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Refugee solidarity in Europe final manuscript .docx
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
This article focuses on the discourses in support of refugees as developed in Greece by local grassroots groups. The article theorises the public debate of the refugee issue as taking place in a hybrid media system, in which elites and policy makers, mainstream media, large non-governmental organisations and smaller solidarity groups as well as everyday people participate in unequal ways in constructing this debate and its parameters. In focusing on the solidarity discourses emerging from the grassroots, this article hopes to show how these groups seek to re-politicise the question of refugees, directly countering the (post)humanitarian and charity discourses of non-governmental organisations as well as the racist and security frames found in the mass media and policy discourses. In focusing on Greece, this article shows how two crises, the refugee and austerity crises – both symptoms of an underlying deep structural crisis of capitalism – may be dealt with in ways that overcome dilemmas of belongingness and otherness. In empirically supporting such arguments, the article posits the issue of solidarity to refugees as a research question: what kinds of solidarity do refugee support groups in Greece mobilise? This is addressed through focusing on the Facebook pages of 12 local solidarity initiatives. The analysis concludes that their alternative discourse is not based on spectacle and pity, nor on irony, but on togetherness and solidarity. This solidarity takes three forms, human, social and class solidarity, all feeding into the creation of a political project revolving around ideas of autonomy and self-organisation, freedom, equality and justice.
The Transformation of the Refugee Category and the Dialectics of Solidarity in Europe Nancy Alhachem
Alhachem, N. (2023). "The Transformation of the Refugee Category and the Dialectics of Solidarity in Europe." Weltbeziehung, edited by: Bettina Hollstein, Hartmut Rosa, Jörg Rüpke, Campus Frankfurt / New York, 259-278. , 2023
In this paper, I sketch the formation and transformation of the ‘refugee’ category in legal and historical discourses, as well as the necessity of a new view on migration in all its different groupings. For expressing solidarity in terms of a resonant “Weltbeziehung” (Rosa 2018; 2019), we can say that a 'healthy' Weltbeziehung is one in which the relevant political and legal measures take into account the reality of migration. Where the line between forced and voluntary movement is not always clear. And therefore, the persistence of solidarity beyond euphoric Willkomensmomentum is conditioned by this transformation of Weltbeziehung. Hence this contribution addresses how the modern refugee regime is still based on unequal sovereignties and egocentric politics. Pleading hereafter, for a solidarity that transcends national interests, and the double standard view on movement. It is assumed that the category of Refugee has been created about 70 years ago to protect Europeans who were fleeing Nazi-fascist regimes and in the aftermath of the Second World War. As well as the communist rules of central and east-European countries, seen as heroic ‘white, anti-communist males’ as Chimni argued already in 1998, the category of refugee was established on a colour line separating South from North (Chimni 1998). This is what we are reminded of when we look at the portrayal of the ‘refugee crises’ following the summer of 2015, the flow of Syrian refugees, and most recently Afghan escaping Taliban in the aftershocks of the American retreat.
This paper aims to build a spatial model on refugees' political struggle for human rights with connection to activism and social movement theories in relation to sovereign control spaces. The research undertakes an interdependent theoretical approach to Critical Citizenship Studies (CCS) and Autonomy of Migrants (AoM) perspectives through categorizing forms of activism under the hierarchical model of migrants' access to rights by decomposing variance in refugee activism cases. Through such classification, it aims to find a middle ground for the discussions between refugee/migrant struggle within the AoM and CCS by integrating the limits of right-based actions that are shaped by the sovereign state policies and practices using empirical evidences collected from Greece and Turkey for the period between 2011-2016.
Coming Together in the So-Called Refugee Crisis
Anthropology in Action
In 2015, Germany entered what would later become known as the ‘refugee crisis’. The Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) trope gained political prominence and met with significant challenges. In this article, we focus on a series of encounters in Berlin, bringing together refugee newcomers, migrants, activists and anthropologists. As we thought and wrote together about shared experiences, we discovered the limitations of the normative assumptions of refugee work. One aim of this article is to destabilise terms such as refugee, refugee work, success and failure with our engagements in the aftermath of the ‘crisis’. Refugee work is not exclusively humanitarian aid directed towards the alleviation of suffering but includes being and doing together. Through productive failures and emergent lessons, the collaboration enhanced our understandings of social categories and the role of anthropology.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2019
and was a member of the EASA Executive Committee between 2017 and 2019. She codirected the SNSF project 'Transnational Biographies of Education: Young Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers and their Navigation through Shifting Social Realities in Switzerland and Turkey' between 2014 and 2019. Her research interests include translocal political activism, multiculturalism, mobility, intersectionality and belonging. In her ongoing projects she focuses on humanitarian borders, intimate uncertainties and moralities.
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 redefining notions of the political and political community.
From Refugee Crisis to a Crisis of Solidarity?
Solidarity and the 'Refugee Crisis' in Europe, 2018
This chapter describes the background of the refugee crisis and the responses by the international community in terms of refugee management. It looks at the national attempts to manage refugee flows and the inclusion of refugees into the European nation-states. It outlines the general discursive presentation of the refugee issue and uses this as a departure point to initially describe the responses from civil society actors to deal with the crisis and provide alternative models for engaging with the refugee issue. Our argument is that although these responses are diverse and have different aims, they also share some common features as they may be regarded as emerging solidarities based on diverse alliances. We reflect on the role and potential of such alliances and solidarities for developing alternatives to the current management of the refugee crisis on local, national, and transnational levels. Keywords Border spectacle • Civil society • Contentious politics Refugee crisis • Crisis of solidarity 'We are facing the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. Above all, this is not just a crisis of numbers; it is also a crisis of solidarity. […] We must respond to a monumental crisis with monumental solidarity' (UN 2016). These words were spoken by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in April 2016 at a conference in Washington, DC addressing CHAPTER 1 From Refugee Crisis to a Crisis of Solidarity?