Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe

Maurice Stierl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351270465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Over the past few years, increased 'unauthorised' migrations into the territories of Europe have resulted in one of the most severe crises in the history of the European Union. Stierl explores migration and border struggles in contemporary Europe and the ways in which they animate, problematise, and transform the region and its political formation.

This volume follows public protests of migrant activists, less visible attempts of those on the move to 'irregularly' subvert borders, as well as new solidarities and communities that emerge in interwoven struggles for the freedom of movement. Stierl offers a conceptualisation of migrant resistances as forces of animation through which European forms of border governance can be productively explored. As catalysts that set socio-political processes into frictional motion, they are developed as modes of critical investigation, indeed, as method. By ethnographically following and being implicated in different migration struggles that contest the ways in which Europe decides over and enacts who does, and does not, belong, the author probes what they reveal about the condition of Europe in the contemporary moment.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of Migration, Border, Security and Citizenship Studies, as well as the Political Sciences more generally.

1
Resistance as method

If we allow ourselves to conceive of practices of migrant resistance, and seek to enquire into that what becomes animated by them, where do we even begin to look? An approach that begins enquiries with resistances but without giving them a concise contour other than subsuming them broadly under the notions of dissent, excess, and solidarity, may appear as a methodological dead-end, conflicting with assumptions of linearity that underlie most social science research designs. However, avoiding an established and pre-formulated theory or definition of migrant resistance that would then be ‘tested on the ground’ seems crucial in order not to unnecessarily foreclose the ability to grasp its varied articulations. Certainly, one has to be drawn somewhere, and one has to have an initial assumption of what form or shape practices of resistance might take. All over the world there certainly is no shortage of contentions over (im)mobility and borders, and they will not disappear in the foreseeable future, not least as they are deeply connected to some of the major human-made crises of our time: devastating wars and conflicts, catastrophic environmental degradation, rampant capitalist exploitation and widespread poverty, to name a few. When struggles over movement materialise, they often reveal and bring into relation the larger structural forces and forms of violence at work that have perpetuated the desire and need to leave, to escape, to cross borders, as well as to stay where one is threatened to be displaced from.

In my own research, the question of ‘where to look’ was closely connected to my activist engagement and thus necessarily tied to the ‘what to do’ question. My implication in activist collectives that support disobedient movements has provided me with a sort of compass, a sense of direction, continuously shaping my understanding of resistance and the potential for political transformation. Especially engaging in the Alarm Phone, subject of Chapter 4, and its direct interventions in the Mediterranean borderzone, has been, and continues to be, a crucial experience of ever-expanding political possibility. At the same time, many of the enquiries in this book were shaped, in one way or another, by personal experiences and encounters that long preceded any activist or academic involvement. The constant exposure, throughout my life, to questions about where to locate my ‘real home’, given my partly non-EUropean heritage, has certainly prompted many of the questions raised on the pages that follow, revolving around racialised othering and what it might mean to belong. It seems fitting that I wrap up the manuscript for this book where I grew up, in Germany, but where, until recently, I could have never imagined to return to after I left in 2005.

The enquiries of this book were thus not shaped in a vacuum but through my theoretical-empirical engagement and implication in that ‘what there is’, and through my subjective entanglement in a world that is, beside everything else, marked by radical inequality and abyssal violence. When I first thought about following migrant resistances and contemplated the scope of my project, I was drawn to border sites that, in the EUropean context, symbolised both border brutality and fierce migrant resistance – Lampedusa, Calais, Ceuta, and Melilla. In the end, my research interests and involvement in political campaigns took me elsewhere, including Munich, Berlin, Palermo, Lesvos, Athens, Patras, and Tunis. While all migrant resistances I encountered there had precursors, some had just begun to form, unfold, or accelerate, and several were not tied to a singular place. My ability to follow them varied considerably, depending on factors related to their different locations, realities, and progressions, as well as my connections to their protagonists and related (migrant) activist networks. Some connections opened up through chance encounters and were initially not conceived as ‘research opportunities’, while others could not be followed due to little available resources or time constraints on my part. Importantly, to retroactively create a supposed conceptual, methodological, or even chronological order, as final ‘research products’ often insinuate, would be misleading. During the practice of researching and writing, there was hardly any linearity, but a perpetual moving back and forth between various sites and struggles, literatures, methods, and theories, all intensely tied to and constitutive of one another.

