Ilker Ataç

Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements: Remaking Citizenship from the Margins

Abstract 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 re-defining notions of the political and political community.

‘Refugee Protest Camp Vienna’: making citizens through locations of the protest movement

Abstract The Refugee Protest Camp Vienna started in 2012 as a protest against the living conditions found within the biggest reception centre in Austria, and turned into a highly visible protest movement organized by asylum seekers and activists. In this paper, I investigate how and to what extent this protest movement, through a form of contentious politics, succeeded in challenging exclusionary policies and improving asylum seekers’ rights and living conditions. By moving from socially and spatially isolated locations into the centre of the city, setting up a protest camp in a park, and by seeking shelter in a church, the protest movement generated different modes of resistance, forms of mobilization and collective action. In exploring the connection between spatial strategies of the protest movement and relational ties within the movement, I contribute to debates within Critical Citizenship Studies. Specifically, I emphasize the relevance of place for creating alliances and networks and for making citizens.