Visibilities and the Politics of Space: Refugee Activism in Berlin

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which refugee activists attained visibility within the public sphere while they contested, resisted, and helped transform multiple spaitials as part of their movement in Berlin, Germany. Scholarship on refugee and immigrant protests has focused on demonstrations and every day acts of resistance in refugee camps or accommodation. However, there has been less focus on the ways in which refugees engage in spatial politics. This article focuses on urban resistance in Berlin where refugee activists in alliance with supporters occupied several spaces and transformed them to political sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• asylum policy
• refugee movement
• Berlin
• occupied spaces

Notes

1. The supporters were from various countries including Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Serbia, and the United States.

2. “Kein Mensch ist illegal” is the name of a political movement that originated in the asylum debates in the early 1990s and was institutionalized at the Documenta X, an art exhibition, which takes place every 5 years in Kassel.

3. Asylum seekers were sbject to compulsory residence within their state of jurisdiction.

4. The refugee-activists employed the term Lager to convey the difficult conditions they encountered in the refugee shelters. I use the term Lager since it conveys the refugee-activists' position.