The security–migration nexus, movement, and sedentism

The security–migration nexus operates through distinct logics of protection that shape the regulation and politicisation of migration. Specifically, it functions through the interconnection and juxtaposition of border control, risk management, humanitarian action, and the implementation of human rights. The enactment of protections against various vulnerabilities and the tensions arising from differing interpretations of these protections form the nexus. Nina Perkowski, in her analysis of Frontex, summarises it as follows:

This nexus thus establishes parameters for legitimising and contesting border and security agencies and their policies by traversing the domains of security, humanitarianism, and human rights.

Nina Perkowski is not the only one to show that humanitarianism and security do not operate in opposition, but her account differs from most by maintaining a sharper distinction between human rights and humanitarianism and by examining how security connections within the nexus are constructed through a multidimensional conception of protection. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s work, she shows how Frontex simultaneously employs three notions of protection: (a) defending a ‘sacred place’ from an enemy, (b) disciplining and physically containing protected subjects to shield them from an enemy or danger, and (c) caring for protected subjects by determining what is best for them without reference to an enemy. She examines how these three notions intersect in the practices of the European Union (EU) border agency Frontex, despite contradictions and frictions.

One element that remains unclear in this and other analyses is how the security–migration nexus functions by inscribing various conceptions of movement into the regulatory possibilities of protection. I aim to explore these conceptions of movement and their relationship to sedentism and the sedentism/nomadism dichotomy. In anthropological and archaeological literature, sedentism denotes a process in which human groups and their productive activities remain within a single, immobile location year-round.Footnote ⁶ More broadly, it pertains to organising social and political life within territorially circumscribed entities. Transactions between and across these entities matter, but the polity- or society-defining activity is organised within the territorial borders of that unit.

Malkki speaks of a sedentarist metaphysics that combines four elements.Footnote ⁷ (a) Being rooted in a territory, or more generally in the soil, is the foundation of identity and stability. For instance, being a refugee signifies being uprooted from the soil or territory one belongs to. (b) The world exists through the segmentation of space into discrete territorial and cultural units. Borders and boundaries are essential, as they define these units by partitioning the inside from the outside. (c) Living within segmented territorial entities becomes a commonsensical, self-evident imagination that is socially reproduced. This process encompasses daily expressions like ‘home sweet home’, cartographic representations of migration, and narratives of human history portraying an evolution from early hunter-gatherers to agricultural communities that expand into cities, civilisations, and nation-states. The people who continue to live outside the confines of such territorial units are historically described as hunter-gatherers, nomads, or barbarians. Although they represent a significant group of people and, at times, the majority, they largely disappear from history because histories tend to focus on bounded administrative entities such as cities or small agricultural communities.Footnote ⁸ Sedentist thought thus dichotomises sedentary and nomadic lifestyles and conceptions of space, favouring the former. The nomadic is ‘the other’ that exists outside or disrupts sedentary modes of living by living through movement and enacting space by moving through it rather than across a surface striated by grid-like coordinates or by fixing borders.Footnote ⁹ (d) Displacement in a sedentary world is pathological. It pulls the living from the soil where they thrive. The concept of forced migration expresses this displacement, as economic hardship, fear of persecution, war, or natural disasters push people out of their territorial and communal spaces into the outside world.

Since I am interested in how renditions of movement inscribe sedentism into the security–migration nexus and its logics of protection, cartographic mappings of migration are interesting devices. They represent migration as movement within geographical, often territorialising, compositions. Cartographically, flows do not hover in a volume; they become traces on a surface and organise coexistence through lines of separation and connection. Like other maps, they are ‘schematic structures that use spatialized organisation to construct semantic value’.Footnote ¹⁰ But they are also, in Lury’s and Wakeford’s terminology, inventive methods.Footnote ¹¹ Lury and Wakeford introduce this notion to express that methods for addressing a problem do not leave the problem untouched. Their inventiveness, however, refers not simply to the performative force of methods. It refers to the ‘capacity of what emerges in the use of that method to change the problem’.Footnote ¹²

The graphic methods and forms through which these maps are constructed can, thus, closely intertwine with the politics of problematisation – in our case, the politicisation of the security–migration nexus. Their political value lies in recognising that mapping practices actively sustain the creation of space, domination, and governance.Footnote ¹³ For example, Yves Lacoste holds that maps are the ultimate form of geographical representation, expressing how geography serves as a means of domination and governance over people and territories, and provocatively states that maps were first and foremost created for and by military officers.Footnote ¹⁴ Migration maps are not merely propositions that make space sentient, knowable, and actionable, however. They also render movement intelligible and actionable in spatial terms. Thus, there exists a politics of motioning within the methodology of migration mapping. The epistemic operations conducted in mapping are never merely a matter of accurately representing an already externally given movement. They give rise to disagreements and disputes over the reproduction and contestation of policies, as well as the cultural, economic, and cosmological projects, interests, and points of view that migration maps and mapping practices encode and uphold through their representations of movement. Migration is one of several policy areas with a rich tradition of engaging in politics through mapping, as demonstrated by a strong interest in countermapping.Footnote ¹⁵

