To play by mobility rules means moving along habits and laws governed by social norms and institutional control. Our scholarly point of departure in this thematic section is that both formal and informal mobility rules abound, though routinely disputed by individuals, groups, and institutions. Power involves the ability to make mobility rules for others (Cresswell 1996), as well as the capacity to govern, enforce, or break such rules. The various contributors to this theme section seek to analyze critically, from an anthropological point of view, the rules that govern human mobility and how mobility regulations and codes are resisted, transgressed, broken, and remade in social power fields. In short, we address the question of how people navigate the rules of mobility.
Social power fields are fields of forces and struggles among the holders of different forms of power (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Mobility rules in social power fields flourish and are strategically and tactically played, requiring a sens de jeu that allows people to adapt to infinite situations that no rule, however complex, can foresee (Bourdieu 1987). Pierre Bourdieu follows Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) in giving prominence to the experience and strategies of agents that do not mechanically obey explicit rules. In this same Wittgensteinian sense, Lorraine Daston demonstrates that rules cannot be unequivocally specified, being “taught by practice rather than by precept” (2022: 11), though they can be organized as (1) models or paradigms, “customs” in Wittgenstein's words; (2) algorithms or tools of measurement and calculation; and (3) laws. Therefore, the concept of rules in practice helps us to understand how fixed notions of mobility rules, like algorithms and laws, are applied and combined with practical models or paradigms along different regulatory contexts of mobility.
Over the past few decades, intrastate exclusionary rules of mobility control (Nagy and Breuil 2015), combined with external mobility regulations, have tightened the borders between the Global North and Global South.1 The global proliferation of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) has led to rules for welcoming “cosmopolitans” such as tourists, expats, or golden visa holders, while anti-mobility rules against some migrants and people on the move have produced categories of mobility that stress the undesired, the undeclared, the illegal, and the unruly (Andersson 2014; FitzGerald 2019; Tazzioli 2017). States monopolize the legitimate means of movement within and across borders through citizenship and identity (Torpey 1998), although citizens’ mobility rights are also restricted through special laws passed in states of exception, suspending some mobility rules while new ones emerge. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that there is no rule book to cope with the incertitude of global emergencies (Daston 2022) and that a state's reactions to exceptional circumstances disrupt migration practices and produce shock (im)mobilities such as emergency flights, mass repatriations, lockdowns, and quarantines (Xiang et al. 2022). As perfectly summarized by Walter Benjamin, the risk is that the state of emergency in which we live will not remain the exception but become the rule (2007: 257).
States are important actors in tailoring mobility rules in both exceptional and non-exceptional circumstances. However, they are not the only ones. Our aim in this collection is to move beyond methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the risk of naturalizing migration and integration research categories that “originated within a nation-state migration and normalization apparatus” (Dahinden 2016: 2). We do so by adopting the perspective of mobility rules as a point of departure to study moving subjects, using rules as a heuristic to disentangle power relations and unequal mobilities. In doing so, we take our global standpoint on the unequal multiscalar regimes of (im)mobilities, in which colonial history, class, race, gender, and origin play central roles (Salazar 2022; Salazar and Glick Schiller 2014). Moreover, in some analyses of migrant, asylum, or mobility regimes, “rules of mobility” are approached as a static set of “regulations” (Baker 2016) using a kind of official, policy, administrative, bureaucratic, or written logic that gives the sense of a coherent system. However, as Daston shows (2022), mobility rules are not set in stone, but they are multiple and overlap in contradictory ways; they are disputed and transgressed in practice.
We therefore not only approach mobility rules from the conventional migration policy-oriented and state-centered focus but also conceive a dynamic transnational field of intersecting sets of international, national, and local mobility rules that are codified, negotiated, and made through multiple governmental and social practices. It is also important to make a distinction between migration and mobility as overlapping fields (Salazar 2019). In this theme section, we consider “migration rules,” which derive from specific asylum, citizenship, entry or residence policies, laws and regulations, as embedded in a broader power field of “mobility rules” in which other formal and informal rules are included. The latter mainly comes from humanitarian, religious, moral, social, and cultural rules but also arises from gender, race, origin, or class power differences in accessing mobility.
