By Elena Liberati – Debates on the commons have become increasingly central to analyses of grassroots struggles around mobility and borders in Europe. In the context of the EU border regime, the concept offers a way to grasp practices of solidarity, care, and agency that emerge outside formal institutions and often in tension with them. Along the Balkan Route, informal initiatives have developed everyday forms of de-bordering through shared knowledge and practical care for people on the move. These practices invite reflection on what the commons can mean when access to movement itself is unevenly governed and violently restricted.
Within this field, one influential interpretation draws on the autonomy of migration literature, where the notion of the mobile commons refers to the material and social infrastructures that sustain movement beyond state control. Routes, information, care networks, and informal economies form a collectively assembled infrastructure through which people support one another, resist border violence, and create forms of social life that exceed the boundaries of citizenship. Here, the commons appears primarily as a practical resource, continuously produced through use.
Other scholars approach the commons less as a material infrastructure than as a relational and moral one. From this perspective, associated for instance with Lauren Berlant’s work, the commons names the everyday labor of sustaining relations in a damaged world: provisional connections marked by ambivalence, discomfort, and endurance rather than harmony or resolution. Read together, these interpretations foreground different dimensions of commoning—material and relational—that often coexist and become entangled in concrete forms of collective action.
The 2025 conference of the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology on “(Un)Commoning Anthropology” offered an occasion to further reflect on these questions. To make sense of this entanglement, I draw on the notion of genealogies of disinterestedness, which traces the moral traditions underpinning why and how people act for others. In grassroots responses to the EU border regime, different moral orientations—such as humanitarian compassion, politically articulated solidarity, and more civic or institutionalized notions of responsibility—do not map neatly onto distinct actors or organizations. Rather, they often coexist within the same initiative, and sometimes within the same person.
In November 2021, I conducted fieldwork by accompanying a small group of volunteers from an Italian grassroots humanitarian organization on a mission to the Bosnian–Croatian border. This case illustrates how such moral orientations are translated into practice in contexts marked by border violence, repression, and fragmented governance. Some practices were oriented toward a humanitarian idiom: distributing donations and basic goods, adhering to semi-formal codes of conduct, and addressing suffering through recognizable forms of aid. Other practices foregrounded a language of political solidarity, emphasizing anti-racism, freedom of movement, and horizontal relations between international volunteers, local activists, and people on the move. These included informal activities such as documenting border violence or supporting unauthorized crossings.
In practice, however, these orientations were rarely enacted separately. Humanitarian and activist repertoires frequently unfolded within the same gesture or encounter, and volunteers moved between them with relative ease. This hybridity was not only practical but also discursive, shaping how participants narrated and justified their actions.
An interview with Patrick (26, MA psychology student), one of the volunteers, offers insight into how this oscillation is experienced: “I always give the example of the first mission I went on in Bosnia because it’s paradigmatic of how the association is able to enter into dialogue with different realities. There we were, talking with people on the move inside the squats and at the same time speaking quite casually with high representatives of institutional governance in the region. Being able to switch from one level to another allowed me to understand how wide the spectrum is in this field of struggle.”
Patrick’s reflection points to the scalar flexibility of the organization’s engagement and its ambition to navigate between grassroots networks and institutional actors. Maintaining dialogue across these levels was seen as a way to preserve room for action and to extend the reach of solidarity without fully submitting to the constraints of formalized humanitarian governance. This capacity to shift between moral orientations functions as a tactical resource. By selectively activating different repertoires of care, responsibility, and resistance, volunteers navigate a border regime that simultaneously criminalizes, tolerates, and attempts to incorporate grassroots initiatives.
The Bosnia mission suggests that the commons at stake is not only a material infrastructure of care and mobility (food, routes, information) but also a moral one. The discursive patchwork through which activists justify their actions shows how different genealogies of disinterestedness are not static legacies but living resources, continually reassembled as people move between local and transnational arenas. At the same time, these dynamics raise questions about how processes of institutionalization and “scaling up” reshape the very idea of the commons. Efforts to sustain solidarity and political viability may also unsettle the fragile relations that make commoning possible. How can solidarity continue to act as a transformative force when the commons itself becomes increasingly entangled with governance, repression, and the pursuit of legitimacy?
Elena Liberati is a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the intersections of migration, urban governance, and participatory citizenship in Mediterranean Europe.