What did drive my research throughout, however, was the desire to probe and challenge dominant conceptions of resistance, in particular those that seemed to reserve the label of ‘resistant subject’ solely for individuals – often white, middle-class, male, EUropean, citizen – engaged in highly visible, seemingly unified, and at times spectacular contestations of (state) authorities and systems of power. Often framed as a global civil society expressing dissent in the form of collective social movements, social movement theory has regularly failed to grasp the importance of migrant struggles that materialise and are politically transformative in different but significant ways. Given my dissatisfaction with what often seemed narrow and exclusionary accounts of resistance, I sought to shift my attention to other sites and materialisations of struggle, to engage with other conceptions of what resistance might be or might become. Beginning my enquiries with a rather broad understanding of resistance was challenging, but, over time, I became increasingly encouraged to ethnographically follow migrant struggles and enquire into the dynamics they themselves set into motion, revealing their own characteristics and political potentialities in the process, as well as the conditions of subjection they found themselves entangled in. Without a blueprint for such approach, I sought, besides the ‘practical theorisations’ of migrant resistances themselves, guidance in Foucault’s (1994a: 523–524) conceptual ‘tool-box’ that, as he declared, was meant ‘for users, not readers’. More than any particular interview, lecture, article, or book, it was his ethos of critical investigation that I sought to follow and capture with the idea of resistance as method.

Resistance as catalyst and analytic

Foucault (1994b: 453) once said that an anti-strategic ethics informed his investigations that took seriously ‘a particular death, a particular cry, a particular revolt’. His attention to subjects considered marginal in society, the mentally ill, delinquents, sexual ‘deviants’, or prison inmates, revealed the socio-political processes that rationalised their governance and subjection in the name of (human) nature, order, truth, or norm. Crucially, Foucault did not simply philosophise in the abstract about their potentiality to resist. Rather, he (1994b: 452) never questioned that they did:

People do revolt; that is a fact. And that is how subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of anyone) is brought into history, breathing life into it. A convict risks his life to protest unjust punishments; a madman can no longer bear being confined and humiliated; a people refuses the regime that oppresses it.

Foucault most explicitly discussed enactments of resistance when elaborating on anti-pastoral revolts in ecclesiastical institutions that appeared in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century Europe. For him (2009: 201, 148), these counter-conducts, as he termed the ‘struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others’, were forces through which one could analyse the dominant characteristics of this ‘pastoral power’:

We may even say that the importance, vigor, and depth of implantation of this pastoral power can be measured by the intensity and multiplicity of agitations, revolts, discontent, struggles, battles, and bloody wars that have been conducted around, for, and against it.

Importantly, Foucault’s (2009: 200–201) characterisation of these insurrections as counter-conducts followed a process of elimination: revolt was ‘too precise and too strong’, disobedience too weak, insubordination ‘attached to military insubordination’, dissidence too historically loaded and localised, misconduct too passive. By settling on counter-conduct, he departed from dominant conceptions of resistance as power’s stable other or as a substance held merely in radical-progressive spaces, not least as certain supposed bastions of resistance themselves could function, as Foucault (2009: 199) once wrote (presumably with the French Communist Party in mind),

internally as a sort of different pastorate, a different governmentality with its chiefs, its rules, and its principles of obedience, and to that extent it possesses […] a considerable capacity both to appear as a different society, a different form of conduct, and to channel revolts of conduct, take them over, and control them.