We argue that it is important to disentangle the specific mechanisms, principles, and symbolic power in mobility regimes that are formed by plentiful mobility rules—written and non-written, legal and non-legal, formal and informal, codified and non-codified, explicit and implicit. The articles in this theme section use cases of the international mobilities of non-privileged migrants to show how mobility rules operate in practice at various scales in social power fields. All the contributions expose how contradictory sets of mobility rules are interpreted, imagined, and deployed by numerous actors with disparate effects. For example, Antje Missbach (this issue) unveils how punitive states blur rule boundaries between rescuers and smugglers/traffickers for their own political benefit. Elia Vitturini and Alice Bellagamba (this issue) reveal how the ambiguity of mobility rules produces unexpected consequences when communities of origin re-examine their own local rules regarding irregular migration. In most of the cases discussed, there is also a tendency to contest and resist the highly regulated institutional apparatuses that control human movements. For instance, the article by Dawit Tesfay Haile and Joris Schapendonk (this issue) shows that some asylum seekers assume the risks of making mobilities that matter within the system, for example, visiting a friend in another country, even if this movement is not allowed by the asylum and integration scheme of which they are part. Similarly, Viola Castellano's article reveals the unauthorized relations that transgress the working rules between asylum seekers and asylum case-workers (this issue). In other cases, international migrants use subtle infrapolitical confrontations to overcome challenging mobility rules, as the article by Ignacio Fradejas-García and Kristín Loftsdóttir shows (this issue). In what follows, we introduce the theme section by connecting the contributions with various bodies of literature pertaining to legal anthropology, the history of rules, (im)mobilities and transnational migration.
Global regulations of mobility: The exception that proves the rule
Throughout history, human mobility has been the rule rather than the exception (Salazar and Smart 2011). The mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006) has produced innovative conceptual frameworks and methodologies to grasp the movement of objects, knowledge, and people (Adey et al. 2013), portraying a fluid globalization based on interconnectedness. Although it was certainly not the intention of its initiators, the mobilities paradigm has a propensity to neglect “the many losers and few winners among those who exercise mobility” (Kalir 2013: 314) and to disregard previous waves of globalization, for example, the expansion in communications, transportation, migration, and capital and resources as mobilities between 1850 and 1914 (Hanagan 2000).
During the last few decades, the increasing control of human mobilities at national borders have produced a rebordering of large parts of Europe (Suárez-Navaz 2004). The tightening of mobility rules is suffered by populations that, based on origin, race, gender, or class, are non-privileged, sometimes being constructed upon the exceptionalism of each nationhood (Jensen and Loftsdóttir 2022). Anti-immigration laws, enforcement practices, and tight border controls have been naturalized (Khosravi 2010) in a process of criminalizing migratory mobilities, or “crimmigration,” in which immigration and criminal laws converge (Stumpf 2006). Gradually, strict rules of mobility are producing a variety of legal statuses in which dichotomous categories such as documented/undocumented, regular/irregular, and legal/illegal hide more complex and changing situations.
One of our theoretical premises is that several mobility rules are operating concurrently in each situation, sometimes in contradictory ways. For example, officially recognized refugees cannot move freely within the Schengen zone but are forced to stay within the country that granted them refugee status (Khosravi 2010). This contradicts the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which even makes rules for the provision of travel documents for refugees (UNHCR 2010). Moreover, international migrants and people on the move are affected by, and affect, the plural rules at play in the transnational social fields they move through. For instance, Alain Tarrius (2002) indicates that migrants’ strict rules of cultural, social, and religious cohabitation disappear during commercial transactions in transnational circuits, where diversity is the norm and the given word acts as a contract. In transnational social fields, opposition, resistance, negotiation, and transgression are as common as alignments for benefiting from formal mobility rules. For instance, transmigrants try “to use state policies to their advantage, subverting regulations” (Basch et al. 1994: 284). An example is a regulation introduced by the Philippines to facilitate the returns of balikbayan—Filipino transnational migrants—who have not come back to live in the Philippines but informally exploit the balikbayan rules to their benefit, for example, using their tax advantages in their import-export businesses, whose activities the government cannot trace (Basch et al. 1994: 284).
