1. The everyday

In a first approximation, the everyday is the environment in which we all live: at home, at work, in the street, in our social relationships and in private existence. The everyday is our common social practices, our ordinary modes of existence and our most general forms of representation, in a given society at a given moment. It is not free from normativity, but this is the kind of social normativity that shapes concrete ways of living and shared understandings of reality. It is concerned with social patterns of action, not with legal rules laid down by state agencies.

Modern law, in its most diffuse definition, is precisely what denies, disturbs and defies the everyday: it is a normative order based on a set of abstract and standardised statements, backed by a technology of power, and it has as its end the social regulation of human behaviour.Footnote ⁵ The point of modern law is precisely to depart from and reshape everyday habits and social patterns. European law, in its postwar reconfiguration at the national and supranational level, can be seen as a radical expression of that modern conception of law, whereby law is entrusted not just with social ends but with its own ends. This is perhaps most visible in the conception of European Union law: since the inception of European integration, law has been designed as a means to construct a ‘community of law’, disembedded from national and international legal frameworks, but also freed from chaotic terrain of power relationships, social conflicts and ideological struggles, with a view to creating a ‘Common Market’ – that is, a legally constituted entity – making it work at the institutional level.Footnote ⁶

However, it turns out that this special form of legal normativity, meant to establish a peaceful form of relationship between European states and to fashion the precarious integration process into a legitimate construction, has generated a form of disconnect from the specific conditions of existence of people living in Europe. Such disconnect currently takes a variety of forms: the invisibilisation of basic conditions of social reproduction; the obfuscation of a large part of social realities; and the suppression of singularity, differences and otherness.Footnote ⁷ The reader will be all too aware of law’s failure and irreverence to exploitative working conditions, social rights protections, xenophobia and sexual violence, as examples that only scratch the surface of law’s uncoupling from social reality. The introduction of the category of the everyday is our response to this state of affairs: this is not to bring law back to social existences in their alleged spontaneity and as they are lived; it is to resist the reduction of the ‘basic terms of social life’ in Europe to purely institutional practices, narrative and knowledge,Footnote ⁸ to reintroduce into the matters of concern of European lawyers the crises of the everyday of European societies.Footnote ⁹ The reference to the everyday thus corresponds to a decision to suspend the conceptual world we inherit – the so-called intellectual and practical programme of ‘integration through law’ – and to start from another end, one that is less abstract and not purely institutionally moulded.

This does not mean we give up on the objectives and values that have found shelter in the European integration project. It means European law should no longer be content with constructing a market, fashioning a value-based European society and ruling the world: it should rather be concerned with lives as ‘market-embedded’, globally fashioned and ruled by the laws of Europe. The everyday is a category to account for the experience of Europe beyond the construction of Europe’s institutional order. It refers to the different ways in which living conditions are experienced and the ways in which people reflect on their own conditions of existence in Europe. This is driven by a dual concern for both the diversity of European society as it is shaped by European law and a critique of its normativity: the social relations it constitutes, its image of social reproduction and its (in)capacity to respond to the multiple crises that face European society.

