The micropolitics of border struggles: migrants’ squats and inhabitance as alternatives to citizenship

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the struggles of the We Are Here movement in Amsterdam as resistance to both securitarian and humanitarian border regimes. It explores the tensions between everyday forms of commoning emerging in migrants’ squats and technologies of enclosure and capture. In the first place, the paper contends that the creation of housing squats marked an important shift in migrants’ struggles that went from acts of protest to the performance of resistance at the level of the micropolitics of borders. By squatting buildings and creating common living spaces, current struggles mobilize material, affective and political solidarities and constitute a politics of inhabitance beyond and against dependency on the state and humanitarian practices. The second part of the paper discusses the government’s attempts to repress, govern and enclose the We Are Here movement within confined fields of action. With negotiations and humanitarian concessions through the provision of emergency shelters, local authorities attempted to re-direct the movement into politics of rights and recognitions. However, these tactics did not succeed to contain the struggle in its entirety: many migrants rejected humanitarian solutions, continued to create radical home spaces through squatting, enacting a politics of inhabitance beyond citizenship.

KEYWORDS:

• Crimmigration
• affects
• micropolitics
• inhabitance
• squatting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=164725&doclang=EN

2. Translated from Dutch from: https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/kst-33512-3.html.

3. See Rutte’s (the Dutch Prime Minister) response to Trump’s inauguration. ‘A letter to all Dutch citizens’ https://vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/.

4. Foucault’s understanding of micro-physics of power, addresses technologies of government, devices, tools, techniques, and apparatuses that enable the shaping and acting upon individual and collective conduct (Foucault 1982). Foucault (2007) proposes the concept of conduct as translation of the Greek ‘oikonomia psuchon and the Latin ‘regimen animourum’ (Foucault 2007, 192), namely, the way in which modes of government operate through management of souls insofar as this direction (conduite) of souls involves a permanent intervention on everyday conduct (conduite), on people’s bodies and affects. In this context ‘conduct’ is a technique to lead others, but also the way one conducts oneself, a reflexive power on the self.

5. See: http://freedomnotfrontex.noblogs.org .

6. See: https://www.coe.int/en/web/turin-european-social-charter/processed-complaints/-/asset_publisher/5GEFkJmH2bYG/content/no-90-2013-conference-of-european-churches-cec-v-the-netherlands?inheritRedirect=false .

7. http://wijzijnhier.org/2014/11/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deanna Dadusc

Deanna Dadusc is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton (UoB). At UoB she coordinates the Social Movements and Radical Politics strand of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE). Her research explores the criminalisation of social movements, including the repression of squatting and of migrants’ solidarity.