Introducing ‘cultures of rejection’: an investigation of the conditions of acceptability of right-wing politics in Europe

ABSTRACT

In this article Bodjadžijev and Opratko introduce the special issue on ‘Cultures of Rejection’. First, they describe the political and intellectual conjuncture in which the term ‘cultures of rejection’ was developed. Second, they introduce some core assumptions and methodological considerations informing the perspective that came to be associated with that term, and that eventually gave rise to original empirical research on the sociocultural conditions in which right-wing and authoritarian politics, movements and sentiments can thrive in contemporary Europe. In the third part, they introduce the common conceptual design and methodological approach of the research projects that follow, and their key findings in Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Germany and Sweden between 2019 and 2022.

KEYWORDS:

• authoritarianism
• cultures of rejection
• migration
• populism
• racism

With this introductory essay, we would like to open a discussion of the conceptual framework of ‘cultures of rejection’. We first started to develop the concept in 2016, in the midst of tumultuous events in Europe. The summer of 2015 had seen waves of migration across and into Europe, with millions of people escaping war, violence and poverty, and seeking new and better living and working conditions. The haunting images of the columns of migrants setting off across choppy seas, over never-ending motorways and through border controls that had previously been impassable to them remain a constant and formative memory to this day. The movement of refugees marked a path, some sections of which became known as the ‘Balkan route’ across Europe, over which many people travelled, often on foot and equipped only with the navigation tools of their smartphones. By embarking on this journey across and to Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Germany and Sweden (among other countries along the way), they temporarily turned the heterogeneous border landscape into a fluid and passable regional space that, however briefly, revived the vision of a ‘democratization of borders’ and thus ‘a democratisation of Europe’.¹

By 2016, it seemed clear to us that they may have forever changed the political, cultural and social geography of Europe. At the same time, however, it became increasingly obvious that an intense political and cultural struggle had emerged over the meaning of such a change. In this conjuncture, two worrisome developments came together. On one side, far-right and authoritarian populist parties, movements and politicians portrayed the movement of people into and across Europe itself as a ‘crisis’, as something that needed to be stopped at any cost and that must never repeat itself. In their mind, migration was, as Horst Seehofer, the then German Minister of the Interior, said in 2018: ‘the mother of all problems’.² Furthermore, it was not only right-wing populist opposition parties, like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany), the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Freedom Party of Austria) or the Sverigedemokraterna (SD, Sweden Democrats), who campaigned relentlessly (and were electorally successful) ‘against migration’, but also politicians at the head of traditionally conservative parties in government, such as Sebastian Kurz in Austria (Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP), Austrian People’s Party), Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS), Law and Justice) or Viktor Orbán in Hungary (Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz), Hungarian Civic Alliance). On the other side, many among those concerned about the rise of the far right, while rejecting anti-migrant racism, produced an equally problematic and distorted discourse on the ‘summer of migration’, and on mass migration more generally. They portrayed the rise of the far right as a reaction to, or outcome of, the migration (something that Étienne Balibar had already identified in the late 1980s as a type of ‘meta-racism’).³ Thus, much public and political debate in Europe at this point seemed stuck between two aspects of one dominant racist discourse in which migration was always a problem: either because it was (mis)identified as the cause of all types of social problems, such as housing, crime or the lack of so-called ‘integration’, or because it was (mis)identified as the cause of the rise of far-right ‘populism’.

These were the circumstances that led us to first introduce the term ‘cultures of rejection’.⁴ With this opening contribution to the special issue, we pursue three goals. First, we want to further sketch the political conjuncture in which we developed the term ‘cultures of rejection’ and the questions and challenges that we found ourselves facing: questions and challenges to which we hoped this perspective would offer new answers and insights. Second, we bring in some core assumptions and methodological considerations guiding our approach, and situate them in current scholarly debates, associated fields of research and the wider intellectual landscape to which we want to contribute. Finally, we describe the research design of our larger research project Cultures of Rejection (CuRe) and the contributions to this special issue, presenting some of our findings from empirical research in Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Germany and Sweden between 2019 and 2022.

From a welcoming culture to cultures of rejection?

The waves of migration of 2015 across a heterogeneous European landscape gave rise to new ideas about affiliation and political belonging, crises and precarity, support and solidarity.

How effective and sustainable these notions were, and still are, is debatable, although they can certainly be assessed differently in different spaces and places.⁵ In us, however, these new ideas inspired a rethink as to the need to investigate if, how and to what extent the multiple crises of the European project hit the ground and crept into the life-worlds of individuals.

The concept of ‘democratization of borders’ had arisen from one of the core components of European migration policy, which at the same time paradoxically stands in the way of this very democratization. The condition of possibility for a democratic Europe that is supposed to be coming closer together has become a stumbling block that has not yet fulfilled its promise and is waiting to become reality. We are talking about the Schengen system itself that represents the formative border policy framework of the European Union (including the Schengen Treaties of 1985 and 1990, and the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam) and introduced both the abolition of internal border controls and the obligation to protect external borders and strengthen police cooperation. Since then, the notion of a walkable regional space, which was brought into being by this treaty, has never in truth been realized. To take the countries in which CuRe members have pursued their research as examples, only Sweden, Germany and Austria belong to the Schengen area, while Serbia and Croatia, even though the latter is an EU member state, do not. On the contrary, the proliferation of borders (both physical and virtual/digital), security systems (including EURODAC, databases that control mobile populations), as well as checkpoints and hotspots,⁶ has gone hand-in-hand with an increasing heterogeneity and flexibility of citizenship,⁷ a multiplication of labour,⁸ and a policy that involves both a violent sealing-off from the outside world, as well as one of differential inclusion that creates heterogeneous logistical borderscapes.⁹

This violence has its price (both human and non-human), and also leaves its mark on the inside. If we only look at the differences in citizenship between the European countries we have researched that were most affected by the mass migration, the differences between Serbian citizenship and that of Sweden, or that of Germany and Austria and that of Croatia, indicate a heterogeneous and differential landscape of access to rights.¹⁰ At the same time, all the countries have been affected by migration flows for quite some time, albeit in very different ways.¹¹ Since 2015 Sweden, Germany and Austria have taken in the highest numbers of migrants in Europe, while Croatia and Serbia are among the countries refugees passed or crossed through on the so-called ‘Balkan route’.¹² Not only does this landscape mark differences with regard to the question of internal and external mobility and social and political citizenship but also, therefore, for the challenges to Europe and its population. This profoundly contradictory configuration of European space keeps producing new (both abstract and real), laterally overlapping sub-spaces and contradictions shaped by the circulation of human beings, labour, commodities, capital, ideas and data promoted by ever new updates of digital technologies in the global neoliberal economy. Our perspective is informed by precisely that heterogeneous space that is permeated by global forms of circulation and in which one of the critical factors is mass migration itself,¹³ as well as the reaction to it in different societal environments.¹⁴

It is worth reminding ourselves that, during 2015 and 2016, the most significant practical and symbolic reaction to the movement of migrants and refugees was not rejection and hostility but a wide range of practices by citizens, movements, activists, civil society organizations and the state that supported (or claimed to support) migrants and refugees.¹⁵ In the political conjuncture instantiated by the ‘summer of migration’,¹⁶ civil mobilization and support for refugees emerged as a major factor in many parts of Europe.¹⁷ In Germany, the term ‘Willkommenskultur’—which has been variably translated into English as ‘welcome culture’, ‘welcoming culture’ or ‘culture of welcoming’—was originally introduced into political discourse ‘from above’, by politicians eager to present themselves as humanitarians. However, the word quickly took on a life of its own when it was picked up by volunteers and activists doing the actual work of supporting migrants and refugees.¹⁸ Soon, ‘welcoming culture’ turned into a shorthand for all and any of these practices of solidarity, as well as for a sociocultural climate in which these actions made sense in a particular way and the institutional, logistical, infrastructural and ‘infra-political’ conditions in which such practices and meaning-making could take place.¹⁹ A welcoming culture in this broader sense thus includes what we could call, borrowing a Foucauldian phrase, the ‘conditions of acceptability’ of such practices of solidarity and support in a discursive-material sense.²⁰

