Refugees as new Europeans, and the fragile line between crisis and solidarity (original) (raw)
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The European Refugee Controversy: Civil Solidarity, Cultural Imaginaries and Political Change
Social Inclusion, 2019
In the summer of 2015, a wave of solidarity washed across the European continent as 1.3 million refugees arrived. While many recent studies have explored how 'ordinary' men and women, NGOs and governments momentarily reacted to the arrival of refugees, this issue examines whether the arrival of refugees and the subsequent rise of civil support initiatives has also resulted in more structural cultural and political changes. The contributions assembled in this issue all delve into the enduring implications of Europe's 'long summer of migration'. They address four sites of change: the dynamics between civil and state actors involved in refugee protection; the gradual politicisation of individual volunteers and organisations; the reproduction of pre-existing cultural imaginaries; and the potential of cities to foster new forms of solidarity.
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.
Sociology, 2018
This article investigates the interconnections between migration to Europe for asylum and the multiple ‘crises’ of the border regime that have occurred in recent decades. Drawing on 22 months of ethnographic research with refugees in Italy and Germany, the article highlights the tensions between migration policy and legislation at the structural level and the agency of refugees. The case study focuses on a protest staged by refugees in Berlin and the active involvement of its civil-society supporters. The everyday practices of refugees, including building relationships with local residents, cross-border mobility within Europe and ‘inhabiting’ the grey zones where different national jurisdictions intersect, generate frictions that open up spaces of autonomy: the ‘interstices’. Territorial, social and judicial interstices develop out of the power relations in Europe’s migration ‘battleground’.
This article examines how refugee support volunteers based in Britain and in France negotiate the boundaries between charity (or humanitarian) action and social activism since the 2015 'refugee crisis'. Scholarly literature has often separated charity and humanitarian action from social activism, as the former is seen as lacking the goal of social and political change that characterises the latter. The set of 147 in-depth interviews we conducted in different British and French refugee support charities and networks reveals the complex relationship between charity and protest. Through the focus on the moral dilemmas that participants encounter throughout their experience in the field, this article aims to highlight the ambivalences of their engagement as well as its transformative potential. Our analysis shows how participants develop new cognitive frames, emotions and interpersonal relations that transform their engagement and lead them to link charity/humanitarian action with broader objectives of social and political change. More generally, our analysis highlights the processes through which participants construct political narratives that aim to challenge state-driven policies and discourses of "migration management". This article aims to contribute to the reflection about the informal character of the forms of participation analysed in this special issue, through the focus on the moral dilemmas and the "quiet" and "unexceptional" politics of volunteering.
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.
A Crisis of Humanitarianism: Refugees at the Gates of Europe
2019
Having initially welcomed more than a million refugees and forced migrants into Europe between 2015 and 2016, the European Union’s (EU’s) policy has shifted toward externalising migration control to Turkey and Northern Africa. This goes against the spirit of international conventions aiming to protect vulnerable populations, yet there is widespread indifference toward those who remain stranded in Italy, Greece and bordering Mediterranean countries. Yet there are tens of thousands living in overcrowded reception facilities that have, in effect, turned into long-term detention centres with poor health and safety for those awaiting resettlement or asylum decisions. Disregard for humanitarian principles is predicated on radical inequality between lives that are worth living and protecting, and unworthy deaths that are unseen and unmarked by grieving. However, migration is on the rise due to natural and man-made disasters, and is becoming a global issue that concerns us all. We must therefore deal with it through collective political action that recognises refugees’ and forced migrants’ right to protection and ensures access to the health services they require.