Acts of Citizenship and Social Movement Studies
For many years, research on social movements has tended to disregard the origins of discontent. For different reasons, concepts like social class (and related conflicts) and grievances, once used to refer to the structural reasons for discontent, have rarely been applied, as attention has more often focused on opportunities and resources. While protest has been defined as a resource of the powerless, researchers have given the most attention to those movements endowed with endogenous organisational resources and exogenous political opportunities, which were considered in explaining their emergence, strength, forms, and outcomes.
In this volume, we aim to fill this gap, introducing some conceptual innovations that we believe are needed in order to address movements around migration, from the actions of the migrants themselves to those of their supporters. The empirical focus is on the contentious activities related to the so-called long summer of migration of 2015, tracing the route followed by the migrants (refugees and others exiled for various reasons), from places of first arrival to places of passage (and often attempted blockage or forced expulsion) and, then, to places of destination. While the migrants’ very movements are considered as acts of citizenship, the analysis focuses mainly on the various acts of solidarity with them. Through qualitative and quantitative data, we map, within a cross-national comparative perspective, the wide set of actions and initiatives that are being created in order to support the refugees who made the journey to the European Union to seek asylum, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea or through South-Eastern Europe.
We focus on these cases from the perspective of social movement studies, which we aim to bridge with studies on migration and citizenship. While critical citizenship studies point at the importance of conceptualising citizenship as contested and processual, social movement studies contribute to an understanding of the conditions and the forms through which ‘acts of citizenship’ are performed.
In research on migration, critical citizenship studies have pointed at the intensification in the struggles for rights: ‘From aboriginal rights, women’s rights, civil rights, and sexual rights for gays and lesbians to animal rights, language rights and disability rights, we have experienced in the past few decades a major trend in Western nation-states toward the formation of new claims for inclusion and belonging’ (Isin and Turner 2003, p. 1). While there are struggles to broaden citizenship rights, there are also attempts to constrain them. As Huysmans and Guillaume (2014, p. 24) summarised,
While citizenship has been an instrument of crafting a people of equals, in which rights are universal and not a privilege, historically it has also been a vehicle for working differentiations within this universal people. On the one hand, citizens comprise a people united around a body of law and rights and/or a set of narratives about its origins. Both allow the people to recognize themselves as a collective unity with political status. On the other hand, citizenship is constituted in relation to those without rights or limited rights, those who remain outside of the narratives of the people’s community of origin. In this continuum between inclusion and exclusion, citizens are actually stratified, rather than dichotomized. Rights are often assigned differentially and citizens do have different capacities to claim rights within the citizenry body.
Within social movement studies, we look in particular at the so-called poor people’s movements, a concept famously proposed by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (Piven and Cloward 1977) when looking at the protests of excluded and marginalised groups. The main aim of our research, which covers most of the EU and beyond, is to understand how the refugees, through their moves, activate opportunities and resources, but are also constrained by them. Focusing on the different political opportunities and threats the migrants find along their route, we also consider their capacity to transform them by their very challenging of the borders and exercising of their right to move. From the theoretical point of view, we aim at bridging the toolkit of social movement studies with critical citizenship studies addressing four interrelated topics.
First, social movement studies have pointed at the importance of political opportunities, broadly defined as political conditions that reduce the costs of mobilising. Research on social movements has often considered the opening up of these opportunities—in particular through the availability of channels of access to decision makers—as favouring the spreading of protest. While social movement studies have been relatively silent on the broad transformations in the interaction between the state and the market, migration studies have looked at the effects of capitalism on the struggles for citizenship, defined as ‘a site and a source of struggles over what being a citizen means’ (Guillaume 2014, p. 150). Bridging political opportunities to broader transformations in the capitalist societal model, we consider the protests during the ‘long summer of migration’ as part and parcel of what has been defined as the crisis of neoliberalism (della Porta 2015; della Porta et al. 2017). The solidarity movements (but also those opposing them) emerged in a situation in which late neoliberalism brought about a decline in citizenship rights—particularly, but not only, in social rights. Political opportunities are therefore to be located within a critical juncture, which is characterised by a fluid temporality, under-structured and (more) open to agency.