At the same time, in 2016 we witnessed an atmospheric shift taking place in many European countries. In Germany, there was a significant increase of racist violence against refugees and migrants and attacks on asylum shelters,²¹ anti-refugee and anti-Muslim rhetoric in news media,²² as well as right-wing street mobilizations,²³ and right-wing parties such as AfD gained support. In a brief op-ed published in late 2016, we noticed that ‘increasingly and forcefully, a counterpart to the welcoming culture is emerging: we could call it a culture of rejection [Ablehnungskultur]’.²⁴ This brief recap indicates that the term ‘cultures of rejection’ did not emerge as a fully fledged theoretical concept, but rather as a heuristic device, and as part of an attempt to understand and come to terms with a changing political reality.

Situating cultures of rejection

One way of coming to terms with a changing political landscape is to interpret it as what is called, in cultural studies, a ‘conjunctural shift’:²⁵ not as a clear-cut break, but rather as something ‘interpretive and historical’, as Stuart Hall put it. ‘I have to feel’, he went on, ‘the kind of accumulation of different things coming together to make a new moment, and think, this is a different rhythm’.²⁶ Taking into account the broad understanding of migratory movements and the phenomenon of a welcoming culture sketched above, we set out to explore the heuristic possibilities of the counter-term ‘cultures of rejection’. It allowed us to open a set of urgent analytical and political questions. If the conjunctural shift, the rise in racist violence and support for far-right parties and movements was not to be understood as a simple reaction to ‘too much migration’, then where did it come from? What are the conditions in which anti-migrant and racist discourses and practices become acceptable and even desirable for social groups? Can and should we speak of cultures in which right-wing and extreme right-wing policies are reflected and lived? If so, to what extent, how and with what degree of intensity? Are we witnessing something like a counter-movement to the ‘democratization of borders’ and the ‘democratization of Europe’ that had emerged, if only briefly, as a potential during the summer of 2015? These were the questions that stood at the beginning of our efforts to develop the concept of ‘cultures of rejection’ into a productive research approach. Our decision to further pursue a project centred around the term was motivated by three considerations. First, as discussed above, in both echoing and juxtaposing the established term ‘welcoming culture’, ‘cultures of rejection’ signals the conjunctural shift that we wanted to investigate. Second, by choosing the term ‘culture’, we self-consciously located our efforts in the tradition of a critical, materialist understanding of culture as something shaped by everyday life and struggle. As Raymond Williams, one of the founding figures of such an approach, put it, investigating culture from this perspective includes analysing ‘the organization of production, the structure of the family, the structure of institutions which express or govern social relationships, the characteristic forms through which members of the society communicate’.²⁷ Researching cultures of rejection has thus been described as ‘a search for patterns in everyday life, an analysis of political, economic and technological conditions and a sensitivity to ruptures and contestations’.²⁸ Third, centring the term ‘rejection’ allowed us to make space for contingency regarding the objects being rejected. While we started out by addressing issues of migration and racism, we encountered questions that led us well beyond these topics. If we reject the idea that the rise of right-wing forces can be explained simply as a reaction to the fact of migration, then, we assumed, we had to investigate the various processes of economic, political and social transformation in Europe, and the everyday experiences they give rise to, in order to arrive at a fuller assessment of the rise of right-wing politics. With the notion of rejection, we insist that we cannot take the exact configurations of the Other for granted before we pursue concrete empirical investigations. In fact, one of our key interests was, and remains, the identification of their articulations,²⁹ that is, the linkages between different types and objects of rejection, and discovering the logics and practices that connect them discursively to each other and, practically, with the lived realities of those invested in cultures of rejection. As members of the CuRe research group have stated elsewhere:

We analyse cultures of rejection as modes of living, or ways of being in the world, that are constituted by attitudes, values, norms and affects that reject a set of socio-cultural objects. While the objects of rejection may vary and form various constellations, they often include immigration, domestic political elites, ‘mainstream’ media, institutions of civil society, scientific or educational institutions, certain bodies of knowledge, shifting gender relations and racialised or culturalised Others.³⁰

