Introduction
‘No luck […]. No lucky me,’ Gargaaro,Footnote 1 a woman from Somalia, exclaimed while bent over a small gas burner in the intense afternoon sunshine. She was sitting in the courtyard of a large and derelict house in the dusty outskirts of Tripoli, Libya. It was a hot day and Gargaaro was cooking spaghetti with an onion and a tomato to feed the small child sitting on her lap, hungry and crying. Gargaaro's aim was to have ‘freedom in Europe,’ but luck had not been on her side. She had left Somalia for Khartoum some months earlier with money from her family. In Khartoum, Gargaaro paid US$ 1700 to a broker to travel on an overcrowded truck to the south of Libya. She then had to pay another US$ 700 to a different group of smugglers to continue her journey north. Gargaaro arrived at the house in Tripoli almost two months after having left Sudan, but was detained not long after in one of Libya's government-run immigration detention centres. She bought her way out with US$ 1300 sent by her family. Back at the house, she paid US$ 800 to take a boat to Italy. But their group was intercepted by Libyan authorities at sea. Gargaaro managed to again buy her way out of detention and return to the house. She paid yet another US$ 800 to leave Libya by boat. This time, they spent three hours at sea before being intercepted. Detention, another escape and a further boat crossing followed in quick succession, culminating in another round of detention. By the time I met Gargaaro, she had been caught at sea five times and lost money to smugglers on two other occasions, bringing the total number of failed attempts at leaving Libya to seven. Her family was unable to provide further funds. They had already sold their house in Somalia to help. But life with a child in Libya was difficult and Gargaaro wanted to leave again as soon as possible. Arrangements were already in place. ‘Freedom in Europe,’ she repeated: ‘This time it will work out.’ She would finally be ‘lucky,’ Gargaaro added confidently.
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Gargaaro's journey was fragmented, shaped by multiple rounds of detention by different criminal and state actors, and repeated payments to move on that stretched her family and personal resources to the limit. Such journeys are not unusual for unauthorized migrants in Libya. The Central Mediterranean Route through Libya to Europe remains one of the world's deadliest (IOM 2017; UNHCR 2019) migratory routes. Migrants’ mobilities are shaped by prolonged phases of immobility in between short spurs of movement. Popular media, research and policy reports of the migration ‘crisis,’ however, posit such journeys across the Mediterranean as linear and directed towards Europe (Crawley et al. Reference Crawley, Düvell, Jones, McMahon and Sigona2016). Not only do these linear and ‘crisis’ narratives gloss over fragmentations and immobilities along the way, but result in policy and humanitarian responses (Lindley Reference Lindley2014). These manifest in an externalisation of EU borders through policies criminalising migration, such as in Niger, the funding of detention centres in Libya, or the push back of migrants at sea. Ideas of a migrant ‘crisis’ are steeped in questions of security, and are quelled by fear and an othering of the figure of the migrant. They give rise to bordering practices that aim to stop migrants’ movements to Europe (Brachet Reference Brachet2016; HRW 2019). Stemming from an EU-led biopolitics of containing movement, such practices are based on a framing of the figure of the migrant as exceptional and state-linked, as well as defined by the binary categories of legal, illegal, documented, undocumented, refugee and economic migrant. These framings fail to account for the non-linearity of journeys and the various forms of immobility that reveal how migrants exert agency, even amid adversity and situations of coercion. While such static binaries and categories have been widely criticised and discussed (see for example O'Connell Davidson Reference O'Connell Davidson2013), less attention has been paid to immobilities along a journey, in both comparative terms and particularly in fragmented state contexts such as Libya. Immobility becomes a means through which one might understand migrants not as passive actors but as active participants in the making of their own mobilities.