I will explore how movement is rendered through cartographic practices in debates on countermapping migration. Countermapping is recognised as a critical practice that mobilises and challenges cartographic techniques and representations in the politicisation of migration, indigenous rights, occupations, and more.Footnote ¹⁶ It stirs controversy, disagreement, and struggle over how ‘geography speaks to sovereignty through cartography’Footnote ¹⁷ and the injustice, violence, exploitation, and repression that governmental maps facilitate and sustain. Harris and Hazen, in their analysis of countermapping conservation areas, define it as ‘any effort that fundamentally questions the assumptions or biases of cartographic conventions, that challenges predominant power effects of mapping, or that engages in mapping in ways that upset power relations’.Footnote ¹⁸ This means that countermapping is not just about seeing more or seeing differently; it also involves knowledge production and its power.Footnote ¹⁹ Crampton and Krygier distinguish countermapping from other critical mappings, such as artistic and everyday mappings, by defining it as maps of resistance that ‘take up maps and politics in an explicit manner to provide alternative mappings of space not represented by official state agencies’.Footnote ²⁰ Van Houtum refers to it as freeing the map from being a pseudo-neutral representation locked into geopolitics and various commercial and governmental interests.Footnote ²¹ In these approaches, there is at least an implicit acceptance that developing alternative techniques for mapping and embedding different representations of migration in maps holds significant value and is powerful in its own right.Footnote ²² Countermapping is thus a practice of envisioning different worlds through the creation of spatial imaginaries that produce ‘new conceptions of place and region, proliferate the kinds of relations among them, open up spaces for action, and constitute new subjects’.Footnote ²³

Rather than focusing on space as such, I want to foreground the analysis of conceptions and representations of movement in mapping migration. A broader argument underpins this focus on conceptions of movement. In line with Merriman’s work, it questions the a priori status of space and time in the social sciences.Footnote ²⁴ It points towards an understanding that life is not primarily experienced or lived in terms of time and space, but through movement. Exploring how (counter)mappings are structured by experiences and conceptions of movement allows for the development of an analytic that gives conceptual primacy to motion, making conceptions of movement generative of spatial assumptions. This leads towards a distinctive approach to countermapping as techniques and representations that motion the world. Such a point of view opens the question of countermapping differently, in that experiences and methods of rendering motion emerge as a primary stake in the politics of mapping.Footnote ²⁵ It allows us (a) to show that the security–migration nexus and its enactment through mapping and countermapping techniques invest migration and protection with diverse understandings of movement and (b) to explore how taking life as motion creates analytical possibilities to disrupt the sedentism that remains entrenched in the security–migration nexus.

The cartographic securitisation of migration: Border crossings and routes

Since I primarily work with literature and situations related to EU migration policies, let’s first examine how migration movements are graphically represented in sedentary ways in some governmental maps operating within the context of EU border policies. I will focus on two securitising maps developed for and by border and policing agencies that depict migration as a threat or risk to a geographical space.Footnote ²⁶ The first can be called invasion maps, and the second, route maps.

Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy have shown in detail how invasion maps securitise migration.Footnote ²⁷ Invasion maps traditionally depict movement as arrows crossing from a territorial outside to a territorial inside. These maps were frequently featured in Frontex’s annual risk reports, for example, until relatively recently. Variations of this image appear when searching for images of migration to the EU. They mainly depict an EU-centred Europe, with arrows pointing from the peripheries of the maps to the EU’s territorial space, crossing national partitioning lines. Arrows are a classic tool for understanding movement. However, they perform specific work on how movement emerges in these maps. Most importantly, arrows are directional. Movement is defined (a) by its destination towards a territorially imagined polity/community and (b) by crossing territorial borders that define the polity’s spatial existence. This makes territorially partitioned polities the stable part of the world. The grid of nation-states and regions of nation-states is the fixed, durable surface upon which movement occurs. It is a sedentist grid in which movement across the partitions potentially disturbs the territorially bounded imagined communities. The centripetal framing of movement – the arrows converging on the EU region – further reinforces sedentism. Movement creates a spatial dynamic of encircling a circumscribed territorial space. As van Houtum and Bueno Lacy formulate it provocatively, it positions the EU as at ‘the mercy of destitute armies pouring from all around the world’.Footnote ²⁸ The key point is that the centring work performed by the graphic representation of problematic migrant movements fixes an enclosure of the sedentary unit as the condition for protecting those living within it.

The incoming ‘risk’ also remains unspecified; the arrows simply press against the borders. In other maps, the arrows are curved to visualise a jump from outside to inside. The securitising effects of these cartographic renditions of migration derive partly from the context in which they operate, the agencies that produce them, and the narrative framings. However, the graphic renditions also mark a security dimension in their own right. They make the migration maps resemble maps representing military invasions and operations, reinforcing the visualisation of problematic movement.Footnote ²⁹ The threat is further reinforced by a graphic suggestion of a frictionless, immediate transfer across the territory, which consists of a blank space cut through by perimeters separating spaces. There is no sense of meandering or stop-and-go movement. Neither the lives lived in the entanglement of multiple movements nor the interactions between people are visible.Footnote ³⁰

These securitising maps sedentarise movement by composing motion as crossing borders – the line that moves from a territorialised outside to an inside – steeped in the history of territorial sovereign states as the principal international political form and in the centripetal framing that engenders a sense of territorial encirclement.