In some cases, the distinctions between legal/non-legal and formal/informal rules are blurred in practice by individuals, groups, and institutions. Dichotomous distinctions obscure practices of mobility and informality that are not defined or enforced by strict codes but negotiated in daily life (Fradejas-García et al. 2021). For example, the importance of kinship support in acquiring travel documents shows how the arbitrariness of global visa regimes creates a sort of indirect rule that puts pressure on social relations (Gaibazzi 2014). Certainly, the most often challenged and challenging rules are those relating to mobility documents. The rules of using and having the right dispositifs for mobility (e.g., passports, visas, identity cards) are assessed in practice (Lewkowicz 2021), for example, in en-counters with consulate staff who retain the arbitrary power to decide visa applications (Scheel 2017). Indeed, while migrants in illegal situations might find legitimate and legal ways, usually long and hard, to move or be incorporated as citizens (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas 2012), states and state agents may also intentionally play with the rules regarding the non-recording or de-recording of some populations (Kalir and van Schendel 2017). In practice, focusing on mobility rules also helps us analyze how regulations are enforced or not. For example, as Kalir shows in his comparison between the regulated and unregulated flows of working immigrants in Israel, there is a legal fiction in which the state “counter-intuitively, makes little effort to enforce its own laws for regulating migratory flows, thereby leaving much of this regulation to an informal migration industry” (2011, 2013: 315).
In other cases, there are no easy legal paths, but multiple landscapes with evolving rules of mobility. In this theme section, the contribution by Haile and Schapendonk show how the status of humanitarian protection provides residence and labor rights restricted to the nation-state that grants it. For their African interlocutors, “incomplete papers” indicate that Europe never really embraces them as free movers. African migrants are confronted with different bureaucratic realities in pursuing their migratory trajectories to and within the EU, not only formal and written rules, but also unwritten rules that derive from “the system” and that subjectify individuals and groups of migrants. African migrants do their best to move out of, escape, and circumvent the system, whereas in other times and places the same people work toward embeddedness, inclusion, and visibility (Haile and Schapendonk, this issue). The recent welcoming of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine by European states is exceptional in comparison to other displaced groups, confirming the existence of rules for separating deserving refugees—also a category with internal hierarchies of its own—from undesirable migrants (Cantat 2022), proving the rule of unequal mobility regulations operating on the global scale.
Rules guiding movement: Regula, regere, movēre
The word “rule” comes from the Latin regula (straight stick, bar, ruler; figuratively a pattern, a model), related to regere (to rule, to straighten, to guide), the root of which is reg- (to move in a straight line; with the derivative meaning to direct in a straight line; thus to lead, to rule).2 Thus, the etymology of “rule” is directly concerned with mobility: guiding a straight movement. However, a “rule” involves the notion of encompassing things: “laws, maxims, principles, guidelines, instructions, recipes, regulations, aphorisms, norms, and algorithms, to name just a few. The variety of these species of rules is a clue to a hidden history of what a rule is and does” (Daston 2022: 2). In most social science scholarship, “norm” and “rule” are used interchangeably. We adopt the broad definition of “rule” as a “general norm mandating or guiding conduct or action in a given type of situation” (Twining and Miers 2010: 80). Rules give meaning to lived experiences and social contexts (Douglas 2003); they do not arise from the air or operate in a vacuum but are grounded in entangled historical and social processes that have produced systems of rules commonly referred as “law.”
