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Migrant activism is key in today’s world, where countries in the Global North employ border regimes to reinforce racial hierarchies, limit freedom of movement, and exploit migrant labour. But how do migrant-led movements engage with human rights - do they see them as limited tools, or as frameworks that can be reimagined in the fight for border justice?
In this compelling study, Perolini critically examines the various ways migrants challenge these border regimes, and highlights the transformative potential of constructing human rights from below, moving beyond the state and legal norms.
Drawing on rich ethnographic research in Berlin, the book offers a fresh and provocative perspective on the intersections of migrant activism, human rights, and racial and border justice
‘This thought-provoking book paves the ground for developing an abolitionist approach to borders that, instead of just dismantling and tearing down, enacts world making practices through a tactical use of human rights and the law. By introducing the notion of “mobile rights”, the book poignantly shows how a radical critique of state-based norms and racialized border mechanisms might hold together with mobilisations grounded in emancipatory and non-legal notions of human rights. In a time of socio-political fragmentation, it is paramount to interrogate how to re-compose and build up, without falling back into the trap of methodological nationalism. Perolini invites us to look at migrants’ constituent struggles, escaping the binary between reform and revolution. This is an invaluable book for critical migration and border scholars who are interested in interrogating what a transformative critique of the border regime today should look like.’ Martina Tazzioli, University of Bologna
Introduction
1. Human Rights: For Whom and By Whom? Approaches to Human Rights in Mobility Struggles
2 Racism, Migration, and Collective Resistance in Germany
3 Change Beyond the State? Mobility Struggles, Rights Claiming, and the State
4 ‘We Are All Refugees’: Mobility Struggles and Their Ambiguous Approach to Legal Norms
5 Non- Reformist Reforms, Border Abolitionism, and Mobile Rights
6 Mobility Struggles in Berlin 2.0
Conclusions
Postscript: My Freedom of Movement
Appendix: List of Organizations and Interviewees