It should be clear that references to ‘European law’ in the symposium ought not to be reduced to ‘the Law of the European Union’. While there is inevitable slippage in this Introduction and the essays that follow, due to the reach and significance of EU law, the distinction matters for a number of reasons. First, there are a plurality of legal orders in Europe that have a profound effect on our everyday lives, which are not necessarily shaped by or do not always fall within the competence of EU law. We see this in the provision of healthcare, employment protections and distinctions in legal culture among European states, not to mention the uneven enforcement of law that is related to local practices and knowledge. Second, the idea of ‘Europe’ and the lives of those shaped by it are not confined to the jurisdictional scope of EU law. As the stories in the book reveal, the economic activities of actors within the Union – such as banks and the oil and gas industry – are to be found in remote locations, including the Arctic Circle. They include activities that can be seen as central to providing the energy required for reproducing European society and feeding ledgers in Turin and Paris.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, those working on the ground in Sabetta and Indigenous communities, who suffer the adverse effects of neo-colonial resource extraction, are not subject to EU law per se. In other words, there is a need to account for the reach of European influence where it does not fit neatly within the territorial or jurisdictional boundaries of the European Union. This is a different but parallel story of the effect of European law on lives lived in and outside Europe. Third, a critical approach to the law of Europe cannot be constrained by EU law. Not only does a sociology of European law require a definition that accounts for the plurality of legal orders and how they are experienced and understood by those affected and reproduced by them; a critical reflection must be capable of transcending the boundaries of the European Union, recognising its institutional deficienciesFootnote ¹¹ and the complicity of its deeds and policies in the erosion of fundamental rights in the periphery to sustain the centre.Footnote ¹²

2. The representation of the everyday

The experience of Europe has already been the subject of research in European studies. Recently, there has been what has been termed a ‘practice turn’ in this field.Footnote ¹³ The studies embracing this turn, pertaining to sociology, political science and anthropology, focus on how people live with the EU as institutional machinery, and as a set of policies and symbols. They attend and explore the concrete development of transnational patterns of interaction and socialisation.Footnote ¹⁴ They document a genuine process of ‘Europeanisation of everyday life’: the sharing among the peoples of Europe of institutions, resources, modes of living, as well as social ideals and political ideologies. This approach is highly valuable; however, it continues to be characterised by an institutional bias. It is essentially based on the uncovering of artefacts, including legal artefacts, that make the EU work on an everyday level.Footnote ¹⁵ The challenge, instead, is to account for the variety of experiences that unfold in Europe because, beyond, and in spite of its institutional and legal framework. The everyday is shorthand for foregrounding the lived experiences that Europe’s institutional discourse fails to capture.Footnote ¹⁶

In our work, Ben Judah’s book provides a departure point for considering an alternative to that discourse. It consists of a collection of short stories about irregular migrants, precarious workers, members of minority groups in society and women suffering from the threat and effects of domestic violence, war and illness. This book is the repository of a social reality that is essentially fragmented, precarious and misaligned with the EU ideal of a prosperous and cohesive society. Judah’s project aims to tell stories about ‘lived Europe, not the Europe of memory or political systems’. His everyday is not the flatly quotidian, the banal and the habitual; it is full of dramatic experiences retold on behalf of the people themselves, fraught with physical or moral hardships and breakthroughs, and filled with heroic achievements. In the articles that comprise this collection, we endeavour to turn this rich material into case studies about the experience of Europe. Yet, we remain aware that the book relies on a specific representation of Europe’s social reality that comes with its own limits.Footnote ¹⁷ These limits are at once epistemic and ethical.

As Judah makes clear, the book is not about ‘characters or subjects’. It does not draw a social or moral picture of Europe based on reified characters representing distinct classes or delimited portions of society. It is really about people on the move, either geographically or existentially, caught up in situations of distress and embedded in broader movements affecting the structure of Europe as a whole, such as migration, war, technological revolution and climate change.Footnote ¹⁸ The stories are selected as an illustration for these broader trends, with an emphasis on the narratives of ‘storytellers’.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, despite Judah insisting that he is telling ‘their own stories’, adopting the style of the third-person perspective, some salient aspects of Europe’s social reality are obscured. For instance, the book refers to racial discrimination only in relation to migrants and from the point of view of the average European who sees migrants as essentially looking for stability and integration into national societies. The specific forms of relationships of migrants with Europe do not find a home in the book.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, the stories of natives of Europe who are exposed daily to forms of discrimination and racism are not told.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, those non-mobile European citizens who are broadly represented in the structures of power and who constitute the standards in relation to which other forms of life are assessed, yet perceive themselves as being exposed to threats from outside and inside Europe, with a part of them prone to regressive tendencies or even racist views are not found. Instead, the discourse of fear and racism is shared in the book by those who may be expected to be its target, such as Aboud, the delivery driver from Syria working in Storkow, commenting that ‘Berlin is full of crime’. Therefore, the representation of social reality in this book is both insightful and problematic. It gives a voice to those who are often unheard, but not without raising concerns about the distortion of social reality.

