MigSol examined practices of citizenship and political mobilisation with and by migrants and refugees along the Balkan Route, and explored how they participated in the formation of political subjectivities that subvert the dominant political architecture of the European Union.
The dominant political order organised around the nation-state, or blocks of nation-states such as the EU, presumes that the sole subject of political action is the citizen. In any given context, the actual capacity for action of citizens intersects with and is modulated by factors such as race, gender, class, which organise the social world of the nation-state and its hierarchies. Displaced people, however, tend to be seen as all together outside of the realm of the political. Their hegemonic modes of interpellation as objects of suspicion as part of security-oriented approaches to migration, or of compassion in humanitarian responses to displacement, obscure their political condition. This depoliticising process does not only invisibilise the political reasons that led to their displacement in the first place, which may be linked to long histories of power and domination involving the very Western societies that in turn de-politicise mobilities. It also denies people’s capacity to become autonomous political subjects and to act in defense of their interests and those of others in their countries of transit or residence.
There exists however many practices and communities in which political action towards a range of goals and values is enacted by displaced people, who may be newly-arrived or longer-term residents. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, MigSol investigated refugee solidarity spaces along the Balkan Route. Its primary objective was to observe and reflect on informal reception and hosting practices, but the scope of the activities under study turned out to be broader and to engage with a range of political and social issues. In turn, MigSol attempted to assess the ways in which politics are exercised and created in these sites, and what this means for our understanding of political community and subjectivity.
In alternative accommodation projects in Athens, displaced people and local activists, often themselves deprived of their ability for effective political participation due to their economic marginalisation following the Greek crisis, have lived together and created new models of political community. In Serbia, the memory of previous episodes of conflict has mobilised locals in solidarity with people on the move. They have developed practices of support that may disrupt the official policy of the state and its politics of separation by acting on the basis of a sense of shared identity from common experience of displacement. In Belgrade, people who find themselves marginalised through recent neoliberal urban developments face state violence in the form of evictions and dispossession in ways that have much in common with the expulsion from public space experienced by migrants. These connections are starting to be noticed and analysed by people engaged in struggles against the various segregating aspects of neoliberal capitalism and conservative nationalisms. At a time when the far-right is on the rise in Europe, MigSol addresses pressing issues about the meanings and future of politics and community. It argues that practices of migration solidarity are one of the sites in which new and essential forms of political subjectivities are being sketched out and experimented.
In conclusion, MigSol considers that these alternative practices of the political should be fostered and addressed as sites that could provide crucial answers to the crisis of politics and democracy we are witnessing in Europe. The very first step towards this would be that member states and the EU stop the ongoing criminalisation of both migrants and their supporters: this means, first, halting the encampment, detention and deportation on non-citizens residents and, second, providing legitimacy and space to solidarity communities where new socialities and subjectivities are being produced.
