Preliminary Programme

Since the summer of 2012 asylum seekers have been involved in struggles organising protest camps in many European cities. In Amsterdam, Berlin and Budapest protest camps and occupations organized by refugees and local supporters including no-border activists, NGOs and churches. Various protests and forms of struggle that occur across European countries are inspired by one another. Currently, one of the largest protests of asylum seekers in Europe takes place in Austria. The protests of the asylum seekers became visible in the public space since October 2012, with the protest march from the reception centre in Traiskirchen to Vienna. Once in Vienna, a protest camp was set up in the city centre. In a next step asylum seekers sought refuge in the Votiv Church. Soon thereafter they entered into hunger strike.

In this paper I am going to discuss the strategies of the refugee movement first from a social movement perspective. Here I will analyse strategies of the refugee protest as a movement from the “periphery” into the “centre” of the society with references to their demands in three steps: protest march and camp in the centre of city, seeking refuge in the church and entering into hunger strike. What happens when the self-organised asylum seekers speak in their names and makes an attempt to challenge the dominant logic of representation? Which mobilization strategies do they use? What are their references to the space, body and public space in the mobilisation?

In a second step I am going to discuss these strategies as “act of citizenship”. Insofar work the protest movement as constitutive of a political subject? Moreover I will discuss the reactions of the policing practices which try to control the refugee movement. How reply political elites to a movement which consists of non-citizens with precarious status? The aim of the paper is to contribute to the scholarship on refugee movements and consider the implications of these resistance movements for critical understanding of citizenship.
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On the evening of the 25th April 2013 around 200 sub-Saharan migrants managed in a collective action to jump over the nowadays heavily fortified and militarized border fences, which encompasses Melilla, the Spanish Exclave on Moroccan soil. Forty of them found temporally refuge at the house of the former mayor of Melilla, Mustafa Aberchán. This incident provoked a new local debate on European migration policies. Almost eight years before, in September 2005 the border fences around Melilla and Ceuta had drawn several days huge media attention all over Europe and Africa, after several hundred sub-Saharan migrants had tried to climb over the fences - also in a collective action. In Ceuta about 220 people managed to enter the exclaves. Many of them got injured, fourteen migrants died in consequence of these border conflicts. These above described attempts illustrate various aspects of the realities and effects of European migration policies in the countries neighboring the EU. This kind of massive and collective attacks of migrants are unusual, the fact, that people die on Europe’s´ border not at all. In the media coverage the events were multiply commented as an “act of desperation” or the attack “of the desperate”. Thereby the events show the inherent conflicts on the borders and in the so-called transit spaces in the periphery resulting from the reorganization of European migration policy (Balibar 1998: 216ff.) and the strategies and resistance against these border politics. Based on findings of my research in the Moroccan and Spanish border zones, I will show in my presentation, how European border politics cause new conflicts locally on different levels, and how migrants organize themselves against, create new forms of solidarity, take political actions and challenge the established border regime. (Show less)

Since 2011 the Occupy movement has captured the imaginations of activist communities as a powerful new form of political action and solidarity. Occupy embodied its demands through spatial practices by, literally, occupying public space over the longer term. These tactics and practices mirror the migrant and asylum seeker protest camps and occupations that have emerged as counter-point to the securitized (and securitizing) European border regime as non-citizens demand recognition. As the European asylum system has become more restrictive and as border controls have tightened, asylum seekers and irregular migrants are increasingly using the method of occupation and presence to promote the visibility of their claims, lending them greater political power and urgency.
Many observers have been tempted to draw a line of commonality between Occupy and the migrant protest camps, citing a commonality of practices in space. This paper interrogates these spatial politics. I argue that although the word ‘occupation’ has taken on a particular meaning within activist communities, there are key differences between the movements. These differences are manifested particularly in the relationship to the state, and to the border.
In this paper I ask how the spatial politics of migrant protest camps and occupations exist within the spatial politics of contemporary Europe. I trace the spatial politics of non-citizen action back through the autonomous camps (such as those in Calais, France and Oujda, Morocco) established by migrants themselves, and ask how activism and resistance can be understood through threads of connection between these occupations that redefine the ‘border’ and the ‘borderscape’.
The use of public space by non-citizens has the potential to transform basic notions of ‘public’, and reaffirms that citizenship is not simply a status, but is also a practice. Drawing upon the Acts of Citizenship literature (Isin and Neilson 2008), I interrogate how the spatial politics present in these activisms enhance the ‘taking politics’ that demands rights from a position of non-citizenship. I argue that understanding the role of space in these politics is essential as it is the spatial dimension that both transforms and transgresses the border regime by bringing the border inside, rendering it visible again in unexpected places, and interrupting the dominant discourses and narratives that enforce and enable the exclusions against which migrants resist.
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The proliferation of restrictive border controls, migrant and refugee camps, and detention centers provide important sites through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated and re-imagined. In this paper I reflect on bordering processes in relation to new configurations of citizenship by considering border controls as technologies of citizenship that are both restrictive but also productive of new forms of transgressive citizenship politics. An extensive system of border controls and camp spaces have proliferated along the external borders of Europe involving a network of actors, practices and policies designed to force migrants back along ‘pathways of expulsion’. From island detention centers like Lampedusa and Lesvos, to ‘guesthouses’ and security fences along the northern Turkish-Greek border, to migrant-built camps in places like Calais in France, border controls restrict mobility and generate new forms of violence, inequality and exclusion. Yet they also generate social responses and, in particular, a growing activism by politicized groups of non-citizen migrants and those working in solidarity with migrants and refugees. This activism is often transnational, linking citizens and non-citizens across borders. In this talk I explore this contradiction of border controls that restrict the mobility of irregular migrants but which are also productive of spaces and networks of relationality from which a potentially transformative politics of transgressive citizenship is emerging. The paper focuses on research conducted at the Turkish-Greek border and examines the politics of the border in terms of forms of exclusion, violence and control as well as the in terms of new forms of transgressive politics that are emerging in response from migrants and their families, border communities and migrant solidarity networks. It considers these forms of activism in terms of citizenship politics aimed at challenging European border regimes but also through human rights discourse and the growing politics in and around migrant deaths at the border. (Show less)