Kim Rygiel

Bordering solidarities: migrant activism and the politics of movement and camps at Calais

The proliferation of more restrictive border controls governing global mobility provides important sites of crystallization through which differentiated and stratified rights to movement are produced, negotiated, and reimagined. One such form, the detention of migrants, is often understood through a logic of exception as the exclusion of unwanted migrants from the borders of the political community. Critical scholarship on detention informed by an autonomous migration perspective suggests a more nuanced reading of detention as the differential inclusion of migrants through positions of precariousness, transformations of legal statuses and subjectivities, and control over the direction and temporality of migratory flows. Building on this trajectory, this paper argues that the very meaning of the camp also needs to be brought into the analysis of a politics of migration and of control. For spaces of detention are sites of contestation that can be used by migrants (and those in solidarity with them) as resources to navigate border controls, reimagine political community and subjectivities and through which migrants engage in practices of citizenship. Reflecting on the destruction of the migrant camps in and around Calais, the paper examines three different images of the camp space known as ‘the jungle’ and draws attention to camp spaces as social and political spaces, in which the struggles to define them are an integral part of what is at stake in the struggle between a politics of control and a politics of migration.

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.

Syrian refugees in Turkey: pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights

ABSTRACT This article addresses the question of how to understand the relation among precarity, differential inclusion, and citizenship status with regard to Syrian refugees in Turkey. Turkey has become host to over 2.7 million Syrian refugees who live in government-run refugee camps and urban centres. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration studies literature, the paper emphasises the Turkish government’s central legal and policy frameworks that provide Syrians with some citizenship rights while simultaneously regulating their status and situating them in a position of limbo. Syrians are not only making claims to citizenship rights but they are also negotiating their access to social services, humanitarian assistance, and employment in different ways. The analysis stresses that Syrian refugees in Turkey continue to be part of the multiple pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights.

Politicizing camps: forging transgressive citizenships in and through transit

The proliferation of migrant and refugee camps for governing populations challenges the contemporary politics of citizenship. This article explores the camp as a question of citizenship. How do camp spaces enable the reproduction of certain spaces as the proper sites of politics and the constitution of some subjects and not others as the proper political subjects of citizenship? Can we think about camps as spaces of politics and citizenship-making? Situating the camp within the context of the historical emergence of extraterritoriality in relation to citizenship, I argue that camps reproduce orientalist mappings of the world that deem some people incapable or unworthy of citizenship. Rather than a space of exceptionality, outside of and separate from the space of the citizen, the article investigates the camp as both a political and politicized space, in which artists, activists and migrants use the camp as a site of building de-orientalizing cartographies to politicize migrant rights and political subjectivities.

Dying to live: migrant deaths and citizenship politics along European borders: transgressions, disruptions, and mobilizations

Abstract Migrants and refugees continue to die as they attempt to cross into Europe. This article explores the issue of ‘dying to live’ to draw attention to the disturbing fact of these deaths in relation to the state, biopolitics, and citizenship, but also to the growing mobilization around refugee and migrant deaths along European borders. The article examines transnational activism in solidarity with migrants, refugees and their families in response to deaths at Europe’s borders as one example of the many political struggles for greater rights undertaken by refugees, migrants, and solidarity activists emerging across Europe and elsewhere. An examination of struggles around rights of the dead and in response to migrant and refugee deaths suggests that they can be transgressive of the logic of modern citizenship.

Snapshots from the margins Transgressive cosmopolitanisms in Europe

Right-wing parties and governments in Europe have recently expressed greater hostility towards cultural pluralism, at times officially denunciating multiculturalism, and calling for the closure of borders and denial of rights to non-European nationals. Within this context, this article argues for rethinking Europe through radically transgressive and transnational understandings of cosmopolitanism as articulated by growing transnational populations within Europe such as immigrants, refugees, and irregular migrants. Transgressive forms of cosmopolitanism disrupt European notions of borders and identities in ways that challenge both liberal multiculturalism and assimilationist positions. This article explores the limits of traditional cosmopolitan thinking while offering a vision of cosmopolitanism based on everyday negotiations with cultural differences, explained using two illustrative examples or snapshots.

Border Control Politics as Technologies of Citizenship in Europe and North America

In October 2009, 76 Tamils fleeing decades of civil war in Sri Lanka arrived off the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, on the Ocean Lady. A year later, in August 2010, another boat carrying some 492 Tamil asylum seekers again arrived off the coast of British Columbia on the MV Sun Sea. Fearing that some might belong to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), listed as a terrorist organisation in Canada since 2006, these ‘boat arrivals’ galvanised the Canadian government to ‘get tough’ on irregular and uncontrolled migration. Despite heated opposition, in June 2011 the government of Canada quickly introduced ‘anti-smuggling’ legislation, the Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act, which was later rolled into an omnibus bill Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act that passed into law in June 2012. The anti-smuggling portion of this new legislation enables the government to create two classes of refugees by designating all those who arrive by boat en masse (including minors of 16 years and older) as ‘irregular arrivals’ and to detain irregular arrivals for up to a year as they wait for their refugee application to be processed. It also enables the government of Canada to deny those refugees designated as ‘irregular arrivals’ the right to apply for permanent residence for up to five years. During this time, this group of refugees may be prevented from travelling outside Canada or from sponsoring family members, all of which is contrary to both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and international law.2

Living with others: fostering radical cosmopolitanism through citizenship politics in Berlin

ABSTRACT A growing refugee and migration crisis has imploded on European shores, immobilizing E.U. countries and fuelling a rise in far-right parties. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the question of how to foster pluralism and a cosmopolitan desire for living with others who are newcomers. It does so by investigating community-based, citizen-led initiatives that open communities to newcomers, such as refugees and migrants, and foster cultural pluralism in ways that transform understandings of who is a citizen and belongs to the community. This study focuses on initiatives which seek to build solidarity and social relations with newcomers, but in ways that challenge citizen/non-citizen binaries based on one of our field research sites: Berlin, Germany. The paper brings insights from critical citizenship studies, exploring how citizenship is constituted through everyday practices, into dialogue with radical cosmopolitanism, particularly through Derrida’s works on ‘unconditional hospitality’. This radical cosmopolitan literature theorizes possibilities for building relational ontologies between guest and host, citizen and newcomer, in ways that are not based on exclusion, but engagement with difference and which challenge antagonistic forms of self-other and citizen-non-citizen dichotomies. Illustrative examples based on community-led initiatives in Berlin demonstrate how this spirit of radical communitarianism is put into practice through everyday lived experience and demonstrate that it is possible to develop a cosmopolitan spirit through exchange and transformation of both the self and other by engaging with rather than seeking to eliminate difference in the aims of constituting a universal around which cosmopolitanism can be built.