The politics of migrant dispersal. Dividing and policing migrant multiplicities

This article deals with states' strategies of migrant dispersal that have been enforced in Europe for regaining control over ‘unruly’ migration, with a specific geographical focus on Italy and France. The article argue that dispersal should be seen as a spatial strategy of migration governmentality, that is enforced in partial continuity with urban tactics and interventions enacted by European states in the colonial context to manage formerly colonised populations. The article illustrates how tactics of migrant dispersal are enacted today by state authorities, in collaboration with humanitarian actors, for disrupting migrants’ presence and autonomous movements, as well as for dividing temporary migrant collective subjects. It retraces the colonial genealogy of dispersal, conceiving this latter as a political technology used for disciplining unruly populations. It moves on by investigating how dispersal strategies have been put into place in France (Calais and Paris) and in Italy (Ventimiglia) not only by scattering migrants across space but also by demolishing migrant spaces of life (‘lieux de vie’). The article goes on showing that the politics of dispersal is enforced also in order to prevent the consolidation of migrant collective formations, criminalising them as ‘migrant mobs’ and dividing them in space. The third section of the article highlights the effects of migrants’ forced hypermobility and the convoluted geographies that dispersal triggers. The article concludes by drawing attention to the increasing criminalisation of migrant solidarity networks that engage against the dismantling of migrant autonomous spaces