The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements

Remaking Citizenship from the Margins

Ilker Atac, Kim Rygiel, Maurice Stierl, Ilker Atac, Kim Rygiel, Maurice Stierl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367143060
• eBook ISBN: 9781351737951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past two years, large-scale migratory movements to Europe have gained worldwide attention, and have prompted ever-greater desires to govern and control them. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of political struggles for rights to movement and demands for greater social justice, in both the global 'north' and 'south'. Throughout the world, political mobilizations by refugees, irregularized migrants and solidarity activists have emerged, demanding and enacting the right to move and to stay, struggling for citizenship and human rights, and protesting the violence and deadliness of contemporary border regimes.

This collection brings together articles that explore political mobilizations in several countries and (border) regions, including Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Austria, Germany, Greece, Turkey and 'the Mediterranean'. Many of these political mobilizations can be understood as transnational responses to processes of regionalization and the intensification of restrictive border regimes across the globe, and as illustrative of what might be referred to as a 'new era of protest'.

Introduction: the contentious politics of refugee and migrant protest and solidarity movements: remaking citizenship from the margins

Ilker Ataç^a, Kim Rygiel^b and Maurice Stierl^c

^aInstitute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany; ^bDepartment of Political Science & School of International Policy & Governance, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada; ^cCultural Studies, African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

ABSTRACT

Throughout the world, political mobilizations by refugees, irregularized migrants, and solidarity activists have emerged, demanding and enacting the right to move and to stay, struggling for citizenship and human rights, and protesting the violence and deadliness of contemporary border regimes. These struggles regularly traverse the local and constitute trans-border, trans-categorical, and in fact, social movements. This special issue inquires into their transformative possibilities and offers a collection of articles that explore political mobilizations in several countries and (border) regions, including Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Austria, Germany, Greece, Turkey and ‘the Mediterranean.’ This issue brings into dialog social movement literature, and especially the ‘contentious politics’ perspective, with migration struggles. It connects these to current debates underway within Critical Citizenship Studies and the Autonomy of Migration literatures around rights making, the constitution of political subjectivities, and re-defining notions of the political and political community.

Introduction

Over the past decade, we have witnessed an upsurge of political mobilizations by refugees, irregularized migrants, and migrant solidarity activists in the countries of the European Union, at its external borders, in Morocco and Turkey, and in other parts of the world, such as the Americas, in countries like Mexico and Brazil. Many of these political mobilizations can be understood as transnational responses to processes of regionalization and the intensification of restrictive border regimes across the globe. With collective public actions that take on a variety of forms (including marches, hunger strikes, occupations of public sites, and protest camps), refugees, migrants, and those working in solidarity with them, demand advocacy for human rights, freedom of movement, a fair asylum process, and access to labor markets. Furthermore, they also demonstrate resistance to detention, deportations, dispersals, and struggles around ‘missing’ migrants or enact the freedom of movement by subverting and challenging border barriers in unauthorized and, at times, hidden ways. In this special issue, we highlight refugee and migrant struggles as illustrative of what might be referred to as a ‘new era of protest’ (Ataç et al. 2015; From the Struggles Collective 2015; Schwiertz 2016) and in particular those struggles emerging globally around the rights to movement.

For Europe, the year of 2015 has been a historic one in terms of the scale and dynamism of migrant movements. More than one million people survived the crossing of the Mediterranean and Aegean seas (UNHCR 2015), many of them taking to the roads and walking hundreds of miles in order to reach a desired place. From Greece in particular, where more than 850,000 people have landed on its islands throughout the year, thousands have struggled onward, passing through the Balkans in an attempt to reach northern and central EU member states. These unprecedented human mobilities have effectively dismantled, even if only temporarily, the Dublin regulation, a corner stone of the EU border regime. Instead of finding concerted responses, nation-state borders in Europe have been, in part, resurrected, causing conflicts among EU member states and a humanitarian crisis along the many borderlines, fences, and walls. Many European citizens responded to such acts of escape (Mezzadra 2004a) and have shown solidarity by meeting travelers at train stations, offering advice or even transportation when trains were re-routed or shut down, and by providing food and shelter and welcoming newcomers into European communities. These acts of solidarity have occurred despite growing populist and right-wing responses to migrant arrivals, and an upsurge in anti-migrant sentiment and violence. In particular toward the end of 2015, a climate of fear spread throughout Europe and beyond, galvanized by events such as the terrorist attacks in Paris in November and sexual assaults and robberies in Cologne on New Year’s eve that were quickly and highly problematically connected to (new) migrant and refugee populations. Public discourses markedly shifted to the political right, calling into question sentiments of solidarity and voicing more audibly than before growing concerns about ‘unlimited’ and ‘uncontrolled’ migration. Within the populist and xenophobic but also increasingly mainstream political spectrum, the refugee began to be ‘re-figured as the potential “terrorist” who surreptitiously infiltrates the space of Europe, or as the potential “criminal” or “rapist” who corrodes the social and moral fabric of “Europe” from within’ (New Keywords Collective 2016). Despite these disconcerting developments and attempts of European countries to find ways to deter future border crossings into their territories, the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees in the first weeks of 2016 demonstrates that migration will continue to be a major transformative political and social force also in the next year to come.

