Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement

Peter Nyers, Kim Rygiel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138803503
• eBook ISBN: 9781136448409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Migration is an inescapable issue in the public debates and political agendas of Western countries, with refugees and migrants increasingly viewed through the lens of security. This book analyses recent shifts in governing global mobility from the perspective of the politics of citizenship, utilising an interdisciplinary approach that employs politics, sociology, anthropology, and history.

Featuring an international group of leading and emerging researchers working on the intersection of migrant politics and citizenship studies, this book investigates how restrictions on mobility are not only generating new forms of inequality and social exclusion, but also new forms of political activism and citizenship identities. The chapters present and discuss the perspectives, experiences, knowledge and voices of migrants and migrant rights activists in order to better understand the specific strategies, tactics, and knowledge that politicized non-citizen migrant groups produce in their encounters with border controls and security technologies. The book focuses the debate of migration, security, and mobility rights onto grassroots politics and social movements, making an important intervention into the fields of migration studies and critical citizenship studies.

Citizenship, Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement will be of interest to students and scholars of migration and security politics, globalisation and citizenship studies.

1 Securitised migrants and postcolonial (in)difference

The politics of activisms among North African migrants in France

Alina Sajed

In January 2005, French feminist activists congregated in Reims to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Veil law (loi Veil), which decriminalised abortion in 1975. The demonstration was massive, colourful and dynamic, but it was marked by one significant incident. Alain Lipietz, a French economist and politician, currently a Member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, related on his blog how several weeks before the demonstration a group of headscarved Muslim women activists had visited the organisers to express their wish to join in (www.lipietz.net). The Muslim women wanted to wear arm bands in support of abortion and contraception. The organisers refused to put their names down and allow them to march with other women. The Muslim activists, nonetheless, did come to the event, and were placed at the very end of the demonstration ‘behind the anarchists’ (Lipietz 2005). This incident, seen as minor by many at that demonstration, carries enormous significance as it highlights the complex and ambivalent politics of activisms in France. It encapsulates the post/neocolonial intersections between ideals and practices of French citizenship, civic and political activism, migration flows, racial politics, and gender dimensions. Lipietz mentions that the largely secular crowd welcomed Catholic activists showing their support of abortion policies, but not the veiled Muslim women. The incident is thus not about the discomforts of championing publicly one’s religious identity in a ‘hyper-secular society’ (Khosrokhavar 2010: 232), but about the role of and space for the racialised other, whose visibility and stubborn difference disturbs cherished homogenous and universalist ideals of political community, belonging and citizenship.

This chapter examines activisms of North African (Maghrebian) Muslim communities in France, who find themselves at the intersection of various transnational links, such as those of migrant labour, postcolonial (in)difference, the global politics of knowledge, and shifts in citizenship. I focus on two types of migrant activisms: one revolves around the creation of a Muslim diasporic identity through engagement in Islamic activist organisations, and the other focuses on North African women’s activisms that attempt to navigate the ambivalent terrain of women’s rights practices and Muslim identities in a secular society. Politically, such a comparative perspective would also provide a needed intervention into a discussion of Muslim identities by emphasising a plurality of positions and identities. I argue that these various political expressions of migrant activisms are instances of minor transnationalisms emerging in an era of globalised flows (see JanMohamed and Lloyd 1990; Lionnet and Shih 2005).