The book consists of individual stories framed in terms of coherent narratives, full of personal voices and emotions – mainly fear, loneliness and a sense of being-out-of-place or of not-being-at-home in Europe. This mode of exposition is integral to the task of generating ethical thinking, inviting the reader to share the hardships of the protagonists of the book, and therefore to develop a new consciousness in the form of a more empathic ‘we’, as this is ‘the way we live now’. Yet, this invitation is problematic on at least two counts. First, it is based on a form of extraction of stories from individuals that is at risk of reproducing the problem to which it is meant to direct our attention, namely the sense of alienation and dispossession that is pervasive in European society.Footnote ²² Second, it is aimed at arousing indignation or even anger in a context in which the question ‘Is this the way we want to live now?’ does not always produce critical reflexivity and progressive policies, but rather works as an interpellation and a rallying cry for those who are willing to feed collective resentment and polarisation.Footnote ²³

While the book is not subject to the methodological rigours of the academy, it does make a claim to narrate stories about how lives are lived, which raised nagging doubts and concerns about the representativeness of This is Europe throughout our seminars and in the articles that follow. In the absence of the author’s original transcripts and the inevitable re-presentation that occurs when speaking on behalf of another,Footnote ²⁴ we do not reify the stories presented in the book, but rather treat them with necessary scepticism. At the same time, we resolved that they serve as a window into the diversity of European lives, as a point of departure that transcends Judah’s work, to comprehend the role of law in constituting the everyday and to reflect on the ir/relevance of law to each of these stories and our own.

3. The law of the everyday

We now come to the most difficult question: how to develop an idea of law that is not only based on institutional knowledge, but also on the everyday experience of Europe? This project builds and draws upon existing interdisciplinary methods, but we are not bound to existing conceptual and theoretical ways of seeing European law and society. On the contrary, we embrace a methodological openness that responds to the aim of our inquiry – a ‘methodological bricolage’ that produces a complex, non-totalising picture of the everyday experience through law, to show how diverse concerns of European society are constituted by law and how this society responds to and defies law’s forms.Footnote ²⁵ In what follows, this section shows how the project of the law of the everyday is not bound to one specific method, but ought to be guided by an array of approaches that operate at multiple levels, both the structural and the personal, and relate to the context under consideration.

To this end, we require tools that transcend disciplinary approaches, including the need to examine the political economy of European labour regimes, the geographical bounds of EU law, the normative foundations of the Single Market and its relationship with competing ambitions of a Social Europe.Footnote ²⁶ The contours of such a method can be found in the distinct approaches of each of the authors in this symposium. Of course, each understanding of the everyday presented here is both necessarily incomplete and essential to our task. The complexity of social reality cannot be bound or satisfied by one perspective, or even a commitment to methodological openness, without leaving something out. Nonetheless, we strive for a contextualised conception of the everyday, one that is situated in time and place, knows the historical foundations of the European project, takes its lead from the people and communities it speaks of, and recognises the structural tension between the economic, political and social in contemporary Europe.Footnote ²⁷ For example, to the extent that we can conceive of the everyday experience of cross-border transport workers whose sleep, mealtimes, social relations and health are shaped by just-in-time global supply chains, we require not only a complex conception of the structural relations that reproduce working conditions in Europe, but a sensitivity to the rhythms of daily life on the road, the extent to which life is and is not dictated by EU-mandated rest periods, the demand for profit of managers in home countries and that of remote shareholders, the distortion of family life and the desire to finally arrive home.

Adopting this approach cannot mean developing just another abstraction, the description of a ‘legal reality’ based on the principles of a ‘good society’.Footnote ²⁸ Our account ought not to be independent from the social reality it addresses: it assumes to carry out a work of description.Footnote ²⁹ Yet we do not intend to simply reproduce or rely upon the reality of a European society fraught with various forms of exploitation, domination and injustice. Therefore, rather than simply looking for the place of law throughout the book, we propose to attend to the systemic vulnerabilities experienced by people in Europe as they emerge from each of these stories, to then wonder about the agency of legal forms and processes in fashioning these experiences, whether they exacerbate, displace or attempt to remedy them.

A method that seeks to account for the way life is lived with law may draw inspiration from legal consciousness studies that have shown the ways ‘law works in everyday life, how people experience and understand law, and what potential this has for understanding and reshaping the relationship between law and society’.Footnote ³⁰ However, to the extent that our project shares some of its aims with legal consciousness scholars, it is closer to the critical ambitions of this tradition. Rather than reproducing and describing the diversity of legal meaning and people’s consciousness, we share an ambition to return to the materiality of the social in the study of the lawFootnote ³¹ – to recognise the social foundations of law, its relations and effects on individuals and how law is reproduced through social understandings. While the legal consciousness field has developed to provide numerous accounts of how different social groups interpret the law or their attitude towards it,Footnote ³² Susan Silbey’s original aim was to investigate the hegemonic nature of law: how its authority and ideologies are reproduced over time, and the effect of its structures on everyday life.Footnote ³³ This is key to our present ambition to inquire into how law is experienced and reproduced in practice. It also shares a concern for the ways law produces material inequalities in society.Footnote ³⁴

We draw upon insights and methods of legal consciousness studies to recognise that any critical concept of the law of the everyday must seek to comprehend the ways the law imposes and sustains structures of domination, which shape not just how people think about law but how they act in relation to it. However, our point of departure is not found in legal rules or ‘legalities’, defined as a set of personal perceptions and reactions about law, but rather in personal experiences and social practices as long as they are imbued with a complex of socio-legal normativities.Footnote ³⁵ We begin not with individuals’ relations to law, but with diverse social experiences as they are fashioned by law, or the lack thereof, developing in the interstices of it.

We acknowledge that we do this in the context of a society that is no longer the one in which the so-called ‘everyday studies’ emerged in Europe, at the age of the development of industrial capitalism, modernisation and productivism.Footnote ³⁶ We live in a post-COVID society that is undergoing major disruptive events – whether crises or catastrophes, such as climate change, the digital revolution or the return of war on the continent – in a global context in which individual and social lives are governed by a new form of capitalism, whether it is called ‘absolute capitalism’, ‘cognitive capitalism’ or ‘surveillance capitalism’.Footnote ³⁷ This structure is based on a ‘framework of law and governance’, as Bakker and Gill put it,Footnote ³⁸ which relies on both increasingly dense webs of interdependence between national societies in Europe, including economic, institutional, technological, social, cultural and legal interdependencies, and a new level of dependency on complex technical systems, external resources and actors, and natural processes beyond our control. This structuration gives rise to a tension that unfolds on the psychosocial level: on the one hand, this may seem to enhance personal agency, give rise to new forms of ‘individuation’Footnote ³⁹ and even expand the very notion of ‘agency’ to include artefacts and non-humans;Footnote ⁴⁰ however, on the other hand, it may be felt that the complex set of techno-social systems that bind European societies together limits individuals’ agency, disempowering and dispossessing them. This generates a sense of ‘social insecurity’ that certain political forces are prone to exploit, including with the intention of pitting middle-class Europeans and minority groups or migrants against each other.Footnote ⁴¹ Today, more and more people in Europe are experiencing feelings of loss, vulnerability and ‘placelessness’.Footnote ⁴²

What has emerged from our inquiry is that the legal forms and processes through which lives are lived in Europe vary depending on the field concerned, whether it is work, migration, domestic violence, healthcare or religion. In each case, though, we found that these are essentially of two kinds. One is the objective or structural forms under which social practices develop and lives are lived in Europe. The task here is to unveil the complex co-integration of ecosystems, technical structures and political ideologies that produce material, social and legal constraints on the everyday life of workers, migrants or women in Europe. The other kind refers to the subjective or existential forms through which people relate to themselves, to each other and to the world. The task here is to decipher people’s affective, embodied, imaginary and conceptual engagements that condition the various ways in which they perceive, relate to and rely upon law in their everyday life.