What might it then mean to attend to migrants’ mobilities not as linear movements from point A to point B, or as isolated events such as departure or arrival, but as fragmented journeys (see also Schapendonk Reference Schapendonk2012) across different state contexts? What do journeys punctuated by a series of immobilities and phases of waiting tell us about migrants’ experiences? This article builds on the work of anthropologists and migration scholars who have called for a closer scrutiny of migrants’ journeys (BenEzer and Zetter Reference BenEzer and Zetter2015; Khosravi, Reference Khosravi2010; Lucht Reference Lucht2012), and for moving against linear depictions characterized by departure and arrival (Collyer Reference Collyer2007; Schapendonk Reference Schapendonk2012). Drawing upon main multi-sited ethnographic work conducted for around six months in Libya and Malta in 2013 and 2014, and follow-ups since then, it aims to highlight a different story of the mobilities and lives of migrants than those encountered through narratives of the migration crisis and linear portrayals of journeys. Migrants’ experiences were elicited through participant observation and semi-structured interviews I conducted with migrants in private houses as well as government-run detention centres in Libya, and reception centres and private houses in Malta.Footnote 2 The migrants I engaged with moved from countries in East and West sub-Saharan Africa through Sudan or Niger and the Sahara Desert to Libya, and either stayed or moved onwards to Italy or Malta by boat. While migrants’ journeys are much more complex than the somewhat simplified description I provide here, and shaped by many difficulties and stops along the way, I attend to immobilities in a comparative vein. Immobility in Libya's context of fragmented state authority with no legal asylum framework is contrasted to periods of stuckness in Malta's strong state and legal system. I, therefore, aim to present a wider conceptual argument about immobilities rather than an in-depth description of migrants’ experiences.
Immobilities deflect the analytical impetus from isolated snapshots to the journey. To this end, the article contributes to emerging conversations on mobility in anthropology and the wider social sciences (Cresswell Reference Cresswell2010; Glick Schiller and Salazar Reference Glick Schiller and Salazar2013; Vogt Reference Vogt2018). Its multi-sited ethnographic endeavour (Marcus Reference Marcus1995) follows the many calls in anthropology for new methodologies of studying mobility (Andersson Reference Andersson, Elliot, Norum and Salazar2017; Elliot et al. Reference Elliot, Norum and Salazar2017), particularly the need to look at legal and bureaucratic contexts in comparative terms. This not only moves away from an understanding of the figure of the migrant as static and binary, linked to the state, but also from that of mobility as always linked to movement. A comparative analysis enables tracing difference and shows how situations of immobility are not the same everywhere. Rather, they vary along journeys and such variance is crucial for grasping the rich intricacies of mobile life.
Migrants’ journeys through Libya are shaped by forced immobility in detention centres and informal spaces of confinement, where state and criminal actors render mobile lives into a source of money. Immobility, however, can be more voluntary, marked by situations of deliberate waiting to move on by boat. In contrast, periods of staying in institutionalized centres in Malta, unable to move on, reveal how immobility plays out in relation to bureaucratic categories and legal processes. In this brief article, I suggest that it is often through the negotiation of different situations of immobility that migrants assert agency and become active participants in the realities they are immersed in. A focus on the journey opens up a comparative understanding of immobility, highlighting how it is not uniform, but contingent on relations with different actors in particular circumstances. Immobility, when looked at comparatively through the journey, becomes a counter-intuitive but helpful starting point for recasting how we might study the lives and mobilities of migrants across Libya and the wider region.
Immobilities in Libya
Moving through the Sahara Desert on overcrowded cars or trucks, migrants like Gargaaro spent large amounts of time in the hands of different smuggler actors and other criminal groups. Frequently, they experienced situations of forced immobility through informal confinement. These were often in sites where onward movement was only possible with the payment of money, usually after a phone call to initiate informal money transfers by friends and family back home. Sites of informal confinement were particularly prevalent along the route through Sudan (see also AI 2015; Campana Reference Campana2018). Migrants without money had to stay put, often working in different jobs at these sites to earn their way out (see also AI 2015). Along the route through Niger, they made long-standing taxation payments by the side of the road (Brachet Reference Brachet, McDougall and Scheele2012b). Moving from Libya's south to Tripoli, where most of the boats for Europe departed from, meant being stopped and detained multiple times. Migrants were held by different state and criminal actors in private houses, at checkpoints, but also in government-run detention centres.
