Autonomy Of Migration Essay

Despite the restrictive migration regime there are thousands of people who manage to resist contemporary migration control that seeks to exclude them from European territory. Many of them are on the move for years, cover long distances and cross several borders. The hope of meeting with one’s aspirations and fulfilling the dream of making it in Europe often endures and makes migrants continue their journeys notwithstanding all the obstacles and hardships.

Once migrants successfully entered Europe, many do not draw back from their plans when facing impediments concerning access to stay. On the contrary, they fight back migration and subvert the European migration regime in many cases and consequently their agency cannot be overlooked. Their partial autonomy forces and enables migrants to switch between statuses and places, but also between resistance and submission with regard to migration control.

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Moulier Boutang 2002; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). The notion underscores migrants’ role as agents, without denying the objective severity of their conditions. The individual and collective practices, the desires, the expectations, and the behaviours of the migrants themselves are put into the focus of analysis (Karakayalı and Tsianos 2005; Mezzadra 2011). In this way it becomes possible to look at the activities of migrants and of control agencies as two mutually dependent forces (Müller 2010). Autonomy is understood not as a complete independence or self-determination but rather as the initiation of a conflictive relationship between migrants and the attempts of their control (Scheel 2015). Scheel draws on Moulier Boutang’s understanding of autonomy that is “the opposite of heteronomy: not to be dependent, free of effects of domination” (2015, 388). Such a reading allows for a situated and relational understanding of