Fugitive Junctures: Life‐Seeking, Route‐Finding and the Mobile Ensemble at Kenya's Borders

ABSTRACT Fugitivity has become an important conceptual frame to understand the illegalised mobilities of contemporary migrants. Their furtive movements in the shadows of modern border regimes echo enslaved people's historical lines of flight and enact similar spatial praxes through which they aim to seize their own freedom. Thinking from Kenya, and drawing on qualitative research with migrants, border officials, activists, police and smugglers, this article critically intervenes in these debates by offering an analysis of ‘fugitive junctures’: decisional moments in time when individual flightpaths conjoin, are renegotiated and reworked by migrants on the run. Drawing on recent debates in Black geographies, critical migration studies and abolitionist scholarship, the article develops a detailed understanding of these junctures to give more texture to the notion of ‘fugitivity’ whose relative mutability has often limited its analytical value in migration research. While their locus may be shifting depending on context, fugitive junctures are nonetheless recognisable by the three existential pursuits that they mediate during migrant journeys: life‐seeking, route‐finding and the mobile ensemble. In examining what structures different stages of escape mobilities, this article ultimately sheds light on the building blocks of a living counter‐cartography of freedom which lays bare the difficult and circuitous road to abolition.