Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested.

Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters

William Walters is Professor of Political Sociology at Carleton University.

Charles Heller is Research Associate, Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

Lorenzo Pezzani is Lecturer in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Acknowledgments  vii
Viapolitics: An Introduction / William Walters, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani  1
Part I: Vehicles of Migration
1. Capillary Power, Rail Vessels, and the Carceral Viapolitics of Early Twentieth-Century American Deportation / Ethan Blue  35
2. From Migrants to Revolutionaries: The Komagata Maru’s 1914 “Middle Passage” / Renisa Mawani  58
3. Stowing Away via the Cargo Ship: Tracing Governance, Rival Knowledges, and Violence en Route / Amaha Senu  84
4. Boxed In: “Human Cargo” and the Technics of Comfort / Julie Y. Chu  105
Part II: Trajectories, Routes, and Infrastructures
5. Infrastructures of Escort: Transnational Migration, Viapolitics, and Cultures of Connection in Indonesia / Johan Lindquist  131
6. Routes Thinking / Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias  153
7. Historicizing the Balkan Route: Governing Migration through Mobility / Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek  183
Part III: The Geophysics of Migration
8. The Other Boats: The Shifting Operations of State and Nonstate Vessels at the EU's Maritime Frontier / Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani  211
9. When the “Via” Is Fragmented and Disrupted: Migrants’ Walking along the Alpine Route / Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli  235
10. Deportation and Airports / Clara Lecadet and William Walters  258
Afterword: For the Migrant, the Way Is the Life / Ranabir Samaddar  281
Contributors  295
Index  301