In the summer of 2015, more than 350,000 migrants moved through Hungarian territory. Almost immediately there emerged in response a dialectic between, on the one hand, depoliticizing narratives of crisis that sought to immobilize the migrants and, on the other, concrete political mobilization that sought to facilitate their mobility. While state institutions and humanitarian volunteer groups framed mobility in terms that emphasized a vertical form of politics, a horizontal counterpolitics arose by the summer's end, one that challenged hegemonic territorial politics. The state's efforts to immobilize resulted only in more radical forms of mobility. Outlining an ethnography of mobility, immobilization, and cross‐border activism, we follow the dramatic yet momentary presence, and subsequent absence, of migrants in an evanescent rebel city marked by novel political solidarities. [mobility, immobility, transit zones, border politics, refugees, migrants, Hungary]

1In this article, I locate the efforts of the Hungarian government to close its borders to migrants in the broader context of externalization of European Union asylum policy. I draw on Martina Tazzioli's conceptualization of the production of temporary, divisive migrant multiplicities in border zones in ethnographically presenting the conditions of two protest marches of migrants. I suggest that the relative successes and failures of these marches, one of which resulted in a temporary rupture in Hungary's adherence to EU border policy, relate to the presence or absence of biopolitical border controls and techniques of externalization that stand in parallel with long-term developments of EU border control. In this context, I also question the extent to which an emergence of a collective subject is contingent upon local support, on one hand, and imaginations of the border, on the other. I argue that the analysis of Hungarian state's border control, as well as efforts to counter it, must be situated in the historical development of the EU border policy.

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Revue européenne des migrations internationales vol. 33-n°2 et 3 | 2017 Dire la violence des frontières. Mises en mots de la migration vers l'Europe

This article examines the social media practices through which young Hungarians deliberate the workings of truth and the meanings of liberalism under Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian regime. Noting similarities between ubiquitous government propaganda billboards and the aesthetics of parodic social media content, these youth increasingly perceive everyday situations as internet memes. Navigating generational differences, class antagonisms, and rural-urban divisions, for them, seeing the world as a meme anchors the youth’s sense of truth and untruth and liberal identity in a polarized political field. We trace the everyday practices of montage through which conspiratorial billboard campaigns and the parodic forms of internet memes become linked, and observe how the visual, visceral, and networked sensibilities of meme culture help neutralize illiberal propaganda by turning it into a source of the self.  KIVONAT Írásunkban azokat a közösségi média gyakorlatokat vizsgáljuk, amelyeken keresztül a magyar fiatalok értelmezik és reflektálnak arra, hogy mi az igazság és mit jelent a liberalizmus Orbán Viktor autoriter rezsimