We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship
... Citizenship is a legal status describing duties and rights (Mason 2012;Walzer 1989). It is also an 'ur' right, the foundation, in Hannah Arendt's (1951Arendt's ( /1973 words, of the 'right to have rights'. Citizenship scholar Audrey Macklin (2015) calls it a 'meta-right' to distinguish it from the litany of fundamental rights recognised internationally as human rights law. ...
... Constructions of what this policy change represents are contested. Dual citizenship is often interpreted as an embrace of multiculturalism and a stepping back from conflation of citizenship with loyalty (Balibar and Swenson 2003). Some scholars attribute the policy change to a practical capitulation to modern sensibilities (Ersbøll 2021). ...
... Finally, it creates what Mbembe (2019) identifies as a division between 'pure' and 'borrowed' citizenship that impacts all Europeans. Two-tier citizenship challenges the possibility of equal belonging in a multicultural Europe (Balibar and Swenson 2003). The implications of unequal citizenships are aptly demonstrated by the emerging Danish jurisprudence, which we turn to now. ...
In 2018, the Danish Supreme Court revoked Adam Johansen’s citizenship in conjunction with his conviction for terrorism. Applying a proportionality test adapted from European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence for naturalised, not natural, citizens, the Danish court determined that Johansen’s Muslim faith tied him to Tunisia, his father’s country, rather than to Denmark. In March 2022, the ECtHR unanimously upheld this judgment. In so doing, the ECtHR solidified an emerging standard in cases of citizenship revocation for natural citizens, which standard is weaker than the protections enjoyed by naturalised citizens. This article reviews the Danish and ECtHR jurisprudence to show how the explosive expansion of citizenship revocation in relation to terror crimes, combined with the ECtHR’s emerging jurisprudence rejecting substantive review for such revocation, demonstrates a significant, multidirectional weakening of rights protections in Europe.
... Yet Italy is not an exception in the European context. Several scholars argue that nowadays to be seen as European means still to be racialized as white (Balibar 2009;De Genova 2018, 2016Goldberg 2006). Seldom articulated in the public debate, the notion of Italianness conceived and constructed as exclusively 'white and catholic' (Frisina 2010) has started to be called into question only lately in the country. ...
This article investigates the political activism of youth of migrant
descent mobilizing to achieve access to citizenship rights in Italy.
Specifically, it focuses on the mobilizing practices and discursive
strategies they employed throughout the 2017 campaign to reform
the Italian citizenship law. By means of participant observation and
in-depth interviews with representatives of the main groups
involved in the campaign, the study shows that the so-called ‘new
Italians’ claimed recognition and inclusion into the nation by relying
on the idiom of legal rights and by using a language that rested
upon the notion of deservingness and exceptionality. It also suggests
that the youth constituted themselves as political actors by
means of political engagement, as they performed acts of citizenship
through which they enacted their right to that status even in
absence of formal legal recognition. By putting studies on youth
activism in conversation with critical citizenship literature, critical
race theory and social movement scholarship, this study discloses
how the ‘new Italians’ advocated for their rights, creating and
appropriating their space within the discourse on nation.
Drawing on Foucault's approach to knowledge and power, this paper aims to strengthen theoretical perspectives on migration and to revise social theories by reflecting on the constitutive role of migration in the formation of society. Differing from studies that use a methodological approach based on Foucault, I draw on his work to develop a constructivist theory of society by examining and problematizing two dominant lenses through which migration is commonly problematized: the epistemological-political grids of the “people,” associated with sovereign power and nationalism, and the “population,” associated with biopower and capitalism. Both grids are crucial for understanding how migration is constructed as a specific object of knowledge and incorporated into mechanisms of power. Taken together, they allow us to reconnect the often separated debates on sovereign power and biopower—or nationalism and capitalism—and to reflect on the central tensions of contemporary migration societies. By highlighting the relevance of border and migration processes that Foucault barely addressed, I open up an alternative perspective on people and populations through an analysis of the marginal figures of “vagabondage” and “bad circulation” that are currently most associated with migration.
This paper examines recent amendments to French and German immigration law aimed at accelerating and enhancing the expulsion of unwanted immigrants of the territory. The main normative changes resulting from these reforms, entailing an unprecedented retraction of legal safeguards against expulsion and significantly exacerbating immigrant’s condition of expulsability, will be presented in comparative terms, without losing sight of the European dimension. Specifically, these reforms shape immigrant’s expulsable presence on the territory through three aspects: an increase on the precariousness of foreigner status, a reduction of the sphere of freedom needed to lead a dignified life and an expansion of exceptionality that obliges us to reconsider our social contract to include a human-rights based approach to immigration.
Social actors’ ability to navigate multiple—and at times contradictory—institutions is essential to the well-being of contemporary diverse societies. For immigrants, the process and outcome of this negotiation shape the trajectories of their integration. Through in-depth interviews, participant observations, and the analysis of written and online materials, this paper studies Muslim immigrants’ experiences of, responses to, and negotiations with the coexistence of American and Islamic laws in the U.S. The data show that legal pluralism (LP) in the modern Metropole has given way to new and novel understandings and practices of LP: the “right to the law” and the “cosmopolitization of the legal field.” Also, whether and how Muslim immigrants negotiate American and Islamic laws is deeply rooted in and critically engaged with the prevailing discussions of equality, pluralism, inclusion, and citizenship. The findings of the study demonstrate that the American Muslim community has developed multiple creative responses to the challenges of LP, and these responses are constantly evolving and readapting through redefinition of acceptable practices, reordering of authoritative voices within the community, creative legal interpretations, and hybridization of the coexisting laws. Thus, the idiosyncrasies of LP in the modern Metropole have created simultaneous drives for adjustment and preservation.
The book’s conclusion starts with a summary of the preceding four chapters, drawing attention to what each chapter has contributed to our understanding of the formal and aesthetic features of semi-peripheral literature, especially the unstable combination of realism and irrealism identified across all eight texts. The conclusion proceeds to discuss the suggestion by Neil Lazarus that unstable narrative forms, such as those encountered in The Good Hope, Iceland’s Bell, The Black Cauldron, The Atom Station, Istanbul, Dear Shameless Death, Snow, and Swords of Ice, do more than register the social logic of modernity in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of capitalism. Through their ability to mediate the ‘discrepant and discontinuous’ reality of the semi-periphery these texts engender a world-literary way of reading that draws attention to Lazarus’s observation that there is ‘no necessary contradiction between the ideas of the “universal” and the “local” or the “national”, but that, on the contrary, there are only local universalisms’ (2011, p. 134). This is illustrated further with a brief discussion of William Heinesen’s short story “Sprøjteprøven” (“The Fire-Pump Test”). It is argued that Heinesen’s story captures the sense of an underlying system, which connects the spectacle of testing a new fire-pump in the distant capital of Tórshavn, on an isolated archipelago in the North Atlantic, as part of a shared global experience: the militarised modernity introduced by the First World War. The story, like the other texts included in this study, thus registers both the local ‘social logic of modernity’ (Lazarus 2011, p. 122), whilst maintaining an awareness of the globality of capitalism. The chapter then returns to the idea of semi-peripheral realism, arguing that by registering capitalism’s unevenness it also reflects the dialectical complexity of nationalism in the world system. It is this interaction between nation, global capitalism, and literary form that makes semi-peripheral literature a valuable object of study within world-literature.
This section situates the book and its methods in my personal socio-political-cultural, artistic, linguistic, and historic contexts. Reflecting on my position as a White European migrant from Poland or ‘Eastern European,’ the Przedmowa/Preface discusses my experiences of multilingual theatre, and views on languages in Europe and its theatres.