Undertaking a ‘conjunctural’ study in this sense calls for interdisciplinary social research. Such an approach distances itself from sociopsychological attitudinal research, which is always in danger of slipping away from the contexts of complex political and social relationships; nor is it devoted to economic developments and disputes in party politics. Rather, we direct our attention to the concrete situations of individuals’ everyday lives and the inner view of their subjectivity. To take account of the everyday processes in which meaning is generated, qualitative and interpretive methods are best suited to generate knowledge about the patterns of interpretation with which individuals understand themselves and their social situations. Thus, CuRe researchers employed qualitative, narrative interviews, focus group discussions and ethnographic fieldwork in offline and online spaces in order to take account of both the subjectivities of individuals and the social constellations in which they live. The subjectivity and identity of the individual is formed in an imagined relation to itself as endowed with will and consciousness and, at the same time, these meanings and senses of social processes are placed in relation to developments in society as a whole, hence as material practices. Thus, we include the analysis of power relations, starting from these productions of meaning, linked to the economic or political situation, to contribute to a conjunctural analysis.

To investigate cultures of rejection means to investigate what we might call a counter-movement to processes and projects of democratization. We aim to contribute to a more thorough understanding and qualitative assessment of the social and cultural conditions in which right-wing discourses, movements and parties gained such momentum after 2015, and what might be done to counter these processes. Of course, we are well aware that we share this claim and aspiration with a wide and vibrant field of research in social sciences and cultural studies. There are numerous approaches to the study of populism, right-wing extremism, authoritarianism and racism that have produced a plethora of concepts to explain the phenomena we are concerned with. Why, then, do we need another conceptual tool? Our answer is that the concept of ‘cultures of rejection’ allows us to pursue new avenues both for empirical research and theoretical reflection in at least three ways.

First, our approach offers a perspective that avoids the dichotomization of economic or cultural factors, something we often find in populism studies.³¹ Instead, we assume that we need to look at patterns, grounded and reproduced in everyday practice, that emerge from experiences of change or crisis, up to and including profound crises of authority. In doing so, it is important that we do not simply replace a so-called ‘migration crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ with other crises in order to arrive at our initial argument or research design. On the contrary, we are aware that narratives of the consequences of crises are endowed with a high degree of plausibility precisely because they are historically rehearsed: above all, world economic crises or capitalist modernization processes have always served as a springboard for subsequent explanations of the rise of right-wing movements. But the nexus, we assume, must first of all be explained and better understood. Crises do not automatically lead to the rejection of Others. This means that we must ask which dimensions of transformation and crisis, and which narratives of crises and transformation are processed in cultures of rejection, and how meaning is ascribed to them intersubjectively.

Second, studies on authoritarianism, which play an important role in our field of research, explore manifestations of crises of democracy that are usually conceived of in national terms. Events such as the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the tedious process that eventually led to Brexit or the organized efforts of the Visegrád Group and ongoing attempts to concentrate right-wing national alliances at the EU level have all seen anxious reactions in sociopolitical debates and academic analyses. Generally, crises of democracy (often called ‘polarizations’) within the EU have indeed been thought of in their transnational connections, but additively rather than systematically and comparatively. In our view, this is linked to the thesis of a re-nationalization that is imagined as a linear backward movement. The various respective dynamics, however, are related to processes of globalization that cannot be understood as external stress factors for national-internal democracies. For example, in case of doubt, national policy responses to migration go hand-in-hand with deregulations and transformations in certain economic sectors such as logistics or retail. This is one of the reasons we have sought out these sectors for our research.

Third, we claim that usually very specific categories of anthropological difference are mobilized (gendered or racialized) to make responses to crises plausible but also vivid, and to illustrate their sexist or racist ‘potential’. Our project, in contrast, assumes that other possible categories of difference and important variations may emerge in discourses and practices, or that these categories recompose themselves and need to be considered, not least in order to understand the transformation of racism and to update its analysis.

