Reshaping the border. Informal zones of concentration as a ground for migrants’ agency.

The paper is aimed at discussing informal zones of concentration - those spaces where forced migrants gather in transit countries waiting to trespass the border and continue their journey - as sites where sheer survival becomes the ground for migrant’s political claims and incorporation in local societies. These zones lack physical barriers, official recognition and control but are generated as direct effect of border management policies (Sciurba, 2009) and depend on the same principle at the basis of camps and detention centers. Here, arbitrariness of rules and institutional procedures confronts migrants’ tactics of resistance, in a tacitly recognized mutual misunderstanding that generates self-organized ’gray spaces’ (Yiftachel, 2009). The self-organized space plays a key role in border conflicts of transit migrants as alternative to institutional spaces, where the taking in charge of migrants does not correspond to a real possibility for them of accessing territory and rights connected to it. The settlement in hidden places is the spatial component of a broader strategy of intentional invisibilization (Marconi, 2010) and of other strategies of existence that migrants adopt, being in constant fear of violence, internment and deportation; this condition disarticulate and deterritorialize aspects of citizenship (Syrri, 2012), and can enable the emergence of migrants’ political agency, escaping dominant narratives of criminalization and victimization. Moving from the idea of autonomy of migration as social and political movement (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2008), the paper argues that the negotiation of gray spaces at the border reshapes power relations and creates a margin where migrant flows can challenge the liberal notion of citizenship and access political membership.