Challenging the Political Across Borders: Migrants’ and Solidarity Struggles

While recent years have seen the reassertion of exclusionary, anti-migrant politics and discourses, migrant-led and solidarity struggles contesting migration and border regimes have also risen and gained in visibility. How new are those struggles? What do they mean for our understanding and practice of politics and the political? What possibilities for change do they open up, and what limitations may they face? Based on chapters by a range of academics and activists engaged in border and migration struggles, Challenging the Political Across Borders: Migrants’ and Solidarity Struggles examines the practices, structures, and meanings of solidarity with and by migrants and refugees in Europe and beyond. Bringing together empirical, conceptual and historical insights, the volume interrogates struggles unfolding on the ground and situates them within a critical analysis of historical and current mobility regimes, and how these have been resisted. This collection will be of interest to students and academics working on migration and social struggles, as well as to activists, volunteers and those interested in new forms of solidarity.

"Written in the aftermath of the “European refugee crisis” of 2015, this agenda-setting volume turns to conceptual reflections on the meaning and structures of solidarity with and by migrants and refugees. It connects global processes with local responses, scrutinises the political architecture of citizen-state-nation nexus and dares to complicate, problematise and contextualise pro-migrant solidarity."

Olena Fedyuk, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Work, Employment and Organisation, Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

"This interdisciplinary volume offers an important and timely insight on migration solidarity initiatives and migrants’ struggles during the “European refugee crisis”. The rich collection of case-studies in different national settings is a valuable record of a diverse and multifaceted solidarity landscape that resists normative interpretations."

Katerina Rozakou, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens

Table of contents

Introduction - Tegiye Birey, Celine Cantat, Ewa Maczynska and Eda Sevinin

Part I: Re-historicising and re-conceptualising mobility regimes and solidarity

1. Remembering and Forgetting Refugees - Forced migrants, inclusion and exclusion
    Philip Marfleet
2. Counter-mapping as method: migrants’ Europe and its “external” frontiers
    Martina Tazzioli

Part II: Practices of Solidarity 

3. In the world: Action and fabrication by and on behalf of undocumented persons
    Mikael Spang and Anna Lundberg
4. From margin to centre? Practising new forms of European politics and citizenship in the Calais 'Jungle'
    Timothy Hall, Aura Lounasmaa and Corinne Squire
5. What’s so radical about refugee squats? An exploration of urban community based responses to mass
    displacement in Athens
    Tahir Zaman
6. The rise and fall of migration solidarity in Belgrade: marginalising solidarity and institutionalising aid
     Celine Cantat

Part III: Contesting and Challenging "Solidarity": Alternative Solidarities, Varying Struggles

7. Employing Refugees, Deploying Humanitarian Aid
    Eda Sevinin
8. Imagining the Other: the symbolic construction of political entitlement and exclusion among Mexican
    migrants in Sweden
    Guillermo Merelo
9. Transit migration: Hungary as centrally peripheral
     Annastiina Kallius

Afterword - Prem Kumar Rajaram