In our view, this is also due to methodological caution, simply because racism is often latent and not evident, particularly because oftentimes racist discourse must admit that the racial is not a natural category. As David Theo Goldberg has argued, the logic of the post-racial or anthroporacial is the denial of the racial and even the denial of the denial of the racial in the past.³² This is also true in countries that are marked by migration and where it is becoming increasingly unclear how a boundary between the indigenous and the newly arrived population or those who have already ‘arrived’ for decades can be drawn at all, not even in relation to social and political rights. It is precisely here that differentialist modes of inclusion are at least as relevant to an understanding of racism as discourses and practices of exclusion.³³ Finally, we have observed for many years that racism does not reproduce two political camps defined as right and left; instead, racist arguments traverse such fields and work at the boundary between them, switching sides and appearing as one representing the other.³⁴ This emerged very clearly in our research against the backdrop of growing right-wing populism, anti-democratic sentiments and fears in times of crisis, and the lack of an effective response to them.

Hence, building on but going beyond the aims of studies of race and racism, we deliberately leave open the question of what the objects of rejection are that operate in these everyday cultures. Racialized or culturalized figures of the Other, such as migrants, refugees, religious or other minorities often play a significant role here. However, we are interested in the ways in which they merge with other objects of rejection, be it groups of persons, practices, institutions or symbols, and whether there are perhaps also new objects to be recognized here. They might, depending on local and conjunctural circumstances, include immigration, domestic political and religious elites, institutions of civil society and the media, shifting gender relations, health policies, trade unions, geopolitical shifts or European integration. They are usually based on and combined with specific narratives and interpretations of crises. In any case, that was our initial consideration.

But then, unexpectedly for all of us, this approach proved to be particularly productive during the COVID-19 pandemic, when new and unforeseen objects emerged, such as medical experts, vaccines or supposedly naive ‘sheeple’ uncritically following a ‘mainstream’ narrative of the pandemic.³⁵ Finally, we claim that cultures of rejection can lead to support for authoritarian politics, but not necessarily. They may also be articulated with a rejection of ‘politics’ in toto, the choice not to vote or the inability to vote in the country where one resides and works. They may also indicate a sense of being rejected or left behind. Studying cultures of rejection thus amounts to the examination of sociocultural tactics, or ‘arts of doing’, adopted by people in their practice of everyday life.³⁶

CuRe’s research design and contributions to this issue

Cultures of rejection, according to our approach, are practices, discourses and cultural formations based on values, norms and affects, or political attitudes constituted in and through rejection of a set of sociocultural objects.³⁷ More than just a gesture of protest, they are modes of living, or ways of being in the world under conditions experienced as undergoing transformation or in crisis. In order to investigate them, we constructed a common research design that guided five research teams, based in Belgrade, Rijeka, Vienna, Berlin and Linköping, respectively. As a first entry point to our empirical research, we chose workplaces in two industries that we identified, based on a thorough analysis of literature in the fields of economy and labour sociology, as particularly affected by processes of crisis and transformation: the retail and logistics sectors. This decision was based on the conceptual view that labour constitutes a central element of contemporary socialization without fully determining it. It was also grounded in the empirical observation that these sectors have experienced major changes in recent years that have rearranged labour relations and patterns of social reproduction for their workers.³⁸ Combining ethnographic observations in extended field visits, narrative interviews with employees and focus group discussions, CuRe researchers investigated how experiences in work environments contribute to the emergence (or refutation) of cultures of rejection.³⁹ Results from this part of CuRe’s research design are represented in this issue by contributions from Alexander Harder, and from Kristina Stojanović-Čehajić and Marko-Luka Zubčić. Harder focuses on experiences and narratives of transformation and crisis articulated by retail workers in two locations in Germany. He emphasizes how processes of logistification and digitalization affect workers’ lives both in and outside the workplace, and how they are made sense of by referencing a metanarrative of societal decline and loss of control over one’s own circumstances. Here, cultures of rejection emerge via the articulation of nostalgia and reclusivity, bringing workers’ subjective meaning-making in line with authoritarian politics. Stojanović-Čehajić and Zubčić draw on their work with seafarers in the port city of Rijeka, Croatia. The authors show how these workers, having become part of the global logistical circuit of the international maritime industry, interpret their own hardships through political imaginaries shaped by (a) the consistent experience of a corrupt or captured state; (b) increasingly hard and precarious working conditions; and (c) the particular nature of digital sociality, which plays an extraordinary role for workers spending long periods of time on ships isolated from friends and families.

