Grains of dust in the Aegean archipelago: Unruly migrants and everyday resistance in EU hotspots

This article centres the everyday resistance practices by illegalised migrants contained in EU hotspots in Greece. Set against the regime of violent abandonment governing these carceral spaces, the article draws on ethnographic research in the Aegean archipelago to explore how resistance is enacted, experienced, and suppressed. The analysis foregrounds three distinct tactics of resistance – insubordination, insurrection, occupation – whereby migrants, individually and collectively, seek to disrupt carceral mechanisms. By shifting the analytical focus to migrants’ often barely visible dissenting practices, the article sheds new light on how modalities of bio/necropolitical power and resistance intersect in the everyday workings of the EU hotspots. It reveals how migrants transform these spaces into stages of (infra)political struggle against forced confinement, even if they are unable to fundamentally weaken the hotspot regime as such. The article concludes that attending to migrants’ everyday resistance practices, however fragile, fragmented, and fleeting, is critical. These practices not only unmask the racialised violence that resides at the core of the hotspot regime but its inability to fully contain migrants’ desire for autonomous movement.