The cycle of migrants’ containment between Libya and Africa: navigating their life among dreams, resilience, and defeats

During the last two decades, cooperation between Italy, the EU and Libya on migration management has been intended to establish a “cycle of containment” aimed at the externalisation and securitisation of the southern European border on Libyan soil. The escalation of the civil war in Libya since 2014 was one of the main reasons for the European attempt to replicate the international policies of containment southwards in Africa and to address them towards countries that were reputed as major producers of migrants, as in the case of the Horn of Africa. By comparing and discussing migrants’ life-stories collected in Tripolitania and Southern Tunisia, this study deconstructs some recurrent representations of migratory dynamics that are usually taken for granted in order to legitimate international policies of containment, and reveals the not-pre-made character of migrants’ journeys, their solidarity strategies, and the networks of (im)mobility mobilised to deal with the traps of containment. The international policies of containment and human mobility are two sides of the same reality that must be (re)connected to the wider regional or country context where this nexus is taking shape. This represents an analytical imperative and a methodological intersection between migration studies and African studies.