibility of future work on mobility and migration.