Waiting to Move On: Migration, Borderwork and Mobility Economies in Libya

Abstract

Migrants' mobilities in the fragmented state context of Libya are shaped by different dynamics of waiting. These dynamics emerge through intersections between transnational and local bordering practices. Examining the temporal effects of borderwork ethnographically by focusing on the lives of migrants who attempt to move on by boat to Europe, this article goes beyond depictions of waiting as an empty lived experience of time, to locate it within wider migration and mobility economies in borderlands. Migrants' time is reproduced through intimate practices of care and labour and the ways in which they intermesh with a clandestine and often predatory economy where state and criminal actors profit from mobile lives. Focusing on migrants' lived experiences of waiting to move on in contexts of fragmented state authority like Libya allows us to challenge fixed understandings of temporality as well as state-linked borderwork and its effects in Europe's wider borderlands.