The Leasc and the Rip: Struggles and Conflits beneath Migrants' and Asylum Seekers 'Secondary Movements'

Addressing the current scenario of “crisis” (of refugees, asylum, migrations) affecting the European space, the paper focuses on the multiplication of borders and border apparatuses the government of the crisis directly prompted. It thus suggests to read it through the image of a “borderland”, that is, of an uneven space crisscrossed by a relentless movement and by new and old border devices harnessing it – by containing as well as detaining, dispersing as well as concentrating, exploiting as well as excluding. In order to summarize the relation between the “nomadic machine” enacted by migrants’ movements and such a renewed "apparatus of capture ", it resorts to the image of a “leash”. Literally a leash governs mobility through mobility; it imposes a narrow gauge, limited in time and space. Under its mortgage, besides, every movement becomes "secondary". Rarely, however, those who are led on a leash accept a similar regime of forced mobility: at the ends of the leash a particular tension is thus established, in search of as many rips, expressions of the will to conduct oneself in a different way. By reading those attempts as peculiar forms of “counter-conducts” , actually producing as many possible “counter-spaces” , the article ends by suggesting the idea of a sort of “Underground Europe”, in the wake of the historical and "black" experience of “Underground railroad” in the pre-civil war US.