ABSTRACT
This chapter rethinks what the assertion of an autonomy of migration refers to in the context of biometric border controls. To this end, the chapter develops a reading of the AoM that is based on four interrelated ideas: an understanding of autonomy as the enactment of an irreconcilable conflict between migration and attempts of controlling it that is initiated, second, by migrants’ practices of appropriation. This conflict is, third, an irreconcilable conflict due to the irreducible ambivalence of migrants’ practices of appropriation which can, fourth, be studied in migrants’ embodied encounters with the means of control.