The history of the anthropological study of law sheds light on processes of rule-making. From a legal perspective, anthropological takes on customary rules dating back to Bronislaw Malinowski's Crime and Custom in Savage Society (2013) and Isaac Schapera's Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom (1938), which broadened the field of legal research to include the non-written legal rules of “primitives” (Moore 1969). These and subsequent ethnographic publications opened a long anthropological debate in the 1960s about the adequacy of using the Western concept of law to illustrate “tribal” bodies of rules and legal institutions for solving disputes (Gluckman 1965). At the time, colonial rulers directly imposed their law and, in some cases, “indirect rule” was used to govern through co-opted or invented local rules and legal institutions, such as creating chiefs and tribes ascribed to a territory (Kiwanuka 1970). In these direct or indirect processes of colonial rule, Euro-American law and institutions were imported and violently imposed on populations, a legal order that was established in the colonies and postcolonial territories. Laura Nader (2009) argues that the Western rule of law and democracy was universalized by Euro-American imperialist, colonialist, and civilizing projects, and that it is used today to acquire political, economic, and military control and resources. Western legalism establishes explicit rules that stand apart from local practices (Pirie 2013) to give prominence to the law as a rational corpus of rules subject to coercion over moral and ethical obligations, which are seen as a stereotyped self-internalization of rules derived from moral codes (Morgan and Emily 2021). Hence, predefined legal rules are “almost ‘parachuted’ onto politically organized communities (most often, modern states) through legal and civil codes the design of which is neither consensual nor participatory” (Polese et al. 2019: 2). However, research has also shown that official and unofficial legal orders intersect and are mutually reshaped (Moore 1973) and that the pluralism and hybridity of normative orders through trade and migration can be traced back to colonialism (Merry 1988).
Keeping in mind colonial history and the legalist perspective on rules, in our analysis of the multilayered character of rules, we draw on four different but interconnected approaches: legal pluralism, sociolegal globalization from below, the critical anthropology of development, and the implementation gap. The first is legal pluralism, which argues that various legal orders coexist and interact as semi-autonomous social fields (Merry 1988; Moore 2014), such as transnational laws, customary laws, and religious laws (Griffiths 1986). International mobilities, transnationalism, and globalization have created new constellations of legal pluralism (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann 2016) in which non-state actors offer alternative modes of governance. In this theme section, we are mainly interested in investigating the practices adopted by actors that circumvent formal and informal rules (e.g., local, tribal, kinship, friendship, etc.), a situation in which international laws and rights are vernacularized in grounded practices (Levitt and Merry 2009).
The second approach is characterized by bottom-up perspectives on global sociolegal studies that include anti-hegemonic discourses, plural forms of resistance, and the subaltern cosmopolitan legalities that propose ruling alternatives from below (de Sousa Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito 2005). This scholarship helps us to include in our analysis subaltern transnational movements and organizations, hereby challenging the idea promoted by neoliberal institutions that there are no alternative rules. Third, the anthropology of development has shown how the universal application of a set of rules erases both the pre-existing social and political rules and the history of colonial occupation and appropriation (Mitchell 2002; Mosse 2006). This requires an analysis of the messy realities in which hybrid forms of rules are combined by all the actors at play during processes of rule-making, including colonial and postcolonial rule, pre-existing social and political rules, as well as current clashes and continuities between local, national, and supranational rules. The fourth approach is connected with the previous one and is based on the implementation gap, that is, the distance between public policy rules and how they are played out in practice (de Sardan 2016). Olivier Jean-Pierre de Sardan, for instance, considers implicit rules as “practical norms” that guide non-compliant practices, defined as “the various informal, de facto, tacit or latent norms that underlie the practices of actors which diverge from the official norms (or social norms)” (2015: 27).
In our view, overlapping and complex systems of rules allow ambivalence, contrast, and gaps when rules are put into practice. Moreover, beyond the well-known formal and informal local milieus in which these practical rules are operating, people on the move need to learn several new practicalities, which make transnational social navigation more difficult, with a long learning curve for both the formal and informal rules at play. Among all the new rules to be acquired, we focus specifically on those that directly affect people's mobilities and “the know-how needed to ‘navigate’ between formal and informal sets of constraints” (Ledeneva 2011: 722). We use the metaphor of social navigation as an interaction between the ways people move and the social environment in which this occurs—social structures, arenas, fields, or landscapes (Schapendonk 2020; Vigh 2009). The fluid metaphor of landscapes of motion within motion (Vigh 2009) has been used ethnographically to describe migrant strategies to manipulate national migration laws (Tuckett 2015) and the everyday bureaucratic practices of migration governance (Borrelli and Andreetta 2019). In extending this metaphor, we pay attention to both the strategies of powerful actors to define the place and rules of the game from above, and the tactics of the contestation of players from below (de Certeau 1984). However, we also consider a third option of navigating in between the above and the below through a combination of strategies and tactics in practicing mobility rules. Thus, by bringing together the four approaches mentioned above, this theme section analyzes how international migrants navigate the interconnected sets of mobility rules that are at play during their daily lives.
