ABSTRACT
Th e fi ne lines of border politics as they are lived and experienced by irregular migrants are the lines of geographical borders crossed, of fences and walls that mark immigration reception centres and of the social borders between legal and illegal, allowed and disallowed. Th ey are the lines of the fi ngerprints that are stored in the Eurodac database. Th ey are the fi ne lines between citizens and noncitizens and, fundamentally, they are political. Th ey mark legitimate participation, and what might be considered threatening or troubling agency. Any discussion of migrant and noncitizen political agency grapples with these lines, and how they might be, and are, transgressed. Th is paper begins from such transgression, defi ning noncitizenship as a political status that is not simply the absence of citizenship, but that
has political content in itself. Rather than seeking an enactment of citizenship in order to understand migrant agency, the refugee protest camp movements in Europe are examples of transgressive, situated solidarity as noncitizens give us clues about how we can rethink activism and political agency within the border politics of mobility.