By ‘minor transnationalism’ I mean the various ‘micropractices’ undertaken by minority and diasporic communities through which they negotiate and challenge the ambivalent boundaries of nation, citizenship and belonging (Lionnet and Shih 2005: 6–7). Such a conceptualisation of transnationality indicates the ‘transversal’ formations engendered by migrant mobilisations, whose projected sense of community and belonging draws on affiliations and loyalties that exceed the limits of the national. By going beyond the binary of dominant versus resistant identities, this chapter aims to illustrate the complicated and contradictory practices through which various minor transnationalisms (and their intersections) reconfigure the narrow confines of the citizen versus non-citizen binary. As Lionnet and Shih remark, ‘[w]e study the centre and the margin but rarely examine the relationships among different margins’ (2005: 2). By focusing on women’s mobilisations and Islamic activism, I seek to emphasise the mobile character of migrants’ political engagement and the politics of movement that attend it. The examination of different (and sometimes conflicting) subject positions – such as secular or Muslim feminists, Islamic activists or de-colonial activists – entails both a movement towards the transnational (via larger feminist or Islamic networks), and a reconfiguration of citizenship. Such a dual focus allows for an understanding of citizenship as a set of multifaceted practices, which sometimes push at its rigid boundaries and sometimes reinforce them. The relationships between various transnational phenomena such as the securitisation of Muslim communities, Islamic activisms, women’s mobilisations, flows of migration, and state-centric discourses of citizenship reconfigure the notion of citizenship in the Franco-Maghrebian borderland in unexpected ways.

Migrant mobilisations acquire here a double meaning: they point both to the migrants’ political articulations of migratory experiences, but also to the migrants’ engagements with transnational political movements. Such a double movement helps to destabilise the facile opposition between citizen and non-citizen, and serves to illustrate that citizenship is not a stable category with solidified boundaries. Rather, through an examination of migrants’ experiences, a more ambivalent picture of citizenship emerges, which involves negotiation, accommodation, resistance, and transformation. The chapter begins by offering some background on the processes of the securitisation of Islam in France, and on how such processes impact migrant mobilisations and migrants’ perceptions of identity and community. The practices securitising North African Muslim communities predate 9/11, and go back to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) and to the Algerian civil war (1991–2004). In France, the terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’ are almost synonymous (Cesari 1994, 1998, 2010a), which highlights both the visibility of the Muslim other, and the never-ending debate over the possibility of the integration of these groups within French society. This overlap explains why in Europe there is a tight link between immigration policies, securitisation measures and anti-terrorist legislations (Coolsaet 2008; Pargeter 2008; Cesari 2008, 2010a; Khosrokhavar 2010). The marginalisation of North African migrants within French society, and the various securitisation policies implemented throughout the decades, cannot be understood outside of the (post)colonial project that has bound France to North Africa (particularly Algeria) in intimate and violent ways (Balibar 2004 and 2009). It is not surprising, then, that a number of significant acts of legislation adopted in ‘postcolonial’ France, which have attempted to tackle the Maghrebian ‘issue’ (whether pertaining to citizenship, anti-terrorist measures or violence in the banlieues), stem from French colonial laws (Cesari 1994: 12; Ezekiel 2008: 246).

Thus securitisation measures have profoundly altered the self-perceptions of North African Muslim migrants and reconfigured the possibilities of mobilisation, association and activism. Jocelyne Cesari has argued that Islamic activism has created new forms of citizenship among North African migrants by ‘disentangling political and national identifications’ and thus producing a civil practice of citizenship (meaning grass-roots local participation in social and political initiatives) rather than a civic one (entailing a recognition of and allegiance to public authorities and centralised universal political institutions) (2002: 43–44). The second part of this chapter thus looks at various Islamic organisations and their methods of mobilisation. The plethora of Muslim-based organisations active in France evinces deep transnational links that shape activists’ notions of political community, belonging and citizenship. However, attention to gender brings into focus the underlying power relations and complicities that are crucial to grasping the complicated terrain of migrant activisms. In the last part of the chapter, an analysis of the headscarf debate becomes the basis for investigating the ambivalent and uneasy relationships between migrant women’s rights activism and Muslim-based mobilisations. The spotlight on this link highlights both the possibilities and the limits of contesting the rigid boundaries of citizenship within the Franco-Maghrebian borderland (see Sajed 2010). Such a link is further complicated by the emergence of new types of migrant activisms that embrace the activists’ status as indigènes (natives) of the (Post/Neo)Colonial Republic (République Post/Neo/Coloniale), and use it as a rallying cry for the actualisation of a decolonial politics. Theirs is a transnational political consciousness that draws on solidarities with other minor transnationalisms, thus de-legitimising the universality of the French republican model.

