ABSTRACT
This chapter engage with the core argument of the book, namely the production of lives in transit. The theory of subjectivity allows the shedding of light on how refugees internalize power relations, and on how they negotiate the macro-level forces of EU border control in their everyday lives. The internalization of power structures is grasped through an analysis of the emotions and feelings expressed by the research protagonists. The resistance to power structures is highlighted by looking at the everyday practices worked out by the refugees both in Berlin and Milan to negotiate such structural forces. Speaking about lives in transit leads to drawing attention onto the experiences of refugees’ lives characterized by a lengthened border-crossing mobility – half-autonomous and half-forced – which is circular and fragmented. A protracted precariousness emerges in their feeling of being ‘not yet arrived’, still looking for a condition in which to start their lives. Thus, the transit experience turns from a passage period into an existential state of the self due to the lengthening of the high degree of precariousness in which refugees live. A dispossession of biographical time emerges as the main problem refugees experience in Europe, and consequently they claim for temporal rather than spatial justice – namely, a claim to regain control over their own biographies and to be recognized for their historical subjectivity.