The second part of CuRe’s research design focused on digital environments as relevant spaces for the analysis of everyday cultures of rejection. This approach acknowledges the fact that ‘online’ and ‘offline’ aspects of the social world have become ‘intermeshed in interwoven human practices and social worlds’,⁴⁰ particularly with the ubiquity of smartphones. Benjamin Opratko’s contribution combines this focus with an interest in the emergence of new articulations of rejection in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Based on data collected from online ethnographies in Facebook and Telegram groups, Opratko traces how, during the pandemic, COVID-related cultures of rejection connected with longer-standing objects of rejection in contradictory ways and produced new practices of constructing counter-authorities in the face of a radicalized rejection of traditional political and scientific authorities.⁴¹

Finally, the contributions from Serbia, by Irena Fiket, Gazela Pudar Draško and Milan Urošević, and from Sweden, by Celina Ortega Soto, combine research among retail and logistic workers with data gathered in online spaces. Fiket, Pudar Draško and Urošević connect their empirical material from two Serbian cities, Belgrade and Kraljevo, to theoretical debates around the notion of anti-politics, redefining it as a specific culture of rejection in the political sphere, on which political elites themselves act recursively. Ortega Soto relates our common approach to the particular handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Swedish government, and shows how work-life conditions, political opinions, social views and media habits informed workers’ disagreements with and reactions to the official handling of the pandemic, and how this is linked to decreasing trust in government. These contributions are accompanied by a concluding text by Sanja Bojanić, Stefan Jonsson, Anders Neergaard and Birgit Sauer tying the insights of these individual contributions back to the conceptual and political dimensions of cultures of rejection, as we have outlined them in this introduction.

It is worth noting that the contributions to this special issue were produced while the CuRe research project was still ongoing. Due to the restrictions imposed on researchers during the pandemic, the third phase of research, which focused on ethnographic studies in socio-spatial environments such as neighbourhoods and public spaces, had to be postponed repeatedly. Results from this final phase of research, as well as more of our research on cultures of rejection in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, will be published in other outlets and on the CuRe project’s online platform at www.culturesofrejection.net.

Three years of research are behind us at this point, and the crises are not diminishing. Rather, after the global experience of the pandemic, and, more recently, the war in Ukraine, a permanent crisis seems to be setting in, in which the geopolitical environments that shape Europe are in continuous flux. This brings us back to the starting point of our inquiries: the question of democracy and borders that we had already inherited from the 2008 financial and economic crises, and which can be found in the ongoing problematization of migration and refugees, and the crises of the European project so vividly expressed by Brexit. The measures taken against the COVID-19 pandemic have also strengthened the problematic issues of technological solutionism, and the inescapable need for sustainable modes of economic activity in the face of an accelerating climate crisis. All these crises have been catalysts for larger trends, adding new urgency to the insight that these events signify ruptures in the political regulation and reproduction of our economies and lives, which are always linked to new individual and collective subjectivities. It is these subjectivities and their material culture to which we pay attention. From our point of view, these are not matters that can simply be stated or criticized, agreed with or rejected, but matters that need to be investigated with the aim of finding an alternative way through and out of these permanent crises.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuela Bojadžijev

Manuela Bojadžijev is Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology and the Berlin Institute for Migration Research (BIM) at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is researching globalized and digitized cultures. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3507-0805

Benjamin Opratko

Benjamin Opratko was a post-doc researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and is currently Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) at the Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organisation at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research investigates empirical and theoretical aspects of contemporary authoritarian populism, racism and Islamophobia in Europe. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6120-466X

Notes

1 Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. from the French by James Swenson (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2004), 117.