In this context, the challenge is to articulate and combine the distinct methodologies associated with the objective and subjective forms of the everyday. Accounting for the ‘objective everyday’ requires a reliance on new forms of materialism attentive to ‘embodied subjectivities’, able to unveil the operation of broad structures of power and social constraints that unevenly affect the condition of Europeans.Footnote ⁴³ Accounting for the ‘subjective everyday’ requires the mobilisation of new forms of existentialism able to think the ‘lived body’ and ‘social structure’ together in the geo-ecological and psycho-social context of today’s Europe.Footnote ⁴⁴ When applied to individual stories, the former approach insists on instances of domination and processes of disenfranchisement and exploitation. The latter insists on damaged ways of living, social struggles and forms of reinhabiting the world in a precarious or even devastated social, political and natural context. Both perspectives are required to make sense of stories such as that of Nora, the young girl from the Latvian city of Liepāja who is forced into sex work to finance her studies in Italy and to help her family. This is both a damning tale of structural exploitation and a story about a young woman’s resilience and struggle to achieve her aims on her own terms.Footnote ⁴⁵ Or consider the story of Graña, the fisherman from Corrubedo, a small fishing village in the community of Galicia, Spain, that is increasingly being transformed into a site of over-tourism. This is both a story of systemic extraction and exploitation of natural resources within and beyond the borders of Europe and a tale about the development of a ‘reconnection to Earth’ in the life and consciousness of an old, fatigued European man.Footnote ⁴⁶

To account for these complex dialectics of social oppression and reconnection to life, we were prepared during our seminar to ‘wildly’ associate sociologies of everyday life, philosophies of the ordinary, critical social theory, moral philosophy, science and technology studies, feminist phenomenologies or Black studies.Footnote ⁴⁷ In bringing them all under the umbrella of ‘the law of the everyday’, our aim is to draw attention to the existential fractures left by law, as well as ‘existential territories’ secured with the help of the law or despite its failure or absence.Footnote ⁴⁸ The ‘law of the everyday’ opens a way to understand the forms of lived experience situated in Europe as they are shaped by law that reflects, transforms or seeks to contain social structures of domination, exploitation, and alienation.

One specific form of fracture repeatedly present in the stories of This is Europe is the socio-economic disadvantage suffered by people. In the articles collected for this symposium, the authors insist on the role of law in exposing and exacerbating such vulnerability. This comes as no surprise at a time of gross inequality, but it demands critical questions regarding the distribution of irresponsibility through law, how it denies collective organisation and enables exploitative working conditions to proliferate through inadequate regulatory frameworks, and why certain social groups and demographics are over-represented in the informal economy and denied access to healthcare and other basic needs.Footnote ⁴⁹ Law plays a critical role here in including and excluding individuals and social groups, defining them as employees or independent contractors, citizens or illegal migrants. Yet the reality of Europe is not defined by dispossession and exploitation alone, but also by wealth and prosperity. This is a Europe defined by both precarity and privilege, often in the same place, transaction and relationship. Under these conditions, any method that seeks to comprehend the everyday experience of law is obliged to reflect on the political economic consequences of the present distribution of legal entitlements in Europe,Footnote ⁵⁰ from its role in determining the scope of bargaining power, excluding certain categories of workers from the scope of employment protections, governing the movement of people and business, facilitating (de)regulatory agendas, and the hollowing-out of social rights provisions. This means we are bound to consider the normative foundations of Europe, the dominant discourses that exclude alternative visions of social reality and shape the terms of Europe’s reproduction alongside the stories of how this Europe is lived.

