Now I must go”: uncovering the relationship between masculinity and structural vulnerability in young African men's stories of forced migration

Drawing on personal narratives collected from Sub-Saharan African international protection holders and seekers in Sicily, this article aims to advance understanding of the gender-specific processes prompting young men to migrate toward Europe. Focusing on the diverse experiences of (or threat of) violence that prompted participants to migrate, I argue that masculinity can be seen as a mediating factor between the individual and structural levels, producing a set of structural vulnerabilities to male-on-male violence both in the public sphere and in private spaces like the familial context. Here, vulnerability should be understood as positionality, indicating participants’ placement within context-specific masculine hierarchies along the lines of age, migration status, and race. Accordingly, this article interprets the Central Mediterranean migration route as a highly masculinized migration arena, where the social reproduction of vulnerable male mobilities stemming from the hierarchical organization of masculinities is located on a continuum across different migration phases.