The securitisation of Islam in France: from ‘ratonnades’ to the ‘war on terror’

Securitisation, as a concept associated with the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, has been defined as the removal of certain issues from the political sphere of democratic negotiation and contestation to that of security, away from public scrutiny (see Buzan et al. 1998). An issue is securitised when it is perceived to pose an existential threat to the survival of a society or community. Thus, the ongoing discussion in the literature on the securitisation of migration refers to the process whereby migration becomes a security issue, one that threatens the very survival of political communities.¹ In the case of France, the securitisation of North African Muslim immigrants has been a politically controversial process that started after the Second World War. Even before the war, North African labourers had a significant presence in French society due to their status as French colonial subjects (see Blanchard and Bancel 1998). With the end of the Second World War, the number of North African labourers increased dramatically (ironically, especially after the independence of Algeria) due to a high demand for cheap (and disposable) labour needed for the reconstruction of French society. This post-war generation of North African labourers was largely a masculine migration from rural areas. Scholars indicate that this particular group of migrants was in a precarious position not only in terms of their living conditions (sordid shanty-towns known as bidonvilles on the peripheries of urban areas), but also because politically they inhabited an extremely marginal and fragile location. They were frequently targeted both by police raids and by racist attacks known as ratonnades (Noiriel 1996; Ben Jelloun 1997; Blanchard and Bancel 1998; Gastaut 2004).²

The securitisation of North African migration in France is inseparable from the anti-colonial struggle of the Algerians in the 1950s and 1960s, as France was waging an extremely violent war against Algerian independence movements. Perhaps one of the most memorable and bloodiest ratonnades in the history of North African migration in France occurred on 16–17 October 1961 and became known as the Paris Massacre of 1961. A pro-Algeria demonstration in Paris, organised by the Algerian Front for National Liberation and attended by thousands of migrants and French supporters, was violently repressed by the French police, leaving hundreds dead, most of them Algerian. Thousands of demonstrators, mostly from shanty-towns around Paris, and designated as ‘Français musulmans d’Algérie’ (French Algerian Muslims), were taken by the police to various locations, where they were beaten and violently assaulted. In his vivid account of this episode, historian Jean-Luc Einaudi (1991) describes the horror witnessed by members of medical teams, social services, and even by some police members as they looked on at the physical abuse of the demonstrators by the police. Einaudi suggests that this is one of the most dismal moments in the history of the Fifth French Republic. It is perhaps no small detail that the chief of police who ordered the violent repression against the Algerian migrants was Maurice Papon, former senior police official of the Vichy government. When in 1997 he was prosecuted by the French state, it was for his role in the Vichy government between 1942 and 1944, and not for the violent repression of a peaceful demonstration of North African migrants. The ‘anti-Algerian pogrom’, as it is called by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (quoted in Einaudi 1991: 330), was conveniently left aside.³

Between the 1950s and 1970s, there was a general feeling that the North African migrants would end up by being assimilated into French society, thus erasing their difference and embracing the homogenising lure of French citizenship. The laws on family regrouping (regroupement familial) adopted by Jacques Chirac in 1976, which allowed migrants to bring their families to France, officialised this sentiment. But the change effected to the Code of Nationality (Code de Nationalité) in 1993 (also known as the Pasqua Laws, named after the then Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua) attempted to reverse the immigration trend. In fact, Pasqua declared that the goal was for France to attain zero immigration. The Pasqua legislation stipulated that children born in France of foreign parents would no longer be automatically granted citizenship. This reversal of immigration policies had started much earlier, in the 1970s, when France was hit by oilprice shocks and therefore attempted to close its doors to migrants (see Doty 2003). It is now common knowledge that the 1993 reforms of the Code of Nationality specifically targeted North African and African migrants, that is, racialised populations from the former colonies of France. In the (post)colonial French context, the legacy of the Algerian War (and later on the spillover effects of the Algerian civil war) has amplified anti-Arab racism. More specifically, the term immigré, which in English is usually translated as ‘migrant’, encapsulates, in the French context, very specific racial and class connotations. Thus immigré actually designates individuals of North African background, Muslim, uneducated, and working as low-skilled labourers. Following Blanchard and Bancel (1998), Albert Memmi (2004) and Hafid Gafaiti (2003), I thus understand the term immigré(e) to designate not only a racial difference, but also a class difference in the constitution of North African migrants as a racialised social category (see Sajed 2010).