The experience of the everyday in Europe is at once about the connivance of Europe’s institutions, policies and laws in entrenching systems of social, political and economic domination, exploitation and destruction as it is about modes of acting and living with the help of the law. The law of the everyday reflects the ambiguity of these two movements, the one hardly graspable without the other. Taken as a whole, this collection of articles maintains this complex uncertainty in various guises, with each of them accentuating one or the other of these movements. It aims at sticking to the complex dialectic of social reality itself. Waving this ambiguity would amount to questioning the continuation of the European project as a whole. Some authors in the collection may lean toward this approach; indeed, this may be the next step in our collective inquiry – exposing the law of everyday Europe to a more radical reconsideration and reimagining, yet being aware of the promises and risks entailed by a retreat from the social structures and the laws in which we are embedded.

4. In this collection

From this introduction it should already be clear that the articles in this symposium are of considerable diversity. There are as many approaches to the ‘everyday’, ‘Europe’, and ‘law’ as there are contributions to this collection. Yet the authors concur with the general meaning of the inquiry. The guiding aim of the collection is to shift the focus of European studies from the institutional realities of European integration to the lived experience of it. However, it is not to separate the lived experience of Europe from the institutional and legal account of Europe; instead, the goal is to show precisely how institutional and legal Europe is lived by individuals and social groups and, in the living, reflected and reproduced at the social level, generating various forms of injustices and indignities.

The issue opens with Jacob van de Beeten’s critical reflection on the disembeddedness of EU law from European society, ‘Confronting European Society with the Everyday’. It relies on the ‘everyday’ as a tool to critically reflect on scholarship that describes European integration in terms of shared identity, common values or as a model of society. This common approach, for van de Beeten, tends to obscure the ways in which individuals and groups experience their lives in Europe. He then calls not just for more critical distance in EU legal scholarship, but for a form of ‘disenchantment’ with the EU as a political project.

Irina Muñoz Ibarra’s article ‘This is (White) Europe: Race and European Law of the Everyday’ suggests that, in the way Europe has been fashioned and developed, a specific set of realities have been obscured. These are the realities of race and racialisation in the everyday life of non-white Europeans. This omission, she argues, is clearly reflected in Judah’s book. In response, Muñoz Ibarra makes the normative claim that, in our effort to conceptualise a new European law of the everyday, we should act for racial justice and work towards the acknowledgement of racial differences, in terms of discrimination, hierarchies, violence and neglect, in the operation of Europe and its laws.

Mateus Correia de Carvalho’s article ‘People: What EU Law Does Not Understand About Tech’ unveils the pervasive presence of technology in the social experience of Europe. The author re-presents technological infrastructure as everyday interaction, which implies paying attention to ‘instances of violence, alienation and dehumanisation’. Correia de Carvalho insists that, anxious to secure innovation and protect consumers, EU law fails to capture and manage the real social harms suffered by individuals and social groups, such as total surveillance, tech-induced stress and addiction, and gender-based violence. These harms are particularly suffered by platform workers, women and migrants. This analysis has both legal and political consequences, for it offers a way of reimagining technology in Europe beyond the ideology of tech development and risk regulation towards a deeper, qualitative understanding of the violent and dehumanising effects of technologies on European society.

Social risks are also sites of concern in Marc Steiert’s ‘Ways of Seeing European Law Anew: The Everyday, Risk, and Resilience’. For Steiert, the everyday experience of law ought to be approached by recognising the extent to which it reproduces or confronts structural injustice that is embedded in society. His article foregrounds the role of European law in shifting social risks onto individuals, restricting access to collective organisations that historically mitigated against injustice, and shifting socio-economic and political responsibility for social needs onto individuals as rational market actors. The critical value of this article lies in showing how law is embedded into social structures that are potentially alienating and unjust, and in highlighting the form and unequal effects of social risk-sharing reproduced by European law.

