Conclusions

Growing social heterogeneity in Western societies is placing significant pressure on the imagined communities that constitute the foundation of nation states. Responses to this profound challenge range from exclusionary strategies aimed at reinforcing both territorial and nativist identity boundaries to attempts to reconstruct political belonging on new foundations. A temporal approach to migrants’ collective action offers a lens through which to understand emerging forms of political belonging in which migrants of diverse origins are not merely included but constitute a central driving force. If, as Benedict Anderson argued, the time of the imagined national community is homogeneous and empty, the political communities examined in this book are instead shaped by a heterogeneous and full temporality. They are heterogeneous insofar as they gather diverse biographical trajectories and rework collective memories that, in turn, reassemble earlier ones. They are full because they operate across multiple vertical levels –- individual and collective –- and horizontal ones, extending beyond specific experiences of migration and activism. What emerges is an image of dynamic political communities grounded in affective relations. These relations enable the construction of a shared social past, recognized as political, which forms the basis for imagining and enacting migrants’ collective action.