They are not the only migration-securitising maps. Some maps calculate and represent migration through so-called migration routes. They measure migrant flows by identifying hubs or nodes through which migrants pass and the volume of migration between them. The migration route image is a network of connecting lines between nodes. Sebastian Cobarrubias analyses in detail one such map produced by the think tank International Centre for Migration Policy Development: the I-Map.Footnote ³¹ The map drew on a database of migratory itineraries to trace trans-Saharan, trans-Mediterranean, and Eastern European migration routes towards the EU. The data were collected in collaboration with various border agencies and interior ministries. The map circulated among various Directorates-General of the EU (EU DGs) and addressed ‘irregular migration’ and migration risks.

Here, movement is not primarily ‘border crossing’ but rather a network of connections between transport hubs. These networks can detach themselves from a territorially embedded, sedentary understanding of migration. They typically comprise a graphic and data composition that foregrounds motion as it flows between points, with friction and speed, rather than territorial distance and border crossing, at the centre. Cobarrubias argues that cartographic renditions of routes operate within a security rationale that shifts attention from border controls to the control of movement through routes and hubs, thereby linking them to the externalisation of migration control.Footnote ³² The routes are overlaid onto an interstate map, which ties the network of connections and hubs to a territorialised geometric world of states, however. In addition, securitising maps like the I-Map continue to spatially centre movement on the EU territory as its destination. They do so by focusing exclusively on EU migration routes, meaning the lines and nodes are not intercut with those representing intra-African migration or inbound migration to Africa or Asia.Footnote ³³ Such a cartographic rendition sedentarises the network.

More can be said about these maps and their securitising cartographic representation of migration. However, this brief discussion shows how movement sustains a sedentarist metaphysics in these securitising maps. Despite employing two distinct conceptions of movement – border crossing and network connectors, referred to as ‘routes’ – the graphic compositions of invasion and route maps securitise migration by embedding it as a risk, threat, or disruption within a world of territorialised polities.

Countermapping migrant movement 1: Journeys and sentient mapping

The sedentarisation of movement in invasion and route maps supports a protective imperative to defend a territorialised place against external movement pressing against its borders and entering the territory. Different modes of countermapping contest these cartographic securitisations of migration.Footnote ³⁴ An obvious way to introduce cracks in the protection-as-defence rationale is to humanise movement by transforming arrows or directionally flowing pixels into lived experiences. Rather than depicting migrants as mechanised entities crossing distances on a surface in a directional manner, they become human beings on a journey, facing numerous risks and dangers.Footnote ³⁵

Such humanising modes of countermapping aim to address the peculiar emptiness of space in securitising maps, often by highlighting the vulnerabilities migrants experience during their journeys.Footnote ³⁶ Although the Frontex maps, for instance, pertain to human movement and human communities, the territorial space is notably empty. The ‘routes’ reveal nothing about the actual journeys of the migrants. It seems as though the lives of the migrants, and the way they inhabit and dwell in the territory, are rendered irrelevant. In a way, it is ironic that sedentarising cartography, which roots people in soil, operates by detaching the representational image of movement from human experience and dwelling. This detachment is embedded in the cartographic method of mapping movement, which employs geometric calculations of locations, thereby linking to the epistemic shift from experience- and tradition-based cartography to a mathematics-based one. In such maps, movement arises from a calculation of sequential placement across a striated space.Footnote ³⁷

Shifting the representation of movement from its mathematical spacing to the graphical narration of journeys is a widely practised technique for humanising migration. Journeys differ from arrows and from crossing partitioning lines. They convey and trace experiences, encounters, memories, and affections that arise when moving through places, thus transforming the empty surface across which movement occurs into an inhabited territory through which migrants live. Although people use various names for this mapping technique, including ‘deep mapping’ and ‘cognitive mapping’, I propose that, for this article, we use ‘sentient maps’, in line with Elise Olmedo’s term ‘carte sensible’.Footnote ³⁸ I prefer ‘sentient’ because it explicitly conveys how movement organises space through the felt and cognised experiences mediated by a variety of senses, including hearing, smelling, listening, seeing, touching, and tasting.Footnote ³⁹

A journey differs from a network connection because it is not merely a movement from a point of departure to a point of destination but focuses on what transpires along the way. Such a path meanders across the surface. For instance, Migreurope published a map drawn by Mustafa Hadj Rasheed of his ‘journey’ from Syria to France.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sentient migration maps often retain a narrative of origin and destination, either explicitly, as in Mustafa Hadj Rasheed’s map, or implicitly, by identifying the country of origin of the migrants narrating their experiences. However, the sentient method shifts the focus from origin and destination to the experiences Mustafa Hadj Rasheed recalls and prioritises. His journey is depicted as a winding line intersected by small, square text boxes that express experiences at specific locations. For example, the segment of the journey between Mytelene and Katala features three boxes: ‘scaring and black future’, ‘worry for my mum and brother’, and ‘boat: fear first; after: be relax’.