2 Quoted in Peo Hansen, A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing 2021), 7.

3 Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar’s text trans. from the French by Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso 1991), 22.

4 Manuela Bojadžijev and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Von der Willkommens- zur Ablehnungskultur?’, Forum Migration, vol. 12, no. 6, 2016, 1–2. All translations into English, unless otherwise stated, are by the authors.

5 See Peter Bescherer, Anne Burkhardt, Robert Feustel, Gisela Mackenroth and Luzia Sievi, Urbane Konflikte und die Krise der Demokratie: Stadtentwicklung, Rechtsruck und Soziale Bewegungen (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2021); and Margit Feischmidt, Ludger Pries and Celine Cantat (eds), Refugee Protection and Civil Society in Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2018).

6 Bernd Kasparek, ‘Complementing Schengen: the Dublin system and the European border and migration regime’, in Harald Bauder and Christian Matheis (eds), Migration Policy and Practice: Interventions and Solutions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015), 59–78.

7 Balibar, We, the People of Europe?; Aihwa Ong, ‘Mutations in citizenship’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, nos 2–3, 2006, 499–505; Bernd Kasparek, Europa als Grenze: Eine Ethnographie der Grenzschutz-Agentur Frontex (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2021).

8 With the concept of the 'multiplication of labour', the authors hope to make the constitutive heterogeneity of living labour and the articulation of simultaneous and different labour regimes and forms of exploitation more investigable. They oppose the idea that a particular form of labour is dominant or hegemonic and therefore of particular political or strategic interest. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2013).

9 Moritz Altenried, Manuela Bojadžijev, Leif Höfler, Sandro Mezzadra and Mira Wallis, ‘Logistical borderscapes: politics and mediation of mobile labor in Germany after the “summer of migration”’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 2, 2018, 291–312.

10 Manuela Bojadžijev, ‘“The spirit of Europe”: differential migration, labour and logistificationics’, in Giorgio Grappi (ed.), Migration and the Contested Politics of Justice: Europe and the Global Dimension (London and New York: Routledge 2021), 162–83.

11 The Transit Migration Research Group, of which Manuela Bojadžijev was a member, studied the emergence of the European migration regime in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, including Croatia and Serbia, and the migration routes (before they became known as the Balkan Route) in the first half of the 2000s.

12 Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek, ‘Historicizing the Balkan route: governing migration through mobility’, in William Walters, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani (eds), Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2022), 183–208.

13 Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor.

14 Manuela Bojadžijev, ‘Migration as a social seismograph: an analysis of Germany’s “refugee crisis” controversy’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 31, no. 4, 2018, 335–56.

15 Ibid.

16 Sabine Hess and Bernd Kasparek, ‘Under control? Or border (as) conflict: reflections on the European border regime’, Social Inclusion, vol. 5, no. 3, 2017, 58–68.

17 Donatella della Porta (ed.), Solidarity Mobilizations in the ‘Refugee Crisis’: Contentious Moves (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 2018); Feischmidt, Pries and Cantat (eds), Refugee Protection and Civil Society in Europe; Sara de Jong and Ilker Ataç, ‘Demand and deliver: refugee support organisations in Austria’, Social Inclusion, vol. 5, no. 3, 2017, 28–37; Michael Strange, Vicki Squire and Anna Lundberg, ‘Irregular migration struggles and active subjects of trans-border politics: new research strategies for interrogating the agency of the marginalised’, Politics, vol. 37, no. 3, 2017, 243–53.

18 Ulrike Hamann and Serhat Karakayali, ‘Practicing Willkommenskultur: migration and solidarity in Germany’, Intersections, vol. 2, no. 4, 2016, 69–86; Ove Sutter, ‘Narratives of “welcome culture”: the cultural politics of voluntary aid for refugees’, Narrative Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 2019, 19–43; Samia Dinkelaker, Nikolai Huke and Olaf Tietje (eds), Nach der ‘Willkommenskultur’: Geflüchtete zwischen umkämpfter Teilhabe und zivilgesellschaftlicher Solidarität (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2021).

