Our contribution questions the different forms of solidarity towards undocumented migrants in transit that take shape along the Alpine border between Italy and France. In the multiple nodes of the Alpine route, networks supporting the safe passage of migrants have been emerging since the winter of 2016/2017 as a reaction to the systematic controls of the French authorities aimed at slowing down, diverting and blocking the transit of people of the Global South, even at the cost of exposing them to death. Solidarity can be grounded on ethical, religious or altruistic reasons, or building along national, ethnic or linguistic lines, or due to the sharing of the same “migrant condition”. It materialises in an interdependent and complementary cross-border constellation of refuges, where the practices of institutional and non-institutional actors, formalised associations and informal groups, European citizens and non-citizens come together in different ways. Thanks to an extensive ethnographic fieldwork along the main stopovers of the Alpine route (Oulx, Cesana, Claviere and Briançon), we focus on the intertwining between the peculiar morphology of the Alpine space, the different infrastructures which crisscross it, border control operations, and cross-border solidarity practices. Our key assumption is that the peculiar configuration of solidarity networks allows this “corridor” of mobility – given by the devices and operations of border control that channel trajectories – to be transformed into a habitable route – that is, where a space for migrant agency is produced.

Jacopo Anderlini; Filippo Torre
University of Parma; University of Genoa

 
ID Abstract: 214