Borders, (Im)mobility, and the Everyday: Living, Negotiating, and Contesting Migration Regimes

1. Introduction

The first image that comes to mind when we think of borders is one of walls, gates, and barbed wire in isolated spaces at the very edges of states. Borders are mostly thought of as state borders, which delimit territories and protect the inside from the outside. Contrary to this dominant imaginary, we cannot fail to recognise that we are surrounded and crossed by a myriad of visible and invisible lines that shape, delimit, restrict, and often divert our movements. As Étienne Balibar reminds us, borders are “dispersed a little everywhere” [1] (p. 1). The same lines that make mobility possible and ordinary for some can be barriers for others whose movements are deemed suspicious or undesirable. Lines do not simply create barriers by separating groups; they also hierarchise groups and establish modalities, rules, and tools through which some can enjoy mobility while others are forced into immobility. Starting from this premise, we recognise that the line between mobility and immobility is not the same for all of us. Existing legal, social, cultural, political, and ethical barriers affect each of us differently, shaping our capacity to contest, disrupt, or overcome them.

Observing borders through the prism of the many lines that shape our daily lives helps us approach them as not only spatial limits but, fundamentally, social ones. Over the past three decades, border and mobility studies have proven crucial for breaking away from orthodox understandings of borders as geographical lines and engaging seriously with lived experience in this vein [2,3,4]. In particular, the spatial turn has highlighted the social (re)production of space and spatial relations [5,6,7]. This is not to suggest, however, that states have changed their approach to borders but rather that security is no longer the only lens through which scholars examine them.

The borderless world promised by globalisation has proved to be an illusion. Not only do states continue to maintain and protect their borders, but new barriers have been erected and new restrictions introduced, many of them less visible than one might expect. Paradoxically, the European Union (EU)/Schengen area, created precisely to abolish internal borders between European countries, is now surrounded or criss-crossed by nineteen border fences. Between 2014 and 2022, their total length grew from 315 to more than 2000 km [8]. In addition, physical barriers are not the only ones in place. Increased border patrols, sophisticated remote surveillance systems, reinforcement of internal police forces, identification centres for screening newly arrived migrants, and growing bureaucratic and legal obstacles to obtaining entry visas are all intended to enforce immobility, especially for people moving from the Global South to the Global North.

The authors contributing to this Special Issue, Borders, (Im)mobility and the Everyday: Living, Negotiating and Contesting Migration Regimes, are less interested in how states control their borders than in how borders are experienced, negotiated, and contested through quotidian practices. Three particular lines of inquiry have guided and informed this Special Issue: (1) how are borders shaped and reproduced in daily life; (2) what—and who—produces (im)mobility; and (3) what are the specifics of the double-edged nature of (im)mobility, which is a resource for some and a constraint, or even a danger, for others? The contributions cover topics ranging from Liberian refugees in Ghana who continue to negotiate everyday borders long after the cessation of their refugee status to the dream of Europe and the risky journeys it inspires across multiple borders, spanning from the Senegalese coastal communities mourning those lost at sea to lawyers contesting deportation in New Zealand. They also examine the policy and platform narratives that encourage a “return” to China’s rural villages and the efforts of highly skilled Syrians in the United Kingdom to have their professional identities recognised.

In bringing the everyday into view, we draw on the work of Michel de Certeau [9], whose insight—though not explicitly invoked by the contributors—runs through their articles. For de Certeau, ordinary practices, however minuscule, allow both appropriation and resistance. The spaces and rules imposed from above can be lived in, transformed, and even subverted in unexpected ways. When applied to borders, this suggests that everyday mobility is more than movement between places: it involves the appropriation of lived space through power relations, connections, and counter-conduct [10]. Physical and social borders are constantly crossed, negotiated, and resisted. Those who cross borders or are crossed by them are not simply objects of governance, as their practices expose the limits of governance itself [11]. Even where the term is not used, “regimes of mobility” [12,13]—that is, the migration regimes that dictate which movements to restrict, facilitate, or even criminalise—run through all the contributions, which approach borders as sites of constraint as much as sites of contestation.

This Special Issue’s originality is reflected in three aspects of its approach. First, it treats the everyday as an analytical lens and not merely a context. Instead of starting from state policies and tracing their effects, the contributions start from lived experiences of work, family, loss, departure, return, and advocacy and ask what borders look like from there. As a result, borders appear in places where they are rarely searched for, such as the workplace, the household, a lawyer’s office, a rural village, and a solidarity network. Second, this Special Issue broadens what counts as a border and, with it, our understanding of b/ordering as an “active verb” [14] (p. 3) through which individuals and entire communities are bordered, ordered, and othered. The articles engage with legal statuses, professional recognition, emotions, and internal administrative boundaries. They show borders operating at international, national, and local scales simultaneously and reveal that some of the most consequential borders are also the least visible. (Im)mobility is produced where several of these limits intersect. Third, this Special Issue brings together a range of geographical contexts and disciplinary traditions. The contributions not only move across the European Union, the United Kingdom, Senegal, Ghana, New Zealand, and China but also draw on a plurality of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, socio-legal studies, political theory, security studies, and urban studies. This breadth indicates that the relationship between borders, (im)mobility, and the everyday is not confined to particular regions nor specific disciplines. It takes many forms and mobilises diverse strategies and resources in different places, quite often far from the geographical borders of the state. The leitmotif that has inspired all the contributions is a distinctive focus on agency, that is, the capacity to adapt, reshape, contest, and occasionally transform the many constraints on mobility that shape—and, at times, dominate—everyday life. Agency, moreover, is shaped and driven by emotions—above all, hope—and sustained by solidarity, advocacy, and creativity. These appear in the contributions as everyday practices for negotiating the limits imposed by borders and hence as important means of exercising agency.

