“Let Them In!” Humanitarian Work as Political Activism? The Case of the Maximiliaan Refugee Camp in Brussels.

ABSTRACT

Humanitarian aid projects associated with the emergence of refugee camps within European territories are generally perceived as apolitical. Scholars however, are increasingly questioning this view, pointing to many, often untold, ways in which humanitarianism interacts with the politics of migration and border enforcement. This article examines the case of a temporary refugee camp set up in Brussels in September 2015. We show how organizational and spatiotemporal particularities, as well as media framing of the humanitarian assistance, led to controversy, civil initiatives, and hyperpoliticization, eventually calling the state to take responsibility for the refugees, but simultaneously silenced other explicit political responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Asylum seekers
• refugee camp
• Belgium
• Maximiliaan Park
• Agamben
• humanitarianism
• hyper-politicization

Acknowledgments

This case study is part of a doctoral research project supported by the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO) [grant number 11ZX916N LV]. The authors would like to extend their gratitude to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful advice on the first draft of this article .

Notes

1. With the notion politics we refer to different kinds of political activism or protest movements that aim to question existing social order mechanisms, whereas policies refers to governmental and institutional acts aiming to establish social order (Rancière, 1999).

2. The semistructured in-depth interviews lasted between 30 minutes and an hour and a half. The interviews were performed after informed consent. They were anonymized and transcribed prior to analysis.

3. The Citizens' Platform for the Support of Refugees Brussels (Dutch: Burgerplatform–French: Plateforme citoyenne de soutien aux réfugiés Bruxelles) will further be referred to as the Citizens' Platform or simply the Platform.

4. People active in the political citizens' movement Tout autre Chose/Hart boven Hard [Heart above hard], a Belgian political citizens movement in some ways similar to European movements such as Podemos, emerged during and after the austerity measures imposed by the newly elected government in 2014. One of the 10 demands in their manifest was more solidarity with refugees.

5. The subject positions that we describe shouldn't be conceived as fixed or mutually exclusive. Some people changed their positions during the course of the events due to what they experienced and due to discussions with others. Still others shifted between different, seemingly opposite, positions during discussions or during the interview. Further these are not the only subject positions we encountered (e.g., we don't discuss “caring for reasons of curiosity,” which was mentioned on several occasions).

Additional information

Funding

Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek 11ZX916N LV.