Imperceptible Politics: Illegalized Migrants and Their Struggles for Work and Unionization (original) (raw)
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Ever since the Hungarian authorities enacted a temporary halt on international train travel from Keleti Station in Budapest and more or less abandoned thousands of stranded refugees, countless images, both impressive and deeply disturbing, reach us daily: Refugees by the hundreds making their way on foot through Hungary, Austria, Germany and Denmark, walking on motorways and train tracks because international train and bus travel has been shut down; overwhelming transnational willingness to support refugees by offering rides in private cars, by welcoming them and providing for them at train stations, or by organising aid convoys to Hungary, Croatia, Greece and Macedonia. But we also witness violent behaviour of border officials and camp personnel, neo-Nazis stirring up hatred, bawling ‘concerned citizens’, and the burning down of refugee shelters. During this “long summer of migration” (Kasparek/Speer2015), Schengen and the project of the European Union as a whole have entered a sev...
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Migrant Resistance, Introduction, 2019.pdf
Migrant Resistance in Contemporary Europe, 2019
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.
The Political Centrality of the Migrant
Political theory from Plato to Rawls has largely treated the migrant as a secondary or derived political figure of relatively little importance. Political theory has tended to privilege citizens and states over migrants and their circulations. This chapter, however, shows for the first time that within this dominant history is also a subterranean or minor history of political theory that grants the figure of the migrant a certain degree of centrality or importance. If we want to rethink migration in the twenty-first century, we must be able to rethink the basic assumptions that we have inherited from a certain dominant history of political theory. One of the best ways to do this is to begin with the subterranean history that has been buried below it from Marx to Badiou. Any future theory of the migrant must begin from the previous attempts to think about the nature of its centrality and importance in political theory. Since this history has nowhere else been elaborated, this chapter presents it here for others to build on.
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Critical scholarship on "the promise-of-the-political" thesis customarily understands undocumented migrant struggles (UMS) as being politically disruptive. However, the question of what gets disrupted, how, by whom, and to what effect tends to be ignored. Building on insights from the empirical literature on UMS and ethno-graphic research of the "Solidarity March With and Without Papers", this paper argues that three conditions need to be in place for UMS to be disruptive. First, undocumented activists need to craft collective intentions to challenge the institutional order in and through joint action. Second, protest acts need to effectively interrupt everyday routines symbolising the status quo and instigate replication. Third, UMS need to unsettle and force a response from the order in ways that defy existing institutional logics. These findings are translated into a research agenda that proposes to investigate the relative importance of collective intentionality, inaugural performativity and institutional recep-tivity for UMS.