Frontiers of Exodus: Activists, Border Regimes and Euro-Mediterranean Encounters After the Arab Spring

Abstract

This chapter documents the emergence of encounters and initiatives between European and Tunisian activists in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and of mass protests across Europe in 2010–11. It focuses, in particular, on activists belonging to Italy’s Global Project social movement. Rather than solely through the revolutionary spirit of this historical phase, the chapter shows that such cooperation also emerged through the political cultures developed over years of struggle against the EurAfrican border regimes in the Mediterranean. Global Project activists envisioned a biopolitical continuum between, on the one hand, migration and border governance and, on the other, the forms of politico-economic domination and alienation that triggered mass mobilizations on either side of the Mediterranean. Activists thus identified a ground for common struggles that would further unleash the possibility of ‘exodus’, that is, of creating autonomous spaces of self-determination away from power structures. By unraveling these frontiers of exodus, the chapter shows the limitations of narrowly defined, state-centered understandings of border politics and regimes in the EurAfrican space.