Mobility rules in practice: Change from above, from below, and in between
Mobility rules exist beyond technologies and infrastructures of mobility, affecting traveling opportunities and actions “at all levels, from micro-authorities in the home to the government of nation-states. Rules may regulate local trips and international journeys, and they may be in effect under ordinary circumstances or only in times of crisis” (Sager 2006: 481). Mobility rules have been approached in transportation systems, showing that, for example, road rules, infrastructure, and enforcing procedures are creatively choreographed by people's actions (Prytherch 2015). Similarly, airports’ semiotic rules of mobility are staged from above (designed, planned) and from below (performed by people) (Jensen 2014). Indeed, taking the example of airports, we have witnessed a rapid change of mobility rules due to security measures after the 9/11 attacks, partly due to the incorporation of novel mobility practices (e.g., cheap flights). This example illustrates our second theoretical premise, namely that, counterintuitively, mobility rules change and are often challenged. Modifications or new rules of mobility may arise in emergent events (e.g., war, pandemics, terrorist attacks), as well as due to the politization of mobilities and/or struggles and resistance. We consider how processes of mobility rules frequently change from above, from below, and from in between.
First, mobility rules change from above, as designed by institutional apparatuses, such as states, subnational authorities, or supranational organizations (e.g., UN bodies) in which hard law is combined with effective a “soft or nonbinding rule [that] can be as coercive as binding rules” (Zerilli 2010: 5). Large migration databases consider migration policies to be “rules,” the assumption being that migration policy inherently changes and can be tracked and compared to evaluate its effectiveness (de Haas et al. 2015). For example, the international refugee regime is a set of rules based on human rights and humanitarian laws, but its politicization in Western countries over the last thirty years has changed it through restrictive interpretations of refugee conventions and the diversion of policies and laws. It has thus gone from being a welcoming asylum system “to an exclusionary regime, designed to keep out asylum seekers from the South” (Castles et al. 2014). At the same time, supranational organizations such as the UN and the EU increasingly try to standardize the rules of mobility to be applied at borders. The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) is controlling the EU's borders through a regulatory project that is being generously funded, exponentially rising from 6 million euros in 2005 to 754 million euros in 2022. Its work entails military surveillance that has boosted the businesses of illegality control in the diffuse “maritime borders and the patchwork of rules that governs them under international law” (Andersson 2014: 72). More restricted border rules push people to dangerous routes in which a plethora of mediators, smugglers, and traffickers have the power to abruptly change the rules of the mobility game. As Missbach's example in this theme section shows, mobility facilitators may delay sea journeys by asking for extra payments from migrants’ families.
Furthermore, any attempt to understand mobility rules needs to include the existence of official institutions that break their own rules and the effects this has on forthcoming mobility regulations, because under conditions of rapid change and crisis, illegalities from above may become the law (Nader 2009). For instance, when people arrive irregularly in the Schengen area, where 26 countries have abolished passports and border controls, the first entry rule (the Dublin Regulation) forces the country of first arrival to process the asylum application, even if the person has family members elsewhere or a preference for a specific destination (Hess and Kasparek 2017). However, during the 2015–16 European refugee crisis, this first entry rule pressured southern EU countries to manage most of the arrivals and asylum applications, without much input from northern EU countries. As a result, most of the first arrival countries “started to move towards a lax fingerprint registration practice, thus beginning to undermine the effectiveness of the Dublin system” (Hess and Kasparek 2017: 58).