In ‘Ibrahim, the Law and the EU’s Internal Market of Pornography’, Renan Bodin, Johannes Müller and Alex Schuster show that the operation of European law embodies and intensifies a particular form of individuation already present in European societies. They find in Judah’s book a ‘successful internal market story’, whereby a Syrian asylum seeker reinvents himself as a service provider, a free mover, and a content producer in the porn industry and platform economy. However, the very same Ibrahim who proudly tells his own story and feels he enjoys ‘endless possibilities’ is confronted by the extreme precariousness of the economic and social world around him, and suffers from addiction and a sense of disenchantment with Europe. For the authors, it is European law – especially what it does and does not see – that links the socio-economic trajectory of individuals with their personal experience of alienation and exclusion.

In ‘the Truck Driver from Baloga: Driving Through Time and Space’, Mikael Ruukel focuses on one crucial segment of the economic structure of the European Union: the road transport and logistics system that organises the circulation of goods and materials. It does so from the perspective of Ionut, a Romanian truck driver who is profoundly shaped by a complex configuration of rules and devices that sustain and affect the most intimate and trivial aspects of his life. This reveals a life that emerges amid the structuring of the ‘social’ market, but this is also a life that is disconnected from market-oriented rules. Ruukel argues that, in regulating this market, European law offers protection ‘from the most raw forms of exploitative forces of a highly competitive market economy and the logic of logistics’. Yet, by taking the form of a body of detailed rules that meticulously specify every spatial and temporal parameter of his life, it fails to consider the colonisation of the everyday that triggers feelings of alienation and domination.

In ‘Against the Tide: Law, Illegality and the Everyday in Corrubedo’, Anna D’Agostino, Lukas Schaupp and Hubert Sitnik place the case of Graña, a former fisherman from the Galician town of Corrubedo, in the broader context of local fishing communities whose present and future are dictated by transnational frameworks of governance. These communities are sites where tragic choices are exacerbated rather than resolved by European and international law. In this contribution, the authors argue that fishermen are left with the choice of either ‘reinventing their practice, themselves, or reinventing legality’. In the case of Graña, we see that this means engaging in illegal fishing with social consequences of criminalisation, marginalisation and social isolation. As the authors argue, there is something wrong with legal regimes of the EU that regulate fisheries and manage marine resources in the name of sustainability. These regimes exclude the voices of affected communities and they have dramatic social and existential consequences.

A tragic choice is also faced by Nazneen, a migrant Afghan woman who grew up in Iran and reached Greece where, to avoid the refugee camp marked by precarious conditions and sexual violence, she worked in an olive factory on an isolated Greek island. Not only did Nazneen encounter exploitation under the guise of protection; she also faced the risk of death as the result of a wildfire and her employer’s abandonment. In ‘Invisible Struggles: Migrant Women, Everyday Vulnerability and EU Law’, Narin Nosrati raises the question of work as exploitation and death for Europe’s informal workers by showing how European legal regimes neglect primary needs and invisibilise the lives of racialised migrant women. The author calls for the rebuilding of law and institutions through a feminist law of the everyday grounded in state responsibility for human needs.

In ‘Everyday Dystopia: EU Migration Governance and Its Normalisation – Reading Briançon’, Karla Žeravčić focuses on the ways EU law externalises responsibility for migratory routes that are marked by violence, exploitation and death. The author explores the inhumane conditions that emerge from the embodied engagement of migrants with the Mediterranean routes to Europe. The article tells the story of Brico, from Côte d’Ivoire, who decided to leave his country with his wife, Blandi, his daughter, Noa, and his son, Kris. Brico is followed from his place of departure in Abidjan and throughout his journey toward the French–Italian border. Along this journey, Europe’s migration governance takes Brico and his family into its grip and reveals the ways European law orchestrates the dehumanisation of people on the move when they are deemed ‘unworthy’ of protection. Žeravčić argues that, to address such explicit forms of structural violence that cause infinite personal suffering, the inquiry has to reorient itself in a more political manner and radically question the neo/colonial structures of state sovereignty and borders, as well as migration policies that control who can enter Europe and under what conditions.