Although the map still features state-territorial partitioning as the surface upon which movement occurs, this form of sentient mapping allows the spatial organisation to emerge from the journey’s narrative. In doing so, it conveys that, as a journey, movement inhabits the geography rather than simply moving across it. It distinguishes Mustafa’s map from another method of sentient mapping that generates a cartographic representation from satellite data (e.g., Google Maps), onto which one drops experiences that appear when hovering over a pin.Footnote ⁴¹ In Mustafa’s map, the geographical surface is not predetermined but is crafted through narration. The line representing the journey winds through various locations and countries, with Syria at the top, meandering towards Beirut, where he resided for three years. The line then continues to Istanbul and two other Turkish locations. Greece is positioned beneath Turkey and is extended due to multiple inserted experiences. The map includes various time indications, and France, where the line tracing the journey ends, is located in the bottom-right corner. Such intertwining of the narrative journey with cartographic drawing not only adds a narrative layer to the map but also allows the geography to emerge in different ways. Narratives meander back and forth in time as memories are recalled and journeys are drawn. Sites emerge as experiences marked on the map, allowing places to appear out of sequence or in varying sizes as the personal narrative unfolds. This form of sentient mapping of journeys, therefore, navigates a tension between the fluid, emotional, and personal dimensions that define a narrative and the solidity, hierarchies, and quantifications of cartography.Footnote ⁴² The narrative techniques disrupt the grid-like organisation of maps and allow territory to emerge not simply from the perspective of a migrant but from the memories of the journey. In that sense, such sentient migration maps are crafted through a journey rather than by situating a journey on a map, and give a sense of how movement inhabits and shapes the territory.Footnote ⁴³

Many experiences and interactions can emerge within sentient maps by emphasising that journeys inhabit places. However, the sentient countermapping of migration relies heavily on a humanitarian conception of protection that highlights migrant vulnerability. In particular, mobilising personal experiences of violence, harm, abuse, discrimination, and environmental dangers introduces a counter-protection rationale into the security–migration nexus. This shifts the focus of vulnerability by emphasising that the protection of settled individuals and territory creates vulnerabilities for migrants. This serves as a familiar counter-politics to the securitisation of migration. It is not without complexities, as analyses of the unintended consequences of humanitarian practices have documented.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, as Nina Perkowski and others have demonstrated, the security–migration nexus operates through a combination of border defence and humanitarian practices.Footnote ⁴⁵ Border agencies perform both forms of protection simultaneously, and similar mapping techniques circulate among governmental agencies, activists, and social movements.Footnote ⁴⁶

For the analysis here, however, the significant issue is not so much the familiar intertwining of humanitarian protection and defence, but rather how sentient countermaps that focus on the vulnerabilities, violence, and dangers experienced by migrants reinforce sedentism within the security–migration nexus. The experiences of vulnerability are a consequence of movement. People move from the places where they belong – where they are rooted – to somewhere else and in doing so encounter violence, discrimination, destitution, and harm. Migrant narratives also include the vulnerabilities faced in the places they leave behind (including fear of persecution, violent conflict, and economic deprivation), but moving generates its own vulnerabilities. The issue I wish to raise here is that such humanising sentient mappings of journeys through vulnerabilities positively value sedentary imaginaries of life, an imaginary suggesting that it is better to remain in one place if possible and, if not, to establish a new rootedness elsewhere, with the understanding that the journey to that destination will be fraught with dangers. The humanitarian framing of journeys thus introduces a specific qualification of movement. Movement is associated with vulnerabilities for those on the move and is still imagined as an intermediary stage between the old and new rootedness – a journey from a place of origin to a place of destination. This humanitarian framing, along with the sentient maps that articulate it, thus tends to sustain a sedentist conception of protection. Note, however, that it is not the conception of movement as a journey itself that produces sedentism but rather the connection of journeying with harmful experiences and encounters. As we will see after the next section, reading journeys as threads can be integrated into a non-sedentary reading of movement. First, I want to look at another countermapping technique, however.

Countermapping migrant movement 2: Threads and meshing lines

Sentient migration maps often retain an international grid. The cartographic surface tends to remain focused on state borders and territories, even when letting the geography emerge from the journey, as in ‘Mustafa’s map’. Doing so inscribes movement within an order of territorially circumscribed political and socio-cultural spaces. This is not surprising, given that migration is primarily defined as moving within or across states and from one’s place of belonging to a new location. However, it raises the issue that, as long as countermapping places movement onto a cartographic international surface, and is combined with a humanitarian emphasis on vulnerability and protection, the mapping device will continue to depict personal experiences of movement through a sedentary conception of space.

The journey is an individualised line that visualises and narrates the movement of a subject or object. However, subjects or objects also move in relation to other movements. Foregrounding the relations between movements opens towards a different mode of countermapping in which the meshing of lines, rather than the flow of a journey, does the critical work. In this section, I will examine how a video map developed by Forensic Oceanography operates by embedding a single line of movement within a meshwork of lines. I use this video map as a stepping stone for an analytical move that opens towards a distinctive conception of motion, one that breaks with the sedentist conceptions of movement that operate within the security–migration nexus.