Moreover, although policies and rules of mobility are applied top-down, the results might not be as planned. For example, often a decoupling of multilevel governance occurs in which states and local governance in municipalities develop and employ their own contradictory mobility regulations (Spencer 2018). These gray areas of subnational governance allow the denationalization of policy and the access of non-citizens to the welfare state, as social citizenship is separated from legal citizenship (Dobbs et al. 2019). In addition, human rights lawsuits are brought to challenge state rules for developing refugee welcome rules in localities (Baumgärtel and Oomen 2019) and “sanctuary cities” where de facto residents are recognized as legal members with full access to municipal services and protection, evoking a “domicile rule of belonging” (Bauder 2017: 8). Moreover, local authorities may support migrants in irregular positions, but not make these actions public to avoid opposition.
Second, from below, mobility rules change and are challenged in practice by diverse actors such as individuals, groups, and grassroots organizations. Direct political actions that are a part of migrants’ struggles perhaps do not change the law but do shape some of the rules included in it. For instance, in 2001, hundreds of migrants in Spain started a political struggle using staged sit-ins (encierros), mass demonstrations, and even hunger strikes to resist and negotiate the immigration law that was being passed and that discriminated against, criminalized, and condemned immigrants in an irregular situation to an unlawful status (Barbero 2013). Their resistance mobilized multiple legal orders (human rights, transnational, state, and customary laws), actors (the Catholic Church, the European Parliament, social movements, and anarchist, Marxist, and anti-globalization collectives), and especially activist lawyers, who could not get the law abandoned but did produce partial modifications to it (Barbero 2013; see also Nicholls and Uitermak 2017).
From below, migrants navigate, resist, or exploit mobility rules, benefiting from the flexible interpretation of rules and the gray zones resulting from overregulation, overlap, and a lack and excess of control of social institutions. For example, in spaces of exception, such as borders or refugee camps, which are usually portrayed as ruled by sovereign power, everyday practices show a “cycle of rule in which sovereign projects are constantly, and by definition, being eroded and reformulated by those they seek to regulate” (Dunn and Cons 2014). People manipulate state, supra-state, and sub-state regulations, informal governances of mobility and local social and moral rules through double games in which players are apparently following the rules or are co-opting the rules, while pursuing a hidden goal. Strategies range from living in between (e.g., transnationalism, circularity, hypermobility) from exploiting various regulatory regimes (Fradejas-García et al. 2021) to being politically, economically, and socially detached from power centers (Saxer and Andersson 2019). For example, in this theme section, the contribution by Fradejas-García and Loftsdóttir shows that migrants perform minor acts of resistance to institutional pressures, defined by James Scott as “infrapolitics” (Scott 1990), reacting to discourses and images of migration, religion, and race, or claiming their agency by responding (off-stage) to specific mobility rules that illegalized and informalized their presence. Moreover, virtual and imagined mobilities may serve as creative acts to move beyond power imbalances (Salazar 2011) in order to challenge written and unwritten mobility rules.
Finally, mobility rules change in between the above and the below. Although top-down and bottom-up are “the two ideal typical forms of policy change” (Però 2011), the counter-reactions and adaptations between anti-immigration policies closing borders and unwanted migrants who find new ways to cross them (Vives 2017) have to be considered, too. In our view, it is necessary to investigate how international, national, and local forms of mobility governance reverberate with and influence each other, how mobility rules change as an effect of individual, group, and institutional interactions, and how these co-produce hybrid forms of mobility rules in the practical worlds in which they are embedded. A good example in this theme section is the contribution by Vitturini and Bellagamba on how mobility rules are imagined and experienced in emigration towns in The Gambia. The presidential change in The Gambia in 2016 marked a turning point in the ways Gambians and their government deal with the backway, as undocumented migration to Europe is informally known. In exchanges of financial flows, the government implemented a deal with the EU to reduce migration, accept deportees, and attract returns. These rules caused frictions with local communities, where various actors engaged in a discussion on social and moral rules about migration and social mobility to deal with the consequences for the villages and households. This case shows that mobility rules are changing rationalities on the move within intertwined power fields of personal and institutional networks across borders.