While these large-scale movements to Europe have gained worldwide (media) attention, we have, of course, also seen the emergence of political struggles for rights to movement and demands for greater social justice elsewhere. In many parts of the world, migrants and refugees are involved in what can be thought of as connected and global struggles for and of movement. Refugees protest conditions of camps and demand recognition of rights and improved legislation for living conditions, for example in Nambia’s Osire Refugee Camp (Ilcan 2014). Refugees have undertaken hunger strikes in Indonesia on the island of Sumatra in the fall of 2015, in order to protest significant delays in their resettlement to a third country (Topsfield 2015). Similar strikes were also organized in Australia’s offshore detention facility on Manus Island throughout the past year (BBC 2015) and in California in winter 2015, when female prisoners and migrants in detention organized collective campaigns in solidarity with one another (Pratt 2015). In Israel, Sudanese and Eritrean migrants and refugees, along with Israeli supporters, have actively protested against the government’s decision to either deport or resettle asylum-seekers in camps in Uganda and Rwanda and under threat of indefinite confinement should they refuse to leave (Jalil and the Times of Israel Staff 2015). Struggles by Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants over the right to stay emerged in the Dominican Republic. These struggles mobilized against impending mass deportation and enforced statelessness, consequences of a controversial court ruling that deemed anyone born in the Dominican Republic to an undocumented foreign parent stateless (Yuhas 2015). Protests led by Rohingyas have also emerged in Bangladesh and Burma. Despite being denied the ‘freedom of movement, the right to work, and the right to education’ in Bangladesh, Rohingyas have nevertheless repeatedly protested repatriation back to Myanmar (Uddin 2015, 70). Similarly, Rohingyas, now rendered stateless under Burma’s 1982 citizenship law have sought to escape destitution and persecution by boat (The Week 2015). In Japan, Kurdish refugees staged sit-ins to express ‘their dissatisfaction with the Japanese government’s refusal to grant them refugee status’ (Shindo 2009, 219) and detained migrants have more recently, in the wake of several migrant deaths since 2013, protested their prison-like conditions in the Ushiko detention center (Shindo 2015, 319).

Such examples are illustrative of ‘the ways that citizenship is enacted globally’ (Isin and Nyers 2014, 7), with refugees and migrants demanding rights as a form of ‘enacting’ themselves as citizens and doing so globally (Isin and Nielsen 2008). Noting the importance of understanding the ‘worlds of citizenship,’ Isin and Nyers (2014, 7) argue for the importance of freeing citizenship from being long sequestered within the confines of European or Western history and scholarship as a concept believed to be ‘a uniquely Western institution that not only explained the differences between despotic and authoritarian regimes in the east but also ostensibly explained the differences between why the West “took off” and the East has stagnated.’ While not necessarily representative of struggles globally, in a more modest way the articles in this issue seek to contribute to the neglected study of the global enactments of citizenship by exploring political struggles outside of the confines of particular nation-states and through the transnational character of such organizing. Based on original field research, the articles in this collection draw attention to the growing phenomenon of refugee and migrant protest movements from several countries and (border-) regions, including Austria, Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, the USA and ‘the Mediterranean.’ By tracing the networks and connections between peoples in political organizing, the pieces seek to show the much larger geographic scope of such political contestations despite the importance of also paying attention to the specific locations and contexts within which they occur. The selections represent places where struggles are concentrated, which perhaps not surprisingly arises at what Freudenstein (2000) names ‘the world’s “frontiers of poverty”’ (quoted in Walters 2011, 145) or what Walters notes are the ‘faultlines in the smooth space of globalization’ in which those ‘worlds designated in terms of Global North and Global South confront one another in a very concrete, abrasive way, and where gradients of wealth and poverty, citizenship and non-citizenship appear especially sharply’ (Walters 2011, 145).