2. Overview of the Contributions

The six contributions differ in geography, method, and object of study. Approached in the order of publication, however, they follow (im)mobility through a sequence of moments: the state’s attempt to expel individuals, the hopes that lead people to leave, the losses that departure can produce, and the borders that persist once people have arrived, returned, or chosen to stay.

This Special Issue opens with deportation, the point at which bordering takes its most direct legal form. Drawing on Lipsky’s notion of street-level bureaucrats and Lakhani’s concept of “para-state” actors, who stand neither fully inside nor fully outside the state, Timothy P. Fadgen and Luke D. Oldfield examine the role of immigration lawyers and advisers in the deportation process in New Zealand. What emerges from their interviews with twenty-two practitioners is the way in which interviewees use the gaps in the system to better protect their clients—non-resident visa holders—against forced removal. By exploiting the weaknesses of the system, lawyers and advisers create room for creative advocacy through formal and informal networks, and, more importantly, their work has the potential to reshape New Zealand’s bordering practices.

While deportation concerns the state’s attempt to remove people, Raffaela Puggioni and Maria Julia Trombetta consider why people move despite the risks that borders impose. Their concept paper reads European Union border politics as an emotional contest. Deterrence is intended to generate fear, anxiety, and insecurity, but hope, understood as the dream of a different life in Europe, may override the fears that border security seeks to generate. Drawing on theories of hope, the Italian film Io Capitano, and its screenings in Senegal, the authors propose seeing migrants more as dreaming subjects of mobility and less as fearful subjects of security. Accordingly, they ultimately suggest that deterrence may be less effective than it is often assumed to be.

Senegal is also the setting of the third contribution, which moves from the hope of departure to its tragic consequences. Through an ethnography of a pirogue shipwreck off Mbour in September 2024, Luca Queirolo Palmas and Federico Rahola reconstruct the event through the voices of survivors, relatives, organisers, and rescuers, showing that the boat was overcrowded for two reasons. One is excess demand. The other is solidarity, since passage could not be refused to friends, relatives, and neighbours. The notion of “on est ensemble” captures a world in which several distinctions are blurred, namely, those between captain and passengers, survivors and the dead, and those who leave and those who watch. The authors also distinguish death from disappearance and question the category of the “potential migrant” on which dissuasion campaigns rely. In their account, solidarity is communal and material before it is humanitarian.

The fourth contribution addresses events after borders have been crossed, focusing on the workplace. Lina Fadel, Katerina Strani, and Joanna Drugan adopt a decolonial methodology grounded in affect and borderland theories. Through conversations with seventeen highly skilled Syrians, they explore participants’ daily experiences of work. These experiences reveal the difficulties and, at times, struggles participants face in feeling welcome in the United Kingdom. The authors show not only that bordering practices do not end with the crossing of borders but also that they continue years after arrival. They persist within racialised migrant bodies and resurface in professional life, where identities are negotiated, recognised, or put at risk. Work, for the Syrian participants, is much more than a job. It is both an anchor and a contested terrain, where the subjects resist imposed identities and seek to define themselves beyond victimhood.

The fifth contribution turns to borders within national territories. Andrea Palmioli, Eugenio Mangi, and Yucong Zhang review the scholarship on rural return in China and develop the concept of “internal rural re-bordering”. Although return is encouraged by rural revitalisation policies and digital platform economies, it rarely leads to inclusion and durable residency. The authors identify three interacting, multi-layered mechanisms that hinder both mobility and effective return: institutional bordering, through which eligibility and service portability are governed; platform governance, which conditions visibility and income; and “aesthetic governance,” which defines which identities and livelihoods are admissible. Return thus becomes a form of conditional inclusion.

The Special Issue closes with those who decide to stay. Joyce De-Graft Acquah, Philip Aniah, and Kwadwo Addo Tuffour examine why fifteen Liberian refugees in Ghana sought exemption from the 2012 cessation of refugee status. Their choice to remain was shaped by unresolved trauma, fear of insecurity and spiritual harm, the loss of networks and livelihoods, and concern for their children’s futures. Staying did not, however, bring b/ordering processes to an end. Structural, socio-economic, cultural, and psychological borders continue to mark their everyday lives in Ghana. The authors also show that trauma and fear themselves operate as borders, that is, as barriers that need to be managed as much as overcome.

Across this sequence, three threads connect the contributions. First, not only do borders persist beyond the moment of crossing, but they also constantly surface in everyday life, not necessarily through visible lines but through conditional forms of inclusion and bodily experiences in which a sense of not fitting in, of being an outsider, is palpable. Second, emotions are central to how borders are inhabited and experienced: hope, fear, grief, trauma, and the search for dignity are present in virtually all contributions. Finally, people are never merely governed through borders. Lawyers, workers, families, communities, refugees, and (potential) migrants constantly adapt to, circumvent, and, at times, reshape them.

3. Concluding Remarks

Focusing on the everyday has allowed us to ask what shapes borders as well as what—and who—makes people (im)mobile and under which conditions. We see two implications for future research. First, border practices need to be investigated with special attention to the many actors—including workers, relatives, lawyers, returnees, and communities—who rarely appear in state-centred accounts. Second, research should treat the everyday not only as the place where borders are reproduced but also as the place where they are contested, interrupted, and reimagined. As the contributions collected here show, moments of breakage, even small ones, reveal that borders are less stable than they often appear. Although these contributions neither provide nor intend to provide a single perspective on borders, they collectively offer a glimpse of the lived experiences of those who are often marginalised, silenced, and made invisible.