Forensic Oceanography is a team of researchers reconstructing migration-related humanitarian and human rights incidents at sea.Footnote ⁴⁷ In an 18-minute video, ‘The left-to-die boat’, they documented that a rubber boat carrying 72 migrants, which left the Libyan coast in March 2011, was knowingly left drifting, resulting in the deaths of 63 of the passengers. It was one of many tragic incidents in the Mediterranean Sea.Footnote ⁴⁸ The video maps the migrant vessel’s trajectory from its departure from the Libyan coast to its sinking in the Mediterranean Sea. At first, it may seem like another sentient map tracing the migrants’ journey on the vessel, reinforced by the humanitarian narrative that overlays the video. However, this forensic mapping also does something different. The experiences of the migrants are not detailed, and the intertwining of the movement of data, vessels, and sea currents is not represented with images of people dying or the boat sinking. The (video)mapping illustrates how ‘the journey’ meshes with multiple other movements. In a sequence of images, the map traces how, at various times, the vessel’s movement intertwines with the movement of other ships that could have intervened after the passengers sent out distress signals; how flows of mobile phone data create interferences between migrant movements, non-governmental organisations, and governmental agencies; how radar signals and geographical location data map a diversity of movements in proximity and distance; how sea currents intertwine with the vessel’s motion … By using moving images, Forensic Oceanography conveys a sense of the entanglement of multiple movements of people, data, and matter, and how these movements move in relation to each other, including moving into and out of proximity, temporarily criss-crossing, winding around each other in moments, and then disentangling. The mapping itself and the methods used to carry out the mapping demonstrate that many were in the know and that the individuals were thus knowingly left to die, but it does so without foregrounding the vulnerabilities of the individual migrants. The viewer looks down from above onto a geographical oceanic surface, seeing the tracing of movements in the form of lines being drawn and dots moving. It is a remarkably detached yet, at the same time, hyper-detailed and close-up reconstruction of multiple movements, meticulously representing their proximity and intertwining.

The video map operates within the security–migration nexus by embedding protection claims in human rights and legal regimes rather than in a moral order of humanitarianism. These regimes are territorialised and institutionalised within states and polities, as well as within regional and international frameworks that seek to protect individuals by sanctioning territorial states. Geographical location matters for the legal and political assignment of responsibility for failing to respond to a boat in distress by subjects and governmental entities.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, if we focus on the line-drawing itself, some interesting elements emerge, indicating a distinctive conceptualisation of movement in this forensic map. First, this conceptualisation of movement has de-subjectivising effects, centring on the weaving together of movements rather than on the migrant subjects. The case for leaving the boat to die is not made by retracing a personalised journey ending in death but by intertwining lines of people and things moving into a density of presences, and therefore potential legal and political responsibilities for the deaths of migrants. The issue at hand is less about humanitarian sentiment and more about rights and criminal justice; the focus shifts away from the migrant experiences towards tracing lines of intertwining movements.Footnote ⁵⁰

Second, if we focus on the lines and their intertwining, the meshing of movement opens towards a distinctive understanding of motion. The mapping of the ‘left to die boat’ is cartographically located, but its geopolitical location does not fully define how the case that the boat was left to die is constructed. Forensically, the map works by creating densities of intertwining or meshing movements. The critical leverage partly arises from showing that the boat did not simply drift, but that its drifting was intertwined with data flows and other ship movements. Forensically establishing the meshing of these multiple movements is central to evidencing that the boat was left to die. Using Ingold’s terminology,Footnote ⁵¹ the evidence of knottings and meshing, rather than merely the anchoring of lines of movement on a geopolitical surface, is one of the defining characteristics of this countermap. If we push the analytical meshing of lines a bit further by detaching the movements plotted from their cartographic anchoring, we can show how meshing shifts the conception of motion in a different direction; towards movement as threading. In the next section, I will develop this threading concept of movement into one that takes life as essentially motion – as ‘life-in-motion’. Through this conceptualisation of life, I aim to motion the security–migration nexus to create possibilities for analytics of migration and protection that challenge the sedentism inscribed in the nexus.

From threads to life-in-motion

Detaching lines of movement from the geographical surface reinterprets motion. It shifts the focus from border crossings, routes, and journeys to threads of movement. Threads are continuous lines of movement – filaments that meander and intertwine.

To illustrate this concept, students in Aberdeen, UK, participated in an activity in which they unrolled a ball of golden thread while walking, passing it among themselves.

The golden thread above literally hangs in the air. Of course, one can look down on it and identify which ‘sections’ of the park it passes through, thus producing a cartographic representation of the park and overlaying the golden thread so we can see it moving from one section of the park to another. Similarly, we can follow the thread and identify its anchoring points – such as a tree branch or a bench – so that we understand the thread as connecting various points in the park. Both of these ‘mappings’ render threading spatially by adding a supplementary drawing of grids or anchoring points. But what happens if we choose not to do this additional drawing and simply follow the thread? We get movement movingFootnote ⁵⁴ in a continuous flow, rather than vectoring from point to point or location to location. Transitions, frictions, and changes bend the thread rather than cut it or divide it into separate sections. The thread remains a continuous, undivided line. Compared to route maps, threading makes the network nodes fade away; the lines of movement wind without distinct points.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although at first glance the thread just ‘marks’ the movements of the ball of golden thread, the thread becomes entangled with other movements, such as the wind, someone’s path intertwining with the line, or leaves blowing about. The golden thread moves and is moved by other movements, which can be imagined as different threads. In that sense, the illustration demonstrates how, in this conceptualisation of movement, movements move with other movements.

