Emergency, Solidarity and Responsibility: The Ethics of Face-to-Face (Border) Encounters

ABSTRACT

Since the so-called 2015 Migration Crisis, great attention has been devoted to borders, activism and solidarity. While a part of the literature focuses on the political and/or humanitarian aspects of solidarity, this article suggests reading acts of solidarity through ethics. Looking at the Roya Valley, at the Italo–French border, I suggest that many local initiatives to assist and help migrants in transit were driven mostly by a sense of duty, rather than charity or political motives. The emergence of three specific circumstances – face-to-face encounters, conditions of emergency and a sense of duty – made locals offer solidarity because of a sense of responsibility. Faced with a choice between protecting themselves from legal charges or protecting human lives – those of migrants crossing along their route – or protecting themselves from legal charges, many border-people chose the first option. I, therefore, suggest that solidarity should be read through the prism of ethics. Building upon Levinas’ and Derrida’s ethics, I illustrate why face-to-face encounters make a difference and why response-ability requires impossible decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical borders
• border-crossers
• Levinas
• Derrida
• Roya Valley

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the editorial team at the Journal of Borderlands Studies and especially the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. I acknowledge particularly the suggestions of incorporating the work of Derrida, integrating French literature and highlighting border dynamics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Translation from French into English is mine.

2 I use ‘border-crossers’ and ‘migrants in transit’ interchangeably, without any specific reference to their legal status or motives for flight.

3 I translated it as ‘reception crisis’ (La crise de l’accueil) rather than ‘hospitality crisis’, as it highlights the difference between public policies of reception and private initiatives of hospitality (chez soi). Babels (2019, 14) makes this distinction very clearly: between political and institutional “accueil” (reception) and hospitalité (hospitality), which is driven by “ethical, individual, and general political and juridical principles”.

4 Given my interest on the motives of action, and particularly in investigating whether those motives should be read through ethics, I have focussed on local people initiatives, without engaging with migrants’ perspective. I am not, however, suggesting that migrants have been inactive nor merely passive victims, as greatly discussed in my previous works (Puggioni 2014a; 2014b; 2018; 2021).

5 Translation from Italian into English is mine.

6 This is how many local activists identify themselves. Many of them are part of the “Roya Citoyenne” (see https://www.roya-citoyenne.fr/), established in 2011 with the aim of protecting the Roya Valley. In May 2016, its statute has been modified to include activities in favour of migrants.

7 The “Briançon Seven” include members from different nationalities (French, Italian and Swiss): Benoit Ducos, Eleonora Laterza, Lisa Malapert, Theo Buckmaster, Bastien Stauffer; Matthieu Burellier e Juan Jalmain.

8 A few films have documented and romanticised life in the Lampedusa borderlands, highlighting in particular the tension between the legal and ethical, between a touristic Lampedusa and a hotspot Lampedusa, between public initiatives and private and intimate ones. See, for instance, Terraferma (2011), directed by Emanuele Crialese.