By emphasising the importance of routinely overlooked micro-practices of resistance in not so visible spaces, Foucault (2009: 120, footnotes) paid attention to how ‘it is entirely possible to arrive at overall effects, not by concerted confrontations, but also by local or lateral or diagonal attacks that bring into play the general economy of the whole’, which meant, for him, ‘that it may be worth the effort to continue with experiment’. What he (1998: 92–93) seems to mean by ‘experiment’ is a different way of examination, one that locates and follows these local, lateral, diagonal attacks instead of concerted confrontations to enquire into how power relations and ‘social hegemonies’ function, become contested, and modified. Understanding counter-conducts as both important transformative practices and vessels to investigate power relations, ‘an entire field of possible research’ opened up for Foucault (2009: 228). However, he rarely took up the task himself. This is what this book endeavours to do. Throughout, I will understand migrant resistances as catalysts:

I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. […] [I]n order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations.

(Foucault, 1982: 780, emphasis added)

Resistances conceived as catalysts, considered ‘substances increasing the rate of a reaction without themselves being consumed’ (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014), allow for dynamic enquiries of power relations that form and maintain social hegemonies. However, rather than being conceived as a substance, a solid matter with uniform properties, resistance can be understood as an embodied practice materialising in social interactions. In the motions that they create, forces of resistance animate themselves, that with which they collide, and the many reverberations that they cause, all of which are intimately interrelated. As an ‘analytics of power’ (Foucault, 1998: 90), acts of resistance shed light on various aspects that were in the dark prior to their frictional movements. The enquiries in this book thus follow migration struggles, conceptualised as catalysts that set socio-political forces into motion, as well as analytics of power relations. As I will show, in the thicket of diffuse forms of border control, these struggles and their demands for social and political transformation help us dynamically trace the relations of power that compose a system, or rather, a regime of mobility governance.

Toward an ethnography of struggle

A method, Foucault (2009: 119, footnotes) once held with characteristic playfulness, should not ‘be a stake in itself’ but, rather, ‘be made in order to get rid of it’. The proposition that this book makes, to see resistance as method, is, of course, conditional on its value to provide an experimental gaze and analytical grid through which insights into contestations over mobility are won. For Foucault (2000b: 315, 319, emphasis in original), a critical attitude is a ‘limit-attitude’, one that occasions an ‘analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’. In following migration struggles and the ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 2004: 241) they generate, we learn about some of the mechanisms through which their exclusions and abjections become operated and justified, as well as, and importantly, about the weaknesses, pressure points, and fallibilities of regimes of control. As ‘border elements’ (Foucault, 2009: 215), situated materially, discursively, and symbolically at the junctures of un/belonging, they draw attention to the ways in which sovereign insides and outsides are articulated, justified, and enacted, made and unmade. Tracing them, as method, seems to allow, literally, for a critical interrogation of our present condition from the frontiers. As they inevitably appear in the context of borders, understood as more than sovereign lines, they are experiments at imposed limits, shedding light on both limitations and possibilities of going beyond them (Dillon, 1999; Soguk, 1999).

If we want to follow these methodological possibilities and move towards an ethnography of struggle, method itself seems in need of decolonisation (Smith, 1999). It feels crucial to avoid replicating what R.B.J. Walker (2010: 257–258) calls ‘analytical procedures that presume a radical dualism as a ground of scholarly credibility’. One of these radical dualisms is the dominant binary understanding of theory and method where the latter must temporally and conceptually succeed the former. In this sense, a theoretical framework of resistance would become, in a secondary move, methodologically investigated and tested in ‘the field’. Rather than a narrow set of principles that guides research on phenomena ‘out there’, however, method can be understood differently, as the enactment of critical theory by a relational, situated, and subjective being. Method is political and performative, creatively producing realities, making ‘new signals and new resonances, new manifestations and new concealments’ (Law, 2004: 143). Often thought as something constraining, method can be a practice of opening up social phenomena rather than reducing their complexities to simplifying formulas. Marysia Zalewski’s (1996: 350, 346) proposition to overcome ‘theoretical imperialism’ by regarding theory as an ‘everyday practice’ and a ‘verb’ is particularly relevant here: ‘thinking of theory as verb implies that what one does is “theorise” rather than “use theory”’. Theorising seen as an everyday process, similar to resistance itself, also implies that it ‘is not confined either to policy makers or to academics’ (1996: 346).

