This project examines how migrant mutual aid networks in Europe’s southern and southeastern peripheries collaborate to confront the new EU migration Pact and the criminalisation of solidarity. Focusing on Barcelona and Tirana, it asks how these networks build cross-border infrastructures of care, protection, and political imagination in a landscape marked by militarised borders and institutional collapse.

Drawing on a partnership between TICTAC in Barcelona and Europe Other Collective from Tirana, the project combines collective workshops, networking, and co-authored outputs with qualitative, action-oriented research. A 5 days gathering Tirana in July 2026 brings together activists from Catalonia, and along the “Balkan route”, alongside legal experts and researchers, to discuss the Pact’s effects, design shared strategies, and further the collaboration. Follow-up events in Barcelona will later disseminate the co-created materials and insights to wider activist and research communities.

The project contributes to knowledge by theorising “from below” and “from the peripheries” in the context of fortress Europe by spotlighting migrant mutual aid networks and their practices as sources of both conceptual and practical insight. In doing so, the project advances ISRF’s goals by supporting innovative, interdisciplinary research that responds to contemporary crises of meaning and “order”. It does so by fostering collaborative knowledge production between researchers and grassroot practitioners/organizers, and by bolstering transnational solidarities between Europe’s peripheries as sites where alternative futures and practices are collaboratively imagined and built.