These serial and forced immobilities shaped migrants’ movements. Identities and allegiances of actors often shifted, allowing them to harass, arrest and detain migrants (see also Campana Reference Campana2018; Lucht Reference Lucht2012; Micallef Reference Micallef2017; Schapendonk Reference Schapendonk2018). Such practices have developed in a context where state institutions and the rule of law have mostly collapsed. Different groups, including militias, have been competing for control over territory and political power since the 2011 uprisings (Micallef Reference Micallef2017). Over the years, Gaddafi used migration policies to shape his domestic and foreign-policy interests, including framing the migrant ‘other’ around a discourse of security and fear (Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010, 103). While the majority of migrants in the 1970s and 1980s were from the Maghreb, the late 1990s brought more migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (Brachet Reference Brachet, McDougall and Scheele2012b). Increasing international cooperation meant that migration became a political concern among African and European governments in the 2000s (Brachet Reference Brachet2018), leading to bilateral agreements between Libya and the EU and the enforcement of restrictive migration policies towards sub-Saharan Africans. These included the funding of immigration detention centres in Libya, as well as sea patrols and rescue missions to monitor borders (Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012; Brachet Reference Brachet2016; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). The Law No. 6 (1987) Regulating Entry, Residence and Exit of Foreign Nationals to/from Libya as amended by Law No. 2 (2004), and the Law No. 19 of 2010 on Combating Irregular Migration, criminalize violations of migration provisions and include fines, detention and deportation, while not distinguishing between migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, victims of trafficking or others who need protection (AI 2015; Bialasiewicz Reference Bialasiewicz2012; GDP 2015; HRW 2019; Paoletti Reference Paoletti2010). Libya has not signed the 1951 Convention on the status of refugees, or the 1967 Protocol, but has signed the Organization of African Unity 1969 Convention on the situation of refugees in Africa. While the newly-created Department for Combating Illegal Migration within the Ministry of Interior took control of immigration detention centres in 2012, overlaps between state and criminal groups involved in running these centres remain (DRC 2013; Micallef Reference Micallef2017).
As a result, and in contrast to formal detention centres in Europe's strong state context, immigration detention centres in Libya were not only run by state authorities, but often seemingly also involved local militias, linked to the smuggling and trafficking networks (HRW 2019; Malakooti Reference Malakooti2019; Micallef Reference Micallef2017). In this carceral regime, the line between the legal and illegal was thinly drawn. Detention centres were often overcrowded, and sanitation and medical facilities inadequate. Migrants’ stories revealed physical and verbal mistreatment, strip searches, beatings and forced labour (AI 2015; DRC 2013; HRW 2019; Malakooti Reference Malakooti2019). Although these centres were established for migrants in breach of immigration regulations, migrants I met often felt their legal status had not played a role in their arrest. They considered their vulnerability to be linked less to their legal documents, with some having residence permits or passports and no intention to move to Europe, but, as many perceived, more to their darker skin colour and easy identification as foreigners. People were detained when intercepted on the street or at sea when attempting to leave by boat, but also during house raids and when going about their daily lives. Some had been living in Libya for many years before their imprisonment, with a residence permit and stable jobs.
A lack of access to legal recourse often meant that the only way out of detention was through the payment of money which was, as Gargaaro's story shows, mostly arranged by phone through informal money transfers from family or friends. Being transferred between different detention centres was not infrequent, and some people I met had spent more than a year being moved around. Others were deported at short notice, at times taken back through the Sahara Desert. Uncertainty played a major role in migrants’ everyday lives in detention. Paying one's way out was no guarantee of freedom, as the next arrest was just waiting to happen. ‘Freedom,’ was the only thing many detainees said they wanted, not the shampoo or food that was given to them. There was nothing to do in detention other than ‘sleeping, eating, and thinking’ – it was ‘a waste of time.’ In detention, many were unable to achieve what they had come to Libya for: to work in order to earn money, or to move on. Their lives were on hold.