My multi-sited ethnography of migrant resistances is informed by recent ethnographic trajectories that allow for greater methodological pluralism and acknowledge the political nature of social science research, often moving beyond traditional anthropological ways of ‘going native’ and seeking ‘embeddedness’. Rather than finding definitive answers in ‘the field’ that are merely transcribed into accurate accounts of the experience ‘on the ground’, ethnography, for Wanda Vrasti (2013: 17), ‘requires constant travelling back and forth between the part and the whole, experience and text, fieldwork and theory’. She conceives of ‘ethnographic improvisation’ as ‘a textual strategy for building theory from the disparate events, statements, experiences, dilemmas and surprises I encountered during my travels, but also at home, at my desk, in libraries, at conferences and during seminars’. George Marcus’ work on multi-sitedness has been critical in developing ethnographic methods that can account for dynamic practices and patterns which classic research paradigms often fail to capture. Researching heterogeneous socio-political phenomena and actors, he envisions an ethnographic method of ‘following’. The ethnographer as a ‘circumstantial activist’ follows ‘people’, ‘the thing’, ‘the metaphor’, ‘the plot, story, or allegory’, ‘the life or biography’, or ‘the conflict’ (Marcus, 1995: 105).

More than circumstantial activism, an ethnography of struggle compels engaged activism as research, where research is an ethical and practical task (Craven and Davis, 2013). Soyini Madison (2005: 5, emphasis in original), for example, envisions an ethnography which ‘begins with an ethical responsibility to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived domain’. Going further, and understanding ethnography as a collective practice, Jeffrey Juris (2007: 173) advocates for ‘militant ethnography’ as ‘a politically engaged and collaborative form of participant observation carried out from within rather than outside grassroots movements’. This book engages in analytical improvisation and methodological eclecticism and draws from diverse but interrelated ethnographic registers. Reflexive and critical enquiry is not only based upon an awareness of (dominant) forms of knowledge production and implies a process of unlearning them but constitutes also ‘a self-conscious posture counteracting the potential idleness of empirical research’, an attempt to avoid ‘a disengagement […] from acknowledging and accepting the political posture behind every choice made in the mediation between ontology, epistemology, and methods’ (Guillaume, 2013: 29). In an ethnography of struggle, distinctions between subject/object or researcher/participant become blurred. Travelling, conceptually, temporally, and spatially between multiple sites is possible, as is the political implication of the researcher, as advocate, activist, and militant.

Researching migrations and their struggles is a complex endeavour. It is hardly possible through objectivist research paradigms and narrow methodologies that continue to inform and direct significant parts of migration or refugee studies scholarship, and the political and social sciences more broadly. Presupposing that migration could be studied in an unbiased, value-neutral, and detached manner, often from a peculiar bird’s eye perspective, these paradigms disregard not only migration’s contested and relational nature but efface also the researcher’s responsibility for produced knowledges. Migration governance is becoming increasingly a knowledge-based endeavour and business, not only implicating universities in schemes of migration policing but also drawing from studies on migration, economic and managerial discourses, languages of human rights and good governance that often emanate from the academic sphere. Especially following the mass migration movements of 2015, academic research on migration to EUrope has gained attention unlike ever before, leading to increased funding of ‘policy relevant’ scholarship which, in turn, guarantees its circulation, readership, and continuous funding. Hegemonic regimes of people-filtering thrive on supposedly impartial scholarship in their desire to understand, trace, and ultimately control precarious migration projects. Several of today’s migration managers draw from academic expertise and are research-prone themselves, including the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), whose supposedly value-neutral and objective research fertilises the work of national or supra-national border enforcers, including EUrope’s border ...