Such a conception of movement alters how journeys are traced.Footnote ⁵⁶ The sentient mapping discussed earlier traces the journey on a surface populated with houses, other people, rivers, animals, etc. The surface is the plane on which movement occurs. The relationship between territory, water, people, and organisms that movement gives rise to is an interaction among existing entities located on a surface. It overlooks how the being of these entities is itself in motion and intertwined with other movements. People on a journey do not simply encounter things already on the surface or in the landscape, but also live through them. Their movements attune, create friction, and intersect with other movements. Interaction gives way to threading through and with movements, folding the movements of humans, organisms, water, and air into a kinetic meshwork of movements.Footnote ⁵⁷

It allows surfaces to emerge in a non-cartographic manner. If the direction, speed, and drift of the migrant vessel discussed earlier are intertwined with the movement of water, wind, moonlight, other vessels, and digital data transfer via mobile phones, the migrants and their boats do not simply glide over a fluid surface. Instead, they also move through and with the water, air, the spatial threading of vessels, and data flows. In essence, the surface is not merely a surface but a continuous folding of air currents, sea currents, naval traffic, and data transfer. The geographical surface yields to the binding of environments through movements that bend and interfere with one another. The idea that journeys inhabit places is retained but transfigures encounters with other people, homes, and shops into movements that bend the environment as they move. These movements ‘live’ through one another rather than alongside one another. When tracing threads, their entanglements, frictions, proximities, and distances, we do not draw them on a surface, as Forensic Oceanography does. The surface created by tracing these threads exists in the interstices of the entangling, meshing lines. Ingold refers to knots whose ‘surfaces do not enclose but lie “between the lines” of the materials that make them up’.Footnote ⁵⁸

At this point, we can see how tracing a journey as a thread differs from sentient mapping. It de-subjectivises the journey by focusing on lines of movement rather than the migrants’ subjective experience or memory. In addition, the surface is no longer simply a plane upon which entities and people are placed and encountered during traversal, but is created through the bending of flows of movement that fold environments. Analytically, we can say that such an understanding of movement allows the surface to emerge as a milieu rather than as a bounded space.Footnote ⁵⁹ The traversing is not defined by its origin and end or by the interactions between people, but by how a milieu emerges from moving through and with other movements. Such a conceptualisation of movement is, therefore, absolute in its being-in-motion.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is not an absoluteness that comes from everything being connected within a universal grid, applied across earth and water, or from a horizon that offers a possibility of giving the threads a totality – an arrangement that expresses or generates everything being mapped. It is absolute only in the sense that it conceptualises life and matter as always in motion – nothing stands still. The milieu has no centre that functions either as an external point from which the movement and its spatialising work are viewed (a perspective) or as a focal point from which the movements are organised, pulled towards, or radiate outwards. Mapping threads does not work like a mind map radiating outwards from a single idea but uses juxtaposing and following. In textile terminology, it is patchwork rather than embroidery.Footnote ⁶¹

This conception of movement pushes us beyond merely deconstructing the state’s gaze on migration by offering alternative maps that include a migrant’s perspective or forensic tracing of multiple movements on a two- or three-dimensional cartographic surface. In Tazzioli and Garelli’s terminology, it functions as a distinct ‘epistemic approach and not merely as a cartographic perspective’.Footnote ⁶² This epistemic intervention does not simply introduce another notion of movement but extends to an analytics of life itself.Footnote ⁶³ Such an analytics does not treat threads as merely one type of line among others, or one kind of movement among others, but as expressions of a vision of life and matter fundamentally characterised by movement. Life is always in motion. If life stands still, it ceases to exist.Footnote ⁶⁴ Conceptualising movement as ‘life-in-motion’ has significant analytical implications. Movement is no longer contrasted with non-movement. We must conceptualise everything as movement, including forms that seem static, fixed differentiations, hierarchies, or patterns. It alters debates in archaeology and anthropology about sedentist versus nomadic pastoralism. Sedentist communities are not immobile; they are mobile in a different way. Nomadic pastoral communities are not defined solely by movement but by particular ways of being in motion. Instead of dividing communities into moving (often referred to as nomadic) versus non-moving, settled groups or variations thereof, the focus shifts to how people inhabit areas differently through different forms of movement.Footnote ⁶⁵ A similar orientation is present in the scholarship on migration that seeks to move away from ‘roots’ towards a conception of a world in constant motion.Footnote ⁶⁶ In such a world, migration is not a movement from A to B but an ongoing movement.Footnote ⁶⁷ The ways their movements shape sites vary over time, have multiple dimensions (e.g., participating in money flows through remittances and moving with the seasonal agricultural labour market), and depend on how the migration threads move with other threads. The challenging part of life-in-motion is not simply foregrounding different ideas of movement (as we have done by introducing four conceptions of movement across the sections so far – border crossing, routes, journeys, and threads) but refusing to fall back on a dialectical or dichotomous approach that reintroduces oscillations between movement and non-movement.