The contradiction inherent to Europe and its defence of the European way of life is the subject of Alex Schuster and Davide Tomaselli’s ‘Free to Move, Bound to Injustice: Sexual Exploitation, Sex Work, and Law from Latvia to Europe’. Tomaselli and Schuster show how EU law systematically fails to comprehend the lived reality of sex work. The authors identify the inadequacy of the EU’s individualised approach to the regulation or criminalisation of sex work by bringing to the fore the material conditions that perpetuate social inequalities and exploitation of EU citizens, particularly women. This article highlights a dynamic of abuse and exploitation in the experience of Nora, a girl from the Latvian city of Liepāja, who is awarded a scholarship to study in Italy. Under European law, she is entitled and even encouraged to freely move abroad. Yet, as a result of living in conditions that mean she cannot afford the related costs of moving abroad, she is led to accept a job at a scam company and eventually to engage in online sex work. By embracing the European project of free expression of will and free movement, she becomes vulnerable to sexual exploitation and gender-based violence, rather than securing the conditions for an emancipated life. The contradiction, for the authors, can only be resolved through the subversion of the ‘systems of oppression’ enshrined in law. In examining these systems alongside the experience of Nora, the article provides critical insights on the structural conditions of exploitation that are experienced by individuals at the periphery of Europe, particularly those who are under-represented in the dominant narratives of the integration project.

In ‘Thinking the Pathologies of Infrastructural Europe Through Rotterdam’, Luca Tenreira invites us to situate the everyday experience of port workers in Rotterdam in the infrastructural context of global supply chains. For workers, the Port of Rotterdam is experienced as exploitation, neglect, precarity and danger, but the port is also a link in the broader chain of infrastructural relations and legal processes that sustain Europe and connect it to global trade. The article encourages a critical reading of EU law’s interaction with competing and complementary sites of legal ordering, which uncovers the normative aims of European law and policy and its necessary relations with and situatedness in the dynamics of global markets. Tenreira shows that the port is part of ‘Infrastructural Europe’, and that it is regulated through instruments that leave the unjust conditions of labour, the unfair conditions of trade and the inhabitable conditions of the planet untouched. The remedy to this is to introduce new voices and knowledges derived from social actors such as unions, NGOs and affected communities. This would help to give European law the grounding and concrete nature it lacks.

The contributions to the issue provide diverse insights into the connections and dislocations between European law and everyday lives both in and outside Europe. There are many common themes that flow through this collection. There are also critical differences in the ways of approaching the challenge of thinking the ‘law of the everyday’. Some authors contemplate a reimagining and institutional reconfiguration of European law, one that would be more democratic, responsible and just. Others dispute the very possibility of relying on law and Europe; instead, they recommend the articulation of new forms of gatherings and struggles outside the law and its institutions. Above all, the enduring message is that we European lawyers must be prepared for the endless complications and pains that are suffered routinely by individuals and communities in Europe. In a context of profound dis-connection, not just between society and law, but between decision-makers and affected communities, and between those who that enjoy the opportunities of European law and those who suffer its indignities at the margins, our task is to find conceptual and technical resources to see, comprehend and cope with the everyday – if not to transform it.

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We should like to dedicate this collection to the memory of Saniya Amraoui, former PhD researcher at the EUI. Her passing has left many of us inconsolable. Her uprightness in life and her unfinished work on migrants’ life and law in Europe have been a constant inspiration during our collaboration and for our work. Footnote ⁵¹