This issue focuses on investigating the practices, strategies, and mobilization of refugee and migrant activism and the ways in which refugees, migrants, and citizen-supporters engage with notions of citizenship, whether it be through ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008), and the creation of new forms of citizenship and political community through political struggle, or something ‘after citizenship’ (Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013), as discussed below. The articles touch upon different theoretical aspects of citizenship, raising questions about the political agency of the protagonists of migrant and refugee struggles. In particular, they do so by reflecting on them as examples of social movements, forms of contentious politics with transformative potential, along with their trans-border characteristics and the spatial strategies they employ. Our aim here is to bring into conversation scholarship and discussions that have thus far largely remained separate. Although social movements literature has studied pro-migrant solidarity groups (Tazreiter 2010; Rosenberger and Winkler 2014; Monforte 2016; Moran 2015), it has only minimally engaged with the subject of migrant and refugee struggles (Ataç et al. 2015; Refugee Review 2013; Schwenken 2013). Moreover, social movement literature has often paid insufficient attention to the nuances of space, preferring to retain analysis at more macro scales of analysis and, as the literature on ‘contentious politics’ makes clear, it has also been anemic in its attention to the political dynamics at the heart of struggle as discussed below in the third section. Because of this, social movements often appear ‘too readily unified and glorified’ such that ‘other critical, dissenting, and localised voices and spaces become marginalised’ (Stierl 2012, 427). The contentious politics approach suggests promising avenues to connect social movements perspectives with protest actions of migrants and refugees. Contentious politics, following Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto (2008, 157), can be defined as: ‘concerted, counter-hegemonic social and political action, in which differently positioned participants come together to challenge dominant systems of authority, in order to promote and enact alternative imaginaries.’ While not all of the articles explicitly employ the term ‘contentious politics,’ they do share the objectives of this perspective by highlighting the concrete strategies, campaigns, demonstrations, and struggles of refugees and migrants, and those citizens mobilizing in solidarity with them. They do so in order to make visible the politics of these social movements and inquire into the potentiality of such political struggle for the creation of new relationships, political subjectivities, and communities and ways of thinking about citizenship.

Our second aim then is to not only bring into conversation social movement literature, (understood through a contentious politics perspective) with refugee and migrant struggles, but to connect these issues to current debates underway within Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS) around rights making, the constitution of political subjectivities, and re-defining notions of the political and political community. Doing so enables us to examine the political dynamics of movements in relation to claims and to consider how notions of identity, community, and politics are negotiated in and through movement rather than to begin with already settled notions about what citizenship is and is not. Here we share and build on aims of previous special issues in Citizenship Studies, including ‘Engendering the Political: Citizenship from Marginal Space’ (Turner 2016) and ‘Immigrant Protest’ (Tyler and Marciniak 2013), in which political struggles by and for (im)migrants and refugees ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: the contentious politics of refugee and migrant protest and solidarity movements: remaking citizenship from the margins
• 2. Dying to live: migrant deaths and citizenship politics along European borders: transgressions, disruptions, and mobilizations
• 3. A sea of struggle – activist border interventions in the Mediterranean Sea
• 4. ‘Nacimos de la nada’: border struggles and maternal politics in Mexico
• 5. The tactical politics of ‘humanitarian’ immigration: negotiating stasis, enacting mobility
• 6. Transformations of the undocumented youth movement and radical egalitarian citizenship
• 7. ‘Refugee Protest Camp Vienna’: making citizens through locations of the protest movement
• 8. Displacement of European citizen Roma in Berlin: acts of citizenship and sites of contentious politics
• 9. Notes from a refugee protest: ambivalences of resisting and desiring citizenship
• Index