The emerging of solidarity along unauthorized routes: postcards of migrant encounters

The aim of this article is to stress the possibility of a specific and innovative gaze on borders and borderlands: one that puts solidarity as an encounter and a fabric among people on the move enacting a relentless dynamism along unauthorized routes, constituting one of the key elements for understanding the journey as a social construction. The turn we propose aims to mark a clear and novel theoretical break by: (i) overcoming the opposition between state mobility governance and migrants’ agency; (ii) considering unauthorized movements as a variable social construction that can be originally explored from the perspective of solidarity networks. To deepen the theoretical implications of this hypothesis, we would like to start from our ethnographic notes in different borderlands, along the internal and external European frontiers, where we have been doing fieldwork since 2016, about the everyday deployment of grass-root solidarity.