Immobility and crisis: rethinking migrants’ journeys through Libya to Europe

Abstract Much work on recent unauthorized migration via Libya to Europe – often framed as a migration ‘crisis’ – is focused on linear movement, isolated snapshots and points of arrival on European shores. Migrants’ experiences along their journeys and prior to arriving in Europe, important for their future mobilities, are neglected. By highlighting multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Libya and Malta, this paper calls for an analytical focus on immobilities along the journey, so as to develop a more nuanced account of the lived experiences of mobile life. Immobility retrieves situations and relations erased by linear accounts of migration. When looked at in comparative terms through the journey, immobility reveals the variegated forces that shape mobile life.