At the private house in the outskirts of Tripoli where I met Gargaaro, migrants were waiting to cross the sea to Europe. Time spent at the house was in many ways strategic and purposeful. It involved sourcing enough money to pay a broker for a place on a boat, from family back home or through savings from odd jobs that people could find informally. Waiting at the house was also about trying to avoid the threats of repeated detention. As the experiences of Gargaaro show, boat departures were seldom one-off events. Several unsuccessful rounds of departure and detention often followed one another, leading to large sums of money having to be paid repeatedly. These fragmented mobilities, interspersed by short periods of movement, were intimately linked to a clandestine mobility economy where a place on a boat could be bought from brokers and smugglers. Migrants were also caught up in a form of value extraction in the borderlands that, through incarceration, tapped into human vitality, rendering migrants’ very lives into a source of economic revenue (Andersson Reference Andersson2018). Nevertheless, like Gargaaro, people were often hopeful of making it, of being ‘lucky’ one day. They suspended their precarious presents in the quest for a more hopeful future in Europe. At sea, the threat of interception by Libyan state authorities and further rounds of detention continued. The navigation of dangerous waters in derelict and overcrowded boats came with the risk of dying. It could take several days to cross the sea to Italy or Malta. Besides interception by state authorities, adverse weather conditions, shortage of petrol, water or food affected mobility and shaped migrants’ sea journeys.
Immobilities in Malta
‘You see, this is life!’, Aziza exclaimed while sitting on the floor of the bare metal container that had become her home in one of Malta's open centres. She pointed at a cockroach making its way towards her child in one corner of the container. Aziza was cooking pasta on the small gas cooker, the only food she had for her child. She did not have enough money to buy onions or potatoes. In Malta's hot summer weather, the container was like a prison. Aziza felt immobile. Like many other migrants in this government-run open centre, Aziza and her husband had travelled from Somalia via Sudan to Libya, before taking a boat to Malta. Along their fragmented and complex journeys, like Gargaaro, they had spent time at a private house in Tripoli, desperately trying to move on and navigating a system of detention, interception and immobility. After only a few months in Malta's reception centre structure, they left for another EU country where they tried to apply for asylum again.
Eventually, Aziza and her family were deported back to Malta, in line with the Dublin Regulation ruling that asylum seekers can only lodge their asylum application in the first EU member state they arrive in, and the country which has their fingerprints in the EURODAC database. Forced back by Europe's strict legal framework to the same open centre they had lived in before leaving Malta, Aziza and her family were frustrated. They were convinced that Malta was ‘not Europe’: they faced discrimination and their opportunities for employment and future careers were limited. The ‘fingerprint’ was the problem, as it would forever return them to Malta, their first country of arrival, not allowing them to legally move on to find better futures elsewhere. Some people had been ‘lucky,’ Aziza was convinced, because their fingerprints had not been registered or found in the system, thus allowing them to apply for asylum and start better lives in another country. Aziza and her family felt trapped in Malta's reception infrastructure, struggling to find an affordable alternative private living arrangement. They needed to move on, but Malta's strict legal framework prevented them from doing so. With words not dissimilar to those used by Gargaaro at the house in Tripoli, they were convinced that soon it would work out and they would be able to leave Malta for good. For some– but by far not all – migrants I met in Malta during my fieldwork, arriving on the island had not been their plan, but was the result of weather and other conditions at sea. Despite being relieved at having survived the dangerous crossing, migrants often felt stuck on the island that had not been their destination of choice, caught in a strict legal framework and bureaucracy. Wasting time ‘for nothing’ was a concern many people had, particularly when their legal status bore little future prospects in terms of moving on or establishing a career.
