These fine lines: locating noncitizenship in political protest in Europe

Abstract

Since 2012, refugee protest camps and occupations have been established throughout Europe that contest the exclusion of refugees and asylum seekers, but that also make concrete demands for better living conditions and basic rights. It is a movement that is led by migrants as noncitizens, and so reveals new ways of thinking of the political agency and status of noncitizenship not as simply reactive to an absence of citizenship, but as a powerful and transgressive subjectivity in its own right. This paper argues that we should resist collapsing analysis back into the frameworks of citizenship, and instead be attentive to the politics of presence and solidarity manifest in these protest camps as a way of understanding, and engaging, noncitizen activism.

Keywords:

• Protest
• noncitizenship
• political agency
• solidarity
• camps

Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully thank Katherine Tonkiss, Tendayi Bloom and the anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. I would also like to thank members of Refugee Protest Camp Vienna for giving of their time and stories. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.