Political belonging beyond migration

This chapter addresses the dilemma of collective identity by examining identity as a temporal and relational process, focusing on the interplay between public group representations and internal forms of belonging. Rather than treating collective identities as fixed or exhaustive entities, the chapter conceptualizes them as dynamic, context-dependent processes that evolve over time. The analysis centres on the contested adoption of the term migrant as political groups’ self-representations, highlighting the contradictions, tensions and negotiations surrounding this choice and linking them to both macro-level public discourses and micro-level participant experiences. Drawing on three movement collectives that emerged at critical junctures in the history of migration and anti-racism in Italy, the chapter shows that identifying as migrants enables groups to intervene more effectively in public debates and to critically rework externally imposed labels. At the same time, the term migrant entails significant limitations: it often reinforces top-down and stigmatizing definitions and fails to resonate with participants’ diverse lived experiences. Moreover, political biographies reveal that migration itself is not always the primary driver of political engagement, raising questions about the capacity of such a label to foster strong in-group belonging. To address this tension, the chapter explores how groups complement or replace the migrant identity with alternative forms of identification. These include belonging grounded in the idea of a chosen political family, shared activist identities within mixed collectives, and attachment to a movement&s;s long-standing history of struggle, sustained through the transmission of memories and narratives. The chapter contributes to the literature on collective identity by moving beyond the dichotomy between strategic public identification and individual self-definition, highlighting instead how complex and continuous negotiations around identity shape new forms of political belonging and the public representations chosen by those groups.