Concluding remarks: Everyday navigation of rules on the move
Most of the articles in this theme section follow mobility trajectories in which the poorest and most racialized migrants risk their lives because of increasingly tightened state borders, learning how to behave according to ethical and moral rules. People on the move encounter rules and laws that are unknown to them, and everyday uncertainty is common. Socially, there is a shared understanding regarding the lack of knowledge of customary rules, and misconduct and rule-breaking are accepted until a person learns the written and unwritten rules. However, in many legal systems stemming from Roman law, this social presumption does not apply to the principle of Ignorantia juris non excusat, which attributes to every person a full knowledge of the law in a specific jurisdiction. Although some exceptions can exist in court, for example, in cases of inevitable ignorance (Ciuni and Tuzet 2021), this legal principle is still the rule, regardless of the lack of awareness or the individual's transitory social position.
The juridical field is an expert system formed by a rational and instrumental set of rules and legal specialists in which people should blindly trust (Cruces et al. 2002). But its application might be far from fair. For example, continuous access to juridical guidance is a vital but scarce resource for migrants and asylum seekers. Research on asylum appeals has shown that success depends on mastering the rules of the tribunal game, which implies not only the application of the law, but also engaging with non-legal resources of interaction and identity (Hambly 2019: 196).
Furthermore, when crossing borders illegally, migrants must learn several rules about the border and the dangerous cross-border mobility spots controlled by smugglers and corrupt border officers, who in many cases collaborate. During their travels and transits, hospitality and local support is key, albeit the rule is “do not trust even your brother” (Khosravi 2010: 44). Anti-immigration institutional rules push local actors to provide aid to people on the move, a sort of vernacular humanitarianism (Brkovic 2020) embedded in social rules and moral obligations that can have unexpected consequences, some of them terrifying. Missbach's article (this issue) describes the case of three sailors working as smugglers who decided to get all the people off a sinking boat, not only those who had paid to be “aided.” The social rule of saving other humans based on ethical, religious, or humanitarian principles and obligations overlapped with the international legal and moral rule of saving others in the sea. Meanwhile, the sailors knew that part of their action (smuggling or trafficking) was illegal for the “ruling autocracy,” who had the last word, imposed changes to legal rules and used the “rule of law” of the judicial system against them.
Police officers, frontline bureaucrats and NGO workers have attracted most of the research into the everyday asymmetrical power encounters with mobility rules that migrants in an irregular position are faced with. In the EU, power and authority is exercised by street-level bureaucrats and police officers in settling decisions over marginalized migrants who face deportation and detention (Eule et al. 2019; Kalir and van Schendel 2017). These officials do the dirty work of selecting good and bad migrants according to migration policies (Fassin 2011). Moving between humanitarian provision and informal relationships among migrants and social workers in reception camps, the contribution by Castellano (this issue) shows how relationships make a difference in helping, advising, and accompanying mobility processes. These centers of migration confinement are a form of immobility and institutional racialization, in which migrants are stuck due to the rules governing their movements. In their trajectories to get granted asylum status, some migrants use the loopholes in the ever-changing system of rules to get permits and statuses, which, among other things, give them some rights to move (Castellano, this issue). At the same time, migrants produce a new space of relationships in which new forms of physical and social mobility might arise out of the imposed rules of the asylum system.
In sum, this theme section contributes to anthropological knowledge that aims to disentangle how several mobility rules are at play in the everydayness of power fields. Focused on international migrant mobilities and the productive space of changing mobility rules from above, from below and in between, this selected collection of ethnographic articles from Asia, Africa, and Europe brings together a much-needed discussion that goes beyond structural and state-focused analyses that seek to eradicate or control the unstoppable informalities of human mobility.
Notes
South–South and North–North mobilities are also being restricted, as some examples in this theme section show.
Douglas Harper. 2024. “Etymology of rule.” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/rule (accessed 8 March 2024).
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