Migrants moving through mobility regimes: The trajectory approach as a tool to reveal migratory processes

Since the so-called “migration crisis” began in 2015, irregular migratory movement toward Central Europe has significantly intensified public attention in the Global North around this issue. This has also contributed to the increased attention of scholars toward the protracted and fragmented journeys of migrants. A mobile perspective that follows migrants along their trajectories offers a fruitful methodological approach for grasping these ongoing long-term and long-distance migratory journeys. With empirical underpinnings, this paper illustrates that this approach is particularly helpful in understanding the multiple interactions between mobility regimes and people on the move. It argues that such a subject-oriented approach has the potential to (i) unbound geographical perspectives on migration by not limiting the analysis to specific regional or national settings, (ii) question the determining power of mobility regimes as institutionalized sets of regulations, and (iii) shed light on migrants’ creative spaces of maneuvering that actively (re-)shape legal conditions. As a way of concluding this paper, it is argued that the trajectory is not an either/or approach. That is to say that it does not look at individual scope of action or regimes that structure and differentiate migratory im/mobility. It is actually the intersections between them that create the empirical and conceptual value of this approach. From there, new pathways of this emerging subfield in migration studies are further explored.