Since 2002, and just prior to joining the EU in 2004, Malta had been a site of boat arrivals from Libya. This development was sudden, with 57 people arriving in Malta without authorization in 2001, and 1,686 in 2002 (Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019, 15), a number which fluctuated during the following years depending on changing policies and agreements between Italy and Malta on boat reception (see UNHCR 2020). The ‘crisis’ narrative deployed by the Maltese government led to a marginalization of migrants soon after arrival. This included a strict detention system that was the ‘longest and arguably harshest’ in the EU (Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019, 90). Mandatory detention for up to 18 months for all boat arrivals, in place until 2015, was presented as a ‘powerful deterrent’ but also as ‘a potent symbol for, and proof of, the “crisis”’ (Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2012, 690, 692). While the time migrants spent in detention varied depending on the outcome of their asylum application, the feeling of being immobile was often perceived as similar to Libya. Conditions were shaped by inadequate health and hygiene facilities, lack of education, limited communication with the outside world, and insufficient information about the asylum process or release from detention (Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2019; MSF 2009). ‘Not knowing what is going to happen to you and how long you will stay was frustrating,’ said one man describing this waiting period. In contrast to Libya, many migrants felt there was at least a legal process and an eventual end to detention: ‘in Libya […] you go in and you will stay there. Until you escape or you pay, you are never coming out.’ After detention, migrants could choose to stay in government-run open centres or in private accommodation. For the many people who arrived by boat unable to find alternative accommodation on the island, living in institutionalized centres continued long after detention.
Onward movement from Malta was dependent on the legal status migrants received. During my fieldwork, refugee status was rarely given, with the majority of successful applicants receiving subsidiary protection (Mainwaring Reference Mainwaring2012; Reference Mainwaring2019). Those with the status of protection could apply for a travel document to travel within certain EU countries, but had to return to Malta regularly to renew their documents. People could also apply for official resettlement programmes from Malta to the United States or other EU countries, but the process was shaped by prolonged bureaucratic delays. Migrants whose asylum application was rejected had no legal options to leave the island for other European countries. Bureaucratic delays not only rendered people immobile, but also held them in limbo. ‘So whole year you run after your document,’ said one man summing up the situation of having to continuously renew and apply for legal papers.
In Malta's legal framework, migrants’ futures were uncertain. Feelings of immobility and stuckness were generated by a strong state authority. As some migrants reflected, they would have preferred to stay in Libya, where, despite the fraught circumstances, they had been able to exercise agency and navigate a weak legal framework through informal arrangements and the payment of money. Some had not left Libya voluntarily but described being forced on boats by pro-Gaddafi forces during the 2011 uprisings. ‘Gaddafi said we should fill up Europe with blacks,’ a man, who was allegedly forced on a boat in Libya in 2011 when he had no intention of leaving the country, described the situation when I met him in Malta. Another man I met in Malta had similarly been living in Libya for many years with a stable job. He too alleged he was imprisoned during the 2011 uprisings before being forced on a boat to Europe with other migrants. The sudden onward movement that uprooted his life in Libya was to have implications far into the future. He had never heard of Malta before. They lost direction at sea, and moved in circles for many days. People died. Upon arrival on the island, he spent more than one year in detention, which led to a deterioration of the health problems he had developed during imprisonment in Libya. ‘After the prison in Libya, then here prison? Why? […] Sleep in detention. All we do, for the whole year. Sleep.’ Eventually, his application for asylum was rejected. His plan had never been to leave Libya, and he found himself immobile in Malta with a legal status that prevented him from moving on.
Conclusions
In admittedly very broad strokes, this brief article has sought to show what focusing on immobility through the journey offers up for understanding migrants’ movements in Libya and beyond. Migrants’ mobilities are difficult to study, especially with the tools of traditional anthropological research developed to look at relatively stable and static social groups. Attending to immobility in a comparative vein, drawing on a multi-sited ethnography, allows us to go beyond binary and linear thinking on movement and mobility as simply an arc connecting origin and destination. It front stages migrants’ experiences (see also Elliot et al. Reference Elliot, Norum and Salazar2017). Shifting between different sites, actors, scales and methods, a comparative account of immobility enables grasping mobility as a process, revealing nuanced itineraries of migrant life. Furthermore, a comparative perspective shows how particular tropes of mobility – whether immobility, migrant categories (O'Connell Davidson Reference O'Connell Davidson2013), and lived experiences (Belloni Reference Belloni2019; Lucht Reference Lucht2012; Vogt Reference Vogt2018) – are not the same everywhere or even along the course of the same trajectory. The implications of this are manifold. Discussing each in detail is beyond the scope of this article, but, in this brief conclusion, I want to highlight three aspects.