Social movement studies have pointed at the role of mobilising structures, including social movement organisations, pointing at the networked nature of social movements as nets of individuals and organisations. Networks of supporters are particularly relevant for the mobilisations around resource-poor groups in protest campaigns often involving broad coalitions of various players, interacting in different settings, reflecting some characteristics of already mobilised social movements. Critical citizenship studies have stressed the importance of the (more or less visible) activities of migrants themselves as challengers of regimes of citizenship. Complex fields of action are produced through the interactions of actors, with a tension between inclusion and exclusion: ‘The citizen stands for inclusion, membership, and belonging, but at the expense of others who are excluded, non-members, and outcasts—strangers, outsiders, and aliens. The citizen stands on one side of the political, social, and cultural borders of the polity, with non-citizens on the other’ (Isin and Nyers 2014, p. 4). Prompted by the contentious moves by migrants themselves, the campaigns we analysed are embedded in mobilisation of discontents with austerity policies, which has expressed itself in different forms in different contexts. Additionally, protests mobilised first-time protestors, going beyond the already mobilised networks.
According to social movement studies, repertoires of protest are influenced by both the contextual opportunities and the resources available for specific movement networks. When looking at resource-poor groups, more typical forms of protest in the streets are accompanied by two modalities that have traditionally been left out of research on contentious politics: we can label them acts of resistance and acts of solidarity. As critical citizenship studies suggested, acts of citizenship are produced as innovative and disruptive moments by activist citizens, who act to assess their rights (Isin and Turner 2003). In this direction, critical studies on citizenship have looked at the practices through which status has been contested and subjectivities formed, through an analysis of routines and rituals but also customs, norms, and habits through which a subject becomes a citizen (Isin 2008). According to Isin and Nyers (2014, p. 3), citizenship involves both the combination of rights and duties in each polity (as it derives as the outcome of social struggle) and the performance of citizenship, as ‘rights and duties that are not performed remain as inert or passive rights and duties’. The wave of mobilisation in the ‘long summer of migration’ was started by what critical citizenship studies define as an act of citizenship, and then broadened to include contentious activities by a broad range of actors that challenged existing citizenship regimes. In fact, while the very moving of refugees is a defiant act of resistance against imposed constraints, acts of solidarity by supportive citizens accompany them on their way. Eventful protests then contribute to give meaning to resistance and solidarity (e.g. della Porta et al. 2017).
Social movement studies have paid attention to the framing of the issues at stake. A challenge for social movements lies in developing a discourse that is convincing for different players, through an identity work oriented to the internal constituency, but also resonant for outsiders. Cognitive and emotional mechanisms are connected in this activity. Primarily, the mobilisations of the ‘poor people’ need to reverse a negative into a positive collective identity as well as a politicisation, through shifting blame from individual to political responsibilities. According to migration studies, claims to citizenship, beyond the legal status, address issues of social and political recognition as well as economic redistribution (Isin and Turner 2003). We look at this by considering in particular processes of knowledge production, but also the mobilisation of emotions.
In what follows, we will substantiate these assumptions, looking at existing research in cognate fields of research on migrant movements and protests of the unemployed, but also at initial research on refugees’ movements themselves.
Political Opportunities in Critical Junctures
Thus a Greek anthropologist described the essential transformation in the island of Lesbos, where millions of refugees entered Europe in 2015. The time span we addressed in our research has in fact been broadly defined as a ‘refugee crisis’. While, as Alcalde (2016) reminds us, the crisis is not due to the sheer number of refugees, and the term ‘crisis’ has long been used to refer to migration waves, governments in Europe were certainly unprepared to provide humanitarian intervention. In fact, during 2016, a humanitarian crisis was triggered by the perception that the institutional structures and policies in place, at all territorial levels, were unfit to address what was presented as an emergency. Political opportunities are, therefore, to be located within a critical juncture that challenged existing institutions.The ‘event’—which the refugee crisis is—seems to occupy the ‘structure’—which the village community was. (Papataxiarchis 2016, p. 7)
In research on what Piven and Cloward (1977) influentially defined as ‘poor people’s movements’, political opportunities have been identified at the national level according to different domestic welfare regimes or citizenship regimes (Koopmans et al. 2005; della Porta et al. 2017). Social movements of ‘poor people’ are very much structured by institutions at the local level, where social services are often located (Fillieule 1993; Bourneau and Martin 1993, p. 172). Additionally, poor people’s movements at times also address international gov...