The laws of impermanence: displacement, sovereignty, subjectivity

How shall we make sense of migrant mobility in a context of increasingly dislocated governance of territorial borders? What kinds of intersecting spaces and places does such a politics produce? And what forms of structured agency emerge from these intersections? This chapter argues for an embodied analytics, which deals, consecutively, with three productive tensions that underpin the effects of human displacement in contemporary migration regimes: between displacement and enforcement; sovereignty and governmentality; and the negation and negotiation of rights. Building on an analysis of return migration to Italy within the rapidly European asylum regime since 2011, I argue that while human displacement can be associated to a field of power that is not necessarily fixed in place, today’s liquid migration management also produces, sometimes unpredictable, outcomes and renegotiations of identities, hierarchies, and rights.