Threads motioning the security–migration nexus

Letting migration emerge from threads traversing a milieu rather than from bodies occupying locations dislodges life and matter from the sedentary organisation that structures much of the security–migration nexus. It offers a challenging imagination of migration and coexistence. Rather than rooting ‘being secure’ in soil and bounded, earthy entities, and insecurity and vulnerability in movement, it foregrounds worlds in which movements, moving with other movements, organise coexistence. Insecurities, security and other frictions do not disappear. However, they are organised along non-sedentary lines, or more precisely, by the forces between threadings rather than by the difference between territorially trapped socio-political entities. Inscribing such a concept of movement into analytical techniques to interfere in the institutionalised enactment of a security–migration nexus is what I call ‘motioning the nexus’.

An analytics that treats everything as motion, as life-in-motion, first allows the security–migration nexus to be disentangled from sedentist readings that organise protection in terms of residing in a bounded, territorialised community. Instead, it invites an analytics that inscribes various protection rationales within movements and their relations. Rights to roam, for example, can be read as protecting movement itself, rather than viewing movement merely as a step towards protection granted by a right to reside within a territorialised community. Furthermore, protection, as the defence of a community, has also been exercised through movement. Martina Tazzioli, among others, has argued that security practices do not simply work by ‘closing borders’ or by differentiating the speed with which people can enter a territorial site and move on from it, but also by keeping migrants on the move.Footnote ⁶⁸ For instance, migrants in Calais are picked up and driven elsewhere in France only to return later. Rather than removing migrants from the country, security control is exercised by keeping migrants in motion, which, for Tazzioli, aims to make collective organisation among migrants more difficult. We can also reinterpret the mapping conducted by Forensic Oceanography as illustrating a confrontation between different protection codings, expressed and enacted through the lines tracing movements and the meshes they create. Surveillance functions through data flow and categorisation; the movements of other ships encountering the migrant vessel are inscribed with a duty to assist people in distress at sea. Such a rendition of migrant movement differs from a humanising approach. Its focus is not on populating maps with human lives but on allowing maps to emerge from the movements relating to one another and the multiple protections and other codings inscribed in the traces.

Life-in-motion also interferes with the security–migration nexus by transmuting border zones, central to much migration (counter)mapping, into milieus. The Forensic Oceanography mapping traces the failure of a vessel crossing the Mediterranean border zone from one coast to another. However, if we distort the map’s cartographical nature by focusing on how multiple lines of movement create a milieu, the Mediterranean is no longer organised as water lodged between coasts. It exists through the movement of the vessel, sea currents, the traversing of a container ship, and data flows, among others. In such a mapping, migrants do not leave one site for another; they are always within the site that emerges from the entangling threads.Footnote ⁶⁹ The maritime area is inhabited and emerges from, as well as exists between, threading movements. Such a tracing of the maritime space transforms the maritime from a quasi-empty area on a map into a dense milieu of meshing threads.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such a drawing of movements also enables threads to move across sea and land in a continuous milieu. It opens up the possibility for modes of analysis and drawing that show continuities in migration movement and migration control across territory and sea.Footnote ⁷¹ Such mappings can challenge a territorialising view of sea areas as borders or partition zones that create distance between two territories by rendering a continuous milieu of movements not pre-organised by a distinction between land and maritime movement. This transmutation also allows for the de-exceptionalisation of the maritime as a danger zone between landmasses. The point is not to deny that moving through maritime areas can be dangerous, but rather to emphasise that the maritime is not defined solely by its natural dangers. Instead, it is a dynamic site full of co-existing life and movements. Such an approach encourages distinctive analytical interventions in the security–migration nexus, including challenging necropolitical readings that focus on the deaths of migrants, questioning the naturalisation of the maritime, and exploring the continuities in migration control across maritime and land areas.Footnote ⁷²

It is easy to interpret these interferences of life-in-motion as merely another iteration of the classic move to unsettle sedentism by privileging nomadism or flows over territoriality. However, the threading conceptualisation of movement does not merely challenge sedentism but also the categorial work of the sedentism/nomadism opposition. It aims to replace the latter with an analysis that recognises everyone and everything as co-existing not just in but through movement, rather than through a division between a pole of non-movement and a pole of movement. Semplici, for example, has argued against working with the sedentist versus nomadic pastoralist dichotomy along these lines. She studied how villages unfold in space in northern Kenya’s arid lands and how this unfolding connects to pastoral mobility despite evoking stability and persistence.Footnote ⁷³ Her argument is part of debates among anthropologists of pastoral societies about the value of the sedentism category and the sedentism/nomadism dichotomy. She ‘unfixes’ what appears to be processes of sedentarisation by prioritising movement over spatial configurations, turning villages from sedentary places into dynamic, fluid sites of (micro)mobility. As a result, the villages are seen as being in movement, constantly changing over time, and existing through movement without the ‘settlement’ dissolving into nomadic movement. The village is not a fixed pattern but a patterning in and through movement of people: ‘… movement is rendered visible by its embodiment, first, in the villagers who move along chains of relations and by moving create and connect places and, second, in the villages themselves, which throb to the rhythm of pulsating phases: plenty/scarcity, control/dependency, conflict/peace, subsistence production/market production’.Footnote ⁷⁴ She uses ‘pulses’ to describe what and how the movement of people and places is shaped. Pulses are, for her, multi-directional, heterogeneous, and dynamic.Footnote ⁷⁵ Settling in a village is therefore not a sedentist fixation but a dynamic process of relations formed in and through movement. The villages emerge from life-in-motion and remain in motion. This analytical approach does not treat movement as an expression of a (more) nomadic life versus a (more) sedentary life but simply as the practice through which life and sites appear in their fluidity and dynamism.