Thus the category of immigré, in this particular case, points to the location of the North African migrant as a racialised category, within a society whose imagination is haunted by its recent colonial past, and by its concurrent aspiration to a unitary and undisturbed national identity. Speaking about ‘l’arabe’ in France is inextricable from colonial history and memory, from postcolonial (in)difference, and from the ensuing rhetoric on immigration and security. As Albert Memmi insightfully suggests in Portrait du décolonisé, ‘the North African migrant [le Maghrébin] is not a Russian or Romanian migrant, a stranger arrived there by chance, he is the illegitimate child [le bâtard] of the colonial affair, a living reproach or a permanent disillusion’ (2004: 97).⁴

Historian Benjamin Stora remarks that the Algerian War represents a founding moment not only for the new modern French nation (see Ross 1995), but also for what he labels as ‘Confederate Nationalism under a Republican Mask’ (2006: 157). This ‘confederate imaginary’ emerges periodically in various guises and relies on the assumption that there is a clear and unambiguous incompatibility between Islam and French values as embodied in the national ideology of laïcité (French secularism). Jocelyne Cesari remarks that the 1993 reforms to the Code of Nationality were strangely reminiscent of colonial laws (1994: 12). The laws promulgated by Napoleon III in 1865 required Muslim subjects of French Algeria who desired full citizenship to give up the jurisdiction of Islamic law in terms of personal status and submit themselves fully to the jurisdiction of French law (Weil 2005 and 2008). The current ideal of French citizenship whereby the nation is one and indivisible, homogeneous and universalistic (meaning blind to differences) requires no less than the erasure of any signs of difference so that those visibly different can pose no danger to this idealised unity. Therefore, the Pasqua laws can be read as ‘the return of [the] colonial situation to the heart of the hexagon’ (Cesari ibid.). It is not coincidental, then, that in 2005 when riots erupted in the banlieues (suburban estates) involving mainly French Muslims of North African descent, the first reaction of the French government was to dig up a 1955 state of emergency colonial law, which had been originally designed to repress the Algerian independence movement (Ezekiel 2008: 245).

This discussion thus aims to draw attention to the colonial provenance of current policies concerning the securitisation of migration in postcolonial France, and the securitisation of Muslim communities in particular. The spectre of Islam as an object of security in France was raised when Algeria was in the throes of civil war in the 1990s. When in 1991 the Islamist party (Front of Islamic Salvation, FIS) was set to win both parliamentary and local elections, the Algerian gove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Citizenship, migrant activism and the politics of movement
• 1 Securitised migrants and postcolonial (in)difference: the politics of activisms among North African migrants in France
• 2 Claiming rights, asserting belonging: contesting citizenship in the UK
• 3 Ungrateful subjects? Refugee protests and the logic of gratitude
• 4 ‘We are all foreigners’: No Borders as a practical political project
• 5 Ethnography and human rights: the experience of APDHA with Nigerian sex workers in Andalusia
• 6 Moments of solidarity, migrant activism and (non)citizens at global borders: political agency at Tanzanian refugee camps, Australian detention centres and European borders
• 7 Building a sanctuary city: municipal migrant rights in the city of Toronto
• 8 Taking not waiting: space, temporality and politics in the City of Sanctuary movement
• 9 Undocumented citizens? Shifting grounds of citizenship in Los Angeles
• Index