There has been a great deal of popular, political, and scholarly attention on what happens once migrants have crossed Europe's borders, causing a “crisis,” but much less attention on the times they spend in places between origin and destination. Mobility Economies in Europe's Borderlands: Migrants' Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean brings a much-needed focus on those times and places, namely in detention facilities, homes, and camps in Libya and Malta, to show what this crisis looked like outside of the spectacles in headlines.

Marthe Achtnich's work challenges the legal categories that divide migrants, primarily from Eastern and Western African countries in this work, into groups that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Organization for Migration (IOM) use as they adjudicate who will be considered an asylee, refugee, or “only” an economic migrant. The book develops an ethnographically grounded analysis of migrants' experiences of both mobility and immobility in Libya as well as in Malta in 2013, 2014, and 2017. Achtnich highlights the difficulty of conducting ethnographic research in these sorts of communities, where one member of the community may be there one day and then the next might have boarded a boat to keep moving across the Mediterranean or convers