Firstly, immobility is forged relationally with a suite of different actors. In the fragmented state context of Libya, instances of immobility range from forced confinement in informal spaces and detention centres, where migrants have to negotiate and pay their way out, to periods of purposeful waiting before moving on by boat. Here, immobility is intricately enmeshed with a clandestine mobility economy that has emerged partly in response to EU border externalization and increased securitization to govern the so-called migration ‘crisis.’ Immobility, however, also manifests in the strict legal and asylum system in Malta, where the experience of feeling stuck is the outcome of institutionalized and legal insecurity and a series of bureaucratic mechanisms. Immobility thus reveals social, economic and affective dimensions of the journey, and is a productive entry point for understanding what relations migrants forge and how they negotiate with different actors in particular state contexts.
Secondly, resituating immobility as a lived experience, entailing different forms of negotiations with a multitude of state and non-state actors, requires being ‘mobile’ as an ethnographer (Brachet Reference Brachet2012a, VI; Brigden and Mainwaring Reference Brigden and Mainwaring2016). This has less to do with imposing an artificial methodological research tool, and more with listening to migrants' stories and experiences. Migrants in Malta told me about their experiences of immobility and detention in Libya. Migrants in Libya expressed their expectations of Europe while waiting for the boat crossing, therefore demanding a shift in perspective to follow those who had already arrived on European shores. This multi-sited endeavour is by no means neutral: as a researcher I inhabited a position of privilege in terms of being far more mobile and less vulnerable because of my passport and citizenship. As De León and Wells (Reference De León and Wells2015, 13) argue, ‘we as ethnographers need to be more critical regarding the contexts where participant observation is deployed and more reflective about how we write about the act of witnessing other people's trauma.’ A focus on unauthorized migrants’ trajectories, then, must strive to be reflexive, attentive to migrants’ experiences and the politics underpinning and emerging from mobility.
Thirdly, a focus on immobilities experienced in the course of journeys cautions against resorting to binary migrant categories such as legal and illegal, documented and undocumented, refugee and asylum seeker (O'Connell Davidson Reference O'Connell Davidson2013). Not only are such categories inadequate in terms of attending to the lived experience of mobility, for migrants take on and embody different identities along the life course of their journeys, but they run the risk of reproducing the very violence that such categories foster. How and why immobility is produced, the different ways in which it is negotiated, and the effects it has on peoples’ lives is crucial for understanding the struggles of migrants as they are situated in, and subjected to, differential fields of power. The analytic of the journey thus brings about a commitment to engage with migrants’ predicaments and mobilities in the long term and across different state contexts. This includes turning away from mediatised narratives of ‘crisis’ and moving attention to the ways in which migrants seek to make their own mobilities, along and against the grain of state dictate, bordering practices and exclusions, however fraught or difficult such endeavours might be (see also Schapendonk et al. Reference Schapendonk, Bolay and Dahinden2020). The negotiation of immobility, as this article has shown, becomes a crucial lever through which people assert agency and strive to shape their destinies.
Migrants’ mobile lives are particularly difficult to study in contexts of fragmented state authority like Libya. I have highlighted how a multi-sited ethnographic perspective on migrants’ immobilities across different state contexts might open up new ways of studying migrants’ journeys in Libya and the wider region. At stake here is not so much a focus on migration in relation to a nation-state or legal categories but a need for attending to transnational mobility processes and particularly immobilities across different state contexts, where a number of social, economic and biopolitical practices, traversing sites and scales, are at work. Multi-sited ethnography and the analytic of the journey allow us to understand migration in Libya along movements and flows, recasting the study of isolated places to a wider region formed along and through routes.
