Where Resilience Fails: Transformative Agency in Liminal Spaces

With the incredible rise of multifaceted socio-ecological crises, the concept of resilience has seen such a cross-cutting diffusion in both academic and policy arenas, resulting in a panacea incapable of translating the intricacies and geometries of power embedded in societal complex systems. This conceptual vagueness, rather than unintentional, constitutes an explicit strategy within the new neoliberal design that conceals the power domination over marginal communities, particularly border crossers. Drawing on qualitative, field-based research held in Lesvos (GR), this paper wants to deconstruct the techno-managerial appropriation of the resilience concept, particularly underlying the several criticalities in terms of socio-spatial segregation and punitive management of marginality that could arise from it. Therefore, it will investigate why and to what extent the actual EU migration policies and narratives, by framing migration flows as a sort of resilient adaptation strategies, represent a necropolitical strategy that implies the control and the reshaping of bodies, cultures, social roles, and agencies, through different domination strategies. Opposed to the top-down hegemonic apparatus, different forms of resilience are created by migrants in the liminal space in which they create, reshape, and produce new space and values. We will conclude with a reframing of resilience under a more comprehensive and systemic view that can represent an exercise of affirmative biopolitics of cross-border communities and rethink borderlands as a space of new multiple possibilities and identities.