ABSTRACT
Thousands of migrants and refugees were literally ripping down the fences of the European border regime and were demanding the right to cross the borders of Europe. They camped wherever, jumped on ferries and trains, and if security agents got in their way, they marched hundreds of kilometres to the next national border and protested over their right to proceed. Although migrant resistance is often practised individually, it is nevertheless embedded in the social networks of transit migration, drawing on the wisdom and collective knowledge of diasporic border-crossing communities, which Asef Bayat describes as ‘nonmovement’. In international border studies, the relationship between migration and the border is often understood in a way in which migrants as a social group, movement, or network have practically no agency at all. In this way, researchers contribute to the epistemological reproduction of the structural dominance of migration control devices.