19 Serhat Karakayali,‘“Infra-Politik” der Willkommensgesellschaft’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 30, no. 3, 2017, 16–24.

20 Michel Foucault, ‘What is critique?’ [1978], in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. from the French by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2007), 41–81.

21 Sebastian Jäckle and Pascal David König, ‘Drei Jahre Anschläge auf Flüchtlinge in Deutschland—welche Faktoren erklären ihre räumliche und zeitliche Verteilung?’, KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 71, no. 4, 2019, 623–49.

22 Bastian Vollmer and Serhat Karakayali, ‘The volatility of the discourse on refugees in Germany’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, vol. 16, nos 1–2, 2018, 118–39; Iris Wigger, ‘Anti-Muslim racism and the racialisation of sexual violence: “intersectional stereotyping” in mass media representations of male Muslim migrants in Germany’, Culture and Religion, vol. 20, no. 3, 2019, 248–71.

23 Alexander Häusler, ‘AfD, Pegida & Co.: Die Formierung einer muslimfeindlichen rechten Bewegung’, in Peter Antes and Rauf Ceylan (eds), Muslime in Deutschland: Historische Bestandsaufnahme, aktuelle Entwicklungen und zukünftige Forschungsfragen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2017), 59–74.

24 Bojadžijev and Opratko, ‘Von der Willkommens- zur Ablehnungskultur?’, 6.

25 Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today, vol. 23, no. 1, 1979, 14–20; Robert F. Carley, ‘The rediscovery of the conjuncture’, in Robert F. Carley, Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2021), 51–89; Jeremy Gilbert, ‘This conjuncture: for Stuart Hall’, New Formations, nos 96–97, 2019, 5–37; Melissa Gregg, ‘The politics of conjuncture: Stuart Hall, articulation and the commitment to specificity’, in Melissa Gregg, Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), 55–81.

26 Stuart Hall and Les Back, ‘In conversation: at home and not at home’, Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, 2009, 658–87 (665). Cf. Yi Chen, Practising Rhythmanalysis: Theories and Methodologies (Lanham, MD and London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017), 12.

27 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press/ London: Chatto & Windus 1961), 42.

28 Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work: investigating the acceptability of authoritarian populism’, Ethnicities, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, 425–55 (428–9).

29 John Clarke, ‘Stuart Hall and the theory and practice of articulation’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 36, no. 2, 2015, 275–86.

30 Harder and Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work’, 429.

31 Ronald F. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, ‘Trump, Brexit, and the rise of populism: economic have-nots and cultural backlash’, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Working Paper No. RWP16-026, 29 July 2016, available on the Social Science Research Network at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2818659 (viewed 16 June 2023).

32 David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 2015), 104.

33 Manuela Bojadžijev, ‘Is there a post-racism? On David Theo Goldberg’s conjunctural analysis of the post-racial’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 39, no. 13, 2016, 2235–40.

34 Chetan Bhatt, ‘The new xenologies of Europe: civil tensions and mythic pasts’, Journal of Civil Society, vol. 8, no. 3, 2012, 307–26.

35 Benjamin Opratko et al., ‘Cultures of rejection in the Covid-19 crisis’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 44, no. 5, 2021, 893–905.

36 Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien. 1: Arts de faire (Paris: Union générale d’éditions 1980).

37 Bojadžijev, ‘Migration as a social seismograph’.

38 Altenried, Bojadžijev, Höfler, Mezzadra and Wallis, ‘Logistical borderscapes’.

39 The various case studies had to be postponed due to the disruption caused by government actions against the COVID-19 crisis. While all case studies could be conducted at the places of work, not all focus groups could be. Instead, the CuRe research group, supported by generous additional funding from the VW Foundation, undertook intensive research into the cultures of rejection during the COVID crisis in digital environments. The contributions gathered here focus on different phases of the research in the respective countries with their corresponding findings. They aim to provide a common picture for the otherwise little connected national scenarios.

40 Robert Kozinets, Netnography: Redefined (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2015), 69.

41 Cf. Opratko et al., ‘Cultures of rejection in the Covid-19 crisis’.