Such a fracturing of the nomadism/sedentism dichotomy bears on the security–migration nexus by separating migration from occupation. Sedentism and its contrast with nomadism frame migration as a move towards (re)settling elsewhere, to occupy a new place that is already occupied. Settlers are those who establish occupancy of a location, while nomads are people who have yet to settle or actively resist settling in the areas through which they travel. However, life-in-motion is not place-bound in this sense. In Ingold’s terms, it is place-making rather than placeless or place-bound.Footnote ⁷⁶ As with Semplici’s villages, border zones, and other sites through which migrants pass, these unfold through the relations they forge and how they inhabit territory by moving with other movements. In itself, there is nothing exceptional about this; it is how lives are lived.

Such an approach also encourages imagining and experimenting with non-cartographic ways of ‘mapping’ migration, especially because cartographic mapping of migration easily reinforces sedentist protection logics by positioning movement on geographical surfaces. To illustrate this, let us do a short thought experiment on how life-in-motion might be inscribed into the design of a digital migration archive that organises the threading of migration experiences and histories. Imagine an archive composed of moments that capture the intertwining of migrants’ movements with other movements. These can be ‘boxes’ of moments of struggleFootnote ⁷⁷ or ‘boxes’ of migrant movement, organised around a pathway or a narrative intertwined with narrative, sounds, and visuals of other movements linked to a specific site, moment, or event. We can refer to the boxes as containing ‘instances of meshing movements’. Engagement with the archive is organised by selecting a box and following one or more threads that continue in (link to) one or more other boxes – a thread within an instance of meshing movements extends outward, moving into another instance. The archive then becomes a patchwork, where instances of interconnected movements are linked by following one or more lines outside the box. Following some of these threads thus creates a movement-space similar to a meshwork of instances of life in motion.

Similar to Deleuze’s view that cinematic composition alters possibilities for thinking and imagining not only by sequencing images into movement but also by letting the camera move across movements, thus breaking from organising images from a fixed point of view, we can add more motion by letting the archive itself move.Footnote ⁷⁸ The ‘boxes’ can be organised so that visitors and researchers can meander through an archive that regularly or even continuously moves the boxes, allowing one to ‘collect’ a set of boxes that is somewhat different each time. In this scenario, we map the simultaneous movements of the archive materials, the threads of movement within and across boxes, and our meandering within the archive. In this set-up, it is unlikely to collect an exact copy of the previous patchwork on subsequent visits. Some lines will reappear, but not all; the fluidity of movement is embedded in the experience and organisation of the archive. The presence of migration becomes a presence in motion. It conveys a sense of migrant lives lived through movements that move with other movements, folding multiple lives and matters. The moving archive also allows for sensing how those visiting the archive live their lives similarly through the entangling of movements, in this case, moving with a moving archive.

Insofar as the archive does not narrowly focus on protection situations, it can also do more than displace sedentist codings of migration and protection logics. By allowing migration to unfold in its fluidity, it also breaks the exclusive overcoding of life by protection, which tends to be about retaining a given entity, configuration, or imagined life. It diffuses protection logics within an analytics of more-than-protection, both by meshing protection traces with others that are not protection-coded, such as struggles or the unfolding of neighbourhoods, and by foregrounding that configurations of coexistence are inherently dynamic.

This brief thought-experiment does not address how to create such an archive in practice, nor how to design a moving archive that provides a sensible experience and analytics of migration and protection. Its purpose here was much more modest. It aimed to indicate how the conception of life-in-motion invites not only a distinctive analytics that challenges the sedentism that runs through the security–migration nexus but also experimentation with designing non-cartographic mapping. I use the term ‘non-cartographic mapping’ here in line with Tazzioli’s approach to countermapping, which calls for imagining and designing inventive ways of engaging ‘with the limits of (political) representation at stake in the attempt “to map” the spatial turbulence generated by migrants … More than tracing “another map”, a counter-mapping perspective tries to invent non-cartographic practices that point to the spaces in which the geopolitical map of Europe appears as an untenable illustrative device’.Footnote ⁷⁹ From a cartographic conception of maps, this is a different, metaphorical use of the term ‘mapping’ in that it does not necessarily produce a physical or digital map but refers more generally to ways of representing and bringing into experience non-sedentist enactments of space, in this case by taking life as always in motion.

To summarise, the examples in this section demonstrate how conceptualising movement as threading disrupts the security–migration nexus by introducing new analytical approaches, puzzles, and ways to visualise and experience movement that transform the sedentist logic underpinning the protection rationales that run through the security–migration nexus. The section also argues that this analytical shift is not a simple move from sedentism to nomadism but instead dissolves the dichotomy into a conception of life as always in motion.