In this chapter Maurizio Ambrosini, Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson lay down the main themes of the book. They start by engaging with the theoretical underpinnings of their approach to the fields of migration, borders and citizenship. In particular, they side against the more traditional dramatisation of political conflicts, which have been dividing insider power-holders from outsider challengers. The three co-editors show that their approach allows for a comprehensive analysis across the policy and public spheres.
In this chapter Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson deal with the multidimensional conceptualisation of citizenship. Their main argument is that the traditional “politics of borders” has been an essential mechanism for determining membership in the civil polity, of who is inside and who is alien or foreign. But the role of borders for politics, and for citizenship in, is even more profound than questions of membership. Accordingly, Cinalli and Jacobson put forward an argument how borders are changing into what they call “seams,” which demarcate both local, national and transnational distinctions.
This chapter aims to analyse the narratives emerging from the claims for the right to citizenship carried out by two Italian networks composed of people with migratory backgrounds: Italians without Citizenship and the National Coordination of New Italian Generations (CoNNGI). Analysing interviews with members of these two networks, as well as their public statements, two main narratives are evident: one proposes an expansion of the concept of Italian nationality including new generations with a migratory background who share the same cultural and linguistic features; another one proposes a vision of citizenship including new generations with a migratory background not according to their cultural features but on the basis of their actual participation in the Italian social community. The examples of these two groups stimulates the reflection on the categories of nation-state and belonging as intrinsically subject to continuous changes and re-significations.
In this paper, we explore how borders and associated processes – spatial othering and ordering – are reproduced, resisted and undermined temporally. To do so, we investigate ethnographically how ‘welcomers’ from volunteer pro‐refugee initiatives in Paris become involved in the chronopolitics of b/ordering. Our empirical analysis builds on the practice turn in border studies and on Sharma's chronography of power, which focuses on the relational dimension of temporal politics. We detail three temporal practices of Parisian welcome cultures: temporal translation, temporal creation and the elaboration of sub‐architectures of temporal maintenance. In detailing these practices ethnographically, we highlight the ambiguity of welcomers' role in the chronopolitics of b/ordering: aligning with and recalibrating refugees' bodies to the rhythmic and temporal logics of b/ordering as well as undermining the violence, binarity and rigidified identities underpinning b/ordering timelines.
The coloniality of power is still a central part of Western policies and practices, including migration policies. The article aims to discuss on historical and contemporary encounters, namely the colonial heritage and the current crisis of Europe, that shape, poison and sometimes prevent the feminist solidarities between migrant women and the women in the host countries. It critically investigates the constituent role of gender within the colonial and current racial constructions and the fact that many feminist movements in Europe reinforce gender and cultural essentialism by accepting and promoting the image of the ‘migrant woman’ as authentic victim subject.KeywordsPost-colonialismGenderFeminist solidarityRacismIslamophobiaMigrantRefugeeSchlüsselwörterPostkolonialismusGenderFeministische SolidaritätRassismusIslamophobieMigrant*innenFlüchtling
In its relations with China from 1972 to 2018, Pakistan has endeavored to extract
and mobilize its domestic resources while conducting a foreign policy of balancing
under systemic pressures and power disparities. Statist ideology and state-sponsored nationalism have been both useful and influential in this process. While there is abundant literature on ideology, nationalism, and Pakistan’s foreign policy using theoretical foundations, a neoclassical realist approach has yet to be made. This paper seeks guidance from neoclassical realist theory as explored in the works of Taliaferro (2006) and Schweller (2004). We argue that Pakistan’s ties with China have been facilitated domestically by an Islamic statist ideology and anti-Indian state-sponsored nationalism. These both have facilitated internal balancing through the extraction and mobilization of natural resources and emulation while externally they justified Pakistan’s balancing efforts aimed at countering a perceived Indian threat. The nation’s military and civil elites therefore agree on the necessity of closer ties with China.
This article explores how informal, citizen-led solidarity with migrants is practised digitally and discusses how we can concep-tualise such acts. The study draws on digital observations, semi-structured interviews and one eld visit. Citizen humanitarians, who are informants in this study, supported migrants from Afghanistan who had been rejected asylum in Norway. Support included facilitating unauthorised migration, transit, residency within the Schengen area, nancial help, and caregiving. By analysing these acts, the article discusses scholarly debates on citizenship regarding who enjoys the right to stay and access social rights in Europe and humanitarian ideals of 'saving lives' of migrants threatened by deportation. The article show that citizen humanitarians use digital acts to carry out borderwork that were depended on and enabled by weak social ties. These practices fostered communities between citizen humanitarians and enabled them to claim rights for themselves and others. Based on the analysis, I develop the term 'digital citizen humanitarianism', which allows us to be more precise about di erent forms of citizen humanitarianism facilitated by the digital. ARTICLE HISTORY
Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.
This essay analyzes the affective and intimate dimensions of the criminalization of solidarity towards migrants. The core argument is that the criminalization of solidarity is a form of governance that acts through affectivity. It is mainly a way of containing migration by trying to govern the emotions of citizens, fostering feelings of hostility and fear while discouraging feelings of solidarity and empathy. The data that will be discussed comes from broader ethnographic research, investigating the affective transformations in solidarity networks supporting migrants. Data collection took place between 2020 and 2021 in Turin and Florence, Italy. It will be shown how, in the everyday life of supporters, the most pervasive forms of criminalization do not come from political discourse, but rather from the people to whom they are most attached (friends, partners, siblings, parents, etc.). This is the intimacy of criminalization. The situated, vernacular, and more socio-psychologically painful form of criminalization.
The socio-economic and political uncertainties of Kenya in the 1990s jeopardised what many saw as the promises of modernity. An increasing number of Kenyans migrated, many to Britain, a country that felt familiar from Kenyan history. Based on extensive fieldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer's work provides a rich, historically nuanced study of the kinship dilemmas that underlie transnational migration and explores the dynamic relationship between those who migrate and those who stay behind. Challenging a focus on changing modes of economic production, 'push-pull' factors, and globalisation as drivers of familial change, she analyses everyday trans-national family life. Relative Distance shows how quotidian interactions, exchanges, and practices transform kinship on a local and global scale. Through the prism of intergenerational care, Fesenmyer reveals that the question of who is responsible for whom is not only a familial matter but is at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states.
Young people in cities in the Horn of Africa engage with diasporic mobility through social media on a daily basis. Apparent opportunities on these platforms both reflect and shape ideas about life in the diaspora, potential migration, and social mobility. These connections also bring risks of scamming, extortion and misinformation that contribute to the involuntary immobility of those who wish to move for economic or educational opportunities. Drawing from ‘screen-shot elicitation’ group interviews with young men in Hargeisa (Somaliland) and digital ethnographic investigation of social media content gathered before, during and after these sessions, this article argues that transnational flows of mobility-related information need to be studied from the perspective of people within contexts commonly understood as ‘sources’ of south-north migration, but beyond policy-orientated questions about the impact of ICTs on rates of migration. Emphasising the highly ambivalent role played by social media in shaping aspirations and experiences of youth (im)mobility, this approach brings into view a wider range of socially significant online practices. These include the transnational assemblage of elaborate digital scamming techniques, as well as multiple other types of mobility-focused user-generated content that circulate in transnational Somali social (media) networks.
This paper engages with the thesis of the mobile border and the growing interest in cross-border mobilities and practices to understand how borders provide a raison d'être for the organization of everyday life for people living in China's Southwest borderlands. Through a conversation between the literatures on cross-border mobilities, practices and livelihoods , this study moves beyond the mobile border thesis's lopsided focus on diffused and dispersed practices that strengthen state sovereignty and border security, but instead emphasizes the kaleidoscopic everyday practices asserting and erasing borders at the same time, the plural rationalities of state governance, and grassroots actors' agencies and skills in appropriating or transgressing borders. In sum, this study re-appropriates the mobile border thesis to argue that borders are mobile because of their permeation into the textures of everyday life. The empirical study elucidates this argument by investigating two border regions in China, Hekou, and Ruili in Yunnan Province. Specifically, it unpacks four sets of cross-border practices-cross-border socialities and kinship ties, cross-border marriage, labor mobilities, and everyday spaces of exchange-to reveal how what is possible at the everyday level is overdetermined by official territorial-ities, bottom-up negotiations, and the flexibility of state governance.
In this recent study, we analyse the religious diversity of Central and Eastern Europe, from the Balkans up to the Baltic region. This region has many religious confessions, without claiming completeness, Ro-man Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox, Islam, Hussite and many people without any religion. The recent spatial distribution of the religious confessions has been shaped by different drivers across Central and Eastern Europe. We chose a quantitative method to visually interpret the pluralism of the religious confessions and we selected diversity indices. We calculated the diversity of the religious confessions and ethnicities in a very detailed resolution, at municipality level of each country, based on population census data of 2011. We found statistically significant relationship between the diversity of religious confessions and the diversity of ethnicities. We have also shown that near the national borders , the religious pluralism is higher than in another areas. There is statistically significant connection between the former national borders (1900s and 1930s) and the religiously plural areas. The results of this study provide the evidence of the spatial distribution of borderline syndrome and serves as a good basis for further research (theoretical and statistical) of the religion pluralism in Central-Eastern Europe.
This paper investigates how interrelated processes of bordering-i.e. delimitation, interface and affirmation-work out in domains of Nigerian migrants' daily life in Guangzhou. The results reveal that migrants make use of marketplaces as interface platforms for economic exchange and cooperation with Chinese entrepreneurs, yet within a highly delimited playing field and with affirmation of cultural differences. They find residence in the city, with opportunities delimited by state and city laws. In neighborhoods, they find their stigmatization affirmed and lack inter-ethnic interface. Migrants also create underground churches, yet delimited into remaining invisible in the urban landscape. In churches, migrants affirm their identity and community but have limited inter-ethnic interface. The paper pinpoints fierce segregative and exclusionary outcomes for Nigerian migrants but they also persevere and gain agency in becoming a successful entrepreneur through instrumental inter-ethnic contact. Moreover, through non-instrumental intra-ethnic contact, they negotiate a sense of belonging in the city. ARTICLE HISTORY
The COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for bordering, that is, for measures that aim to delineate foreigners' access to citizenship and membership and to further securitize migration policy. Across the globe, new border controls were introduced, stringent new international regulations applied, and hundreds of thousands of flights cancelled, all of which resulted in millions of travelers, including migrant workers and transnational commuters, being stranded. Among the areas affected by these bordering measures is the central Mediterranean migratory route to Italy. In Spring 2020, the Italian government introduced two measures aimed to block migrant arrivals by sea: the closure of ports to search-and-rescue (SAR) operations and the use of ships to quarantine migrants arriving on SAR ships. While the former was only partially implemented and then lifted in the summer of 2020, the latter has become a cornerstone of current securitization policies in Italy. This article-relying on semi-structured interviews with activists, non-governmental organization volunteers, human rights lawyers, and journalists-interrogates the use of quarantine ships during the pandemic as a means of stopping COVID-19's spread by irregular migrants arriving along the central Mediterranean. It shows how this measure, presented as a humanitarian mission to preserve public
This article uncovers an internal tension within theories of agonistic democracy. On the one hand, as radical pluralists, agonistic democrats want to institute a ‘symmetrical’ political scene where different identities can struggle on an equally legitimate basis. On the other hand, they often normatively prioritize the struggles of oppressed groups against domination. In response, this article proposes to collapse any strict distinction between pluralism and social relations of domination. The result is a move from agonistic to insurgent democracy, where insurgent struggles against domination give the central impetus to any democracy. To do so, it turns to the writings of Étienne Balibar, who argues that most, if not all, symmetrical political conflict is built on asymmetrical forms of domination or oppression. This leads us to develop an account of democratic conflict that is incessantly asymmetrical. Finally, this article suggests an alternative way of rescuing the political principle of pluralism cherished by agonistic democrats. Balibar’s writings on the ‘ideology of the dominated’ show that every insurgent struggle expresses itself ideologically, which harbours the risk of obscuring other forms of domination. Therefore, democracy is not only kept alive by insurgent movements, it requires that the latter democratize themselves by maintaining a permanent openness to alternative calls against domination or oppression.
Ireland has the fastest ageing population in Europe, creating significant challenges for health and caring services in the state. Ireland depends on migrant workers, documented and undocumented to meet this growing need. Oona Frawley’s 2014 novel Flight tells the story of one of these workers. In the novel, Sandrine, from Zimbabwe, gets a job as a live-in carer for the ageing Clare and Tom, working 24/7 with just one afternoon off. Set just before the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, the story is complicated by Sandrine’s pregnancy. This article details Sandrine’s precarious labour and citizenship, impacted by the biopolitical legislation. It also foregrounds the vulnerability of the ageing population in Ireland through reliance on unregulated care solutions. Flight represents how a range of vulnerable groups in Irish society are impacted by a precarious and invisible labour market that both fails to address the needs of the worker and the ageing population.
This paper was inspired by empirical encounters with students and teacher-administrators who engaged with an online European education initiative, which raised questions about whether and how their practices were situated as local, transnational, or national(ist) endeavors. The conceptual, theoretical, and methodological resources of social topology and critical border studies guided our inquiry by a focus on bordering practices and how these generate spatiotemporal forms and movements, and evoked a typical national form which is characterized as a singular, stable, linear, and flat “topography.” An innovative methodology is deployed to scrutinize how practices with this online, European initiative continue, challenge or complement that typical national form. The findings demonstrate how the use of topographical indexes and tropes (re-)materialized characteristics of these typical national forms, while the combination with topological relations introduced multiplicities and “levels” in these forms. Moreover, spherical forms, bouncing movements, and tunneling movements challenged the singularity, stability, linearity, and flatness of the typical national form. Building on these findings, the paper sets forth the argument that this online European education initiative mainly challenges the enactment of nationalism in classrooms by encouraging learning and thinking through translocalities, which accentuates distances and differences that are being crossed without appealing to the typical imaginary of the “nation” with linear, stable, flat borders.
By approaching border security as a form of social interaction, the aim of this research is to provide a more thorough consideration of the how in the everyday communicative practices of police officers and civilians who participate in crime control at borders. Employing a corpus of 272 videos of police checks carried out by the Spanish Guardia Civil at La Jonquera–Le Perthus (the Spain–France border area), conversation analysis (CA) is introduced and applied as a novel perspective in the field of border security studies. From this approach, this article scrutinizes how meaningful actions emerge, and their relevance to the development of the encounter. The analysis highlights how certain actions can be consequential for police checks, such as initiating and modifying turns in conversation to overcome problematic situations that arise, for example, from the (non) ownership of the stopped vehicle, or the (lack of) reason for stopping it, which interfere with the police agenda in the management of border security (i.e., the resolution of suspicion). Consequently, this article sheds light on the role of CA in promoting analyses of micro-level border practices, allowing for the detailed examination of how border encounters are locally managed.
Based on research with Latin American women in England, this paper explores how coloniality and gendered necropower is structurally embedded into the UK immigration regime, enabling multi-scalar (re)configurations of border violence. I build on the everyday bordering literature to uncover the under-theorised intimate and embodied dimensions of border violence. Intimate border violence is coined to refer to specific forms of state-sponsored interpersonal violence stemming from immigration policies and practices. Abusive men exploit the hostile environment's logic of deputisation to perform bordering against their migrant partners through threats of deportation, destitution, criminalization and homelessness. The embodied politics of coloniality reproduces hierarchies of (in)humanity and informs the state's necropolitical management of its territory. From within the national space, border violence re-territorializes migrant women's bodies as annexed territories of exception reduced to bare-life. Legal abandonment enables sovereign power to be exerted not only by the state but also by abusive partners.
Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire. Focusing on the former British colonies of India, Cyprus, and Israel/Palestine, the book explores how post-colonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. The book offers a novel institutional theory of 'hybrid bureaucracy' to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day.
Homelessness and other forms of destitution among asylum-seeking migrants are currently on the rise across Europe, as migrants’ access to social rights, including housing, has been restricted through repressive migration policies, fuelled by the welfare nationalism and chauvinism that surge among European states. This article explores the largely overlooked homelessness experienced by migrants seeking asylum in two different geographic and political contexts: Italy and Sweden. Building on research conducted over six years, including interviews with state officials, social and NGO workers, and testimonies of asylum-seeking migrants, we trace the logics and effects of policies that not only fail to deliver minimum welfare provisions to asylum-seeking migrants, but which produce and use homelessness as a way of controlling this group. The implications for asylum-seeking migrants include racialised discrimination, class-based and poverty-related health issues, and other harms, which are the direct result of policies that render access to fundamental social rights, including housing, into instruments of migration control.
The control function of reception centers hinders asylum seekers’ settlement to their host communities. Even though open accommodation centers compose the majority of the European reception system, few studies have comprehensively analyzed their controlling aspects from the asylum seeker perspective. In this article, we examine asylum seekers’ experiences of confinement in Finnish reception centers by using semi-structured and individual interviews (n = 28). We identified three “layers” of confinement in asylum seekers’ accounts: spatial, service-based, and communicative. Together, these permeable but overlapping and accumulative layers define asylum seekers’ experiences by hampering their efforts to participate in local communities and reducing their autonomy.
For left cultural activism, ‘theatre’ forms an important ‘worksite of democracy’ which allows theatre activists to provide creative intervention within the existing ‘field of forces’. Cultural organizations and theatre groups of the Left – like the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Forum) offer a critique of neo-liberalism through theatre. First performed in the year 2000, the street play Nahi Qubool (Unacceptable) was designed to expose neo-liberal policies undertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. The play continued to be performed even after a change of government with suitable modifications for changed circumstances. This genealogy of performance demonstrates the contours of politics and activist performances in contemporary India. It reveals that theatre as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ can also perform a diagnostic role to enhance the effectiveness of political strategy.
This article analyses the central themes in the works of Claudio Magris through a critical reading of Danube, A Different Sea, Microcosms, Utopia e disincanto [Utopia and disenchantment], Blindly, Journeying, and Alfabeti [Alphabets]. Magris’s work, be it his fiction or essays, abounds with descriptions and narrations of spaces and places, which become central to his world-view as an author. These spaces and places, located primarily in Central Europe and in the surroundings of his own city, Trieste, inspired his turn to Eastern Europe, including the Slavic countries. Conscious of the Western Europeans’ often condescending view of the East, Magris became a vocal critic of Western Eurocentrism, which he attributed to their insufficient familiarity with the cultures and histories of their Eastern neighbours. Magris’s primary interest has always been Europe’s ethnic and cultural coexistence, with a particular affinity with dissident, nationless, and exiled literary figures, in line with his notion of hybrid, fluid, and multiple identities. The works of Magris offer compelling reflections on a Europe viewed through the contradictory encounters between East and West. As such they have contributed to the gradual creation of hybrid identities, which, through their historical palimpsests, have become part of a broader cultural geography.
Intra-urban borders are a pervasive feature in today’s global cities. They are not only the result of urban planning but they are also reproduced in everyday movements and interactions. Based on interviews and participant observation in French banlieues of Greater Paris, Mulhouse and Strasbourg, I analyse how inhabitants narrate movements in urban space that lead them to cross the boundaries of their neighbourhood. I build upon Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practice and insights from border studies to understand how these movements relate to the social production of urban marginality. The findings show how experiences and representations of intra-urban border-crossing among banlieue residents are shaped by and reproduce geographies of exclusion.
This article offers an original political theory perspective on debates about EU integration and EU justice by discussing possible tensions with the demands of global justice. In particular, it asks whether global egalitarians can consistently argue for further European integration and for an egalitarian EU while maintaining that the scope of egalitarian justice should be global. After highlighting several tensions between EU equality and EU integration on the one hand, and global justice, on the other hand, it explores strategies available to global egalitarians to defend the focus on the EU. It concludes that global egalitarians can only have instrumental reasons to value the EU, and not any EU, nor merely a just EU; only the most instrumental to the realization of global justice, which can lead to different conclusions on EU integration or EU justice from the standardly assumed ones.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the government measures to curb it in the past two years have had a significant impact on the mobility of workers within the EU. In this article, we analyze the measures adopted by the Slovenian government and the governments of some neighboring countries in the first half of 2020 and examine how these have affected international mobile workers. We identified the economic and social risks to which workers have been exposed following their return to Slovenia or while working in neighboring countries. Such risks were largely due to inconsistently adopted measures on an international level and the adoption of measures at short notice.
Islands offshore in Aotearoa New Zealand are locations for experimental fictions that approach the issues of exclusion/inclusion through “cast off” perspectives. This essay examines – from a historical materialist perspective – novels by writers from the mid-twentieth century: Robin Hyde (Wednesday’s Children, 1937) and Janet Frame (A State of Siege, 1966), whose island locations expand the national imaginary with interrogations of female subjectivity, landscape and society. Drawing on Etienne Balibar’s concept of homo nationalis (i.e. the national being or citizen as subject), it claims that islands are sites for new start-ups in their fiction: they enable alternative representations of the female artist within the nation-state that nevertheless show reduced connectedness to national frameworks that shape social identities. The isolated spinster hero interrogates her self-construction, undergoes loss of the boundaries of self/other, inside/outside, and belonging/non-belonging, leading to self-fragmentation and dissolution.
Intersectionality scholarship has yet to systematically recognize the importance of citizenship status for the mutual shaping of inequalities. In this article, we bring attention to the combined structuring force of criminal law and citizenship status (and the related concepts of ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ status) in intersecting with other categories of social disadvantage, such as those created by racialization, class, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with women in prisons for ‘foreign nationals’ and health clinics for ‘undocumented’ migrants in Norway and Denmark, this article shows how citizenship status has a central role in the co-constitution of gendered, classed and racialized social disadvantages.
This article analyses the political engagement and mobilization of the EU citizens post‐Brexit and investigates the extent to which these have led to the creation of an EU diaspora in the UK. Qualitative research took place in Liverpool and Southport–two different localities in the North West of the UK that have attracted EU citizens of different demographics. The project included participants from 18 EU different countries, which afforded the investigation of dynamics and different positionalities within the EU population in the UK. These positionalities, the findings show, are broadly organized around a typology that is underpinned by the (geo)politics of the EU: national and regional stances; EU‐oriented stances; non‐alignment. While Brexit triggered a stronger European identity and mobilization on the basis of it, the orientation toward, and investment in, the EU diasporic mobilization among EU citizens differs due to these positionalities. The findings, therefore, point toward the creation of a post‐national EU diaspora in the UK, but also identify the strength of national and regional identities, which could indicate the development of different gravity diaspora points in future, nested in the EU diaspora. The differences in demographics and social capital within the EU citizens population across the UK have implications for local dimensions of the EU diaspora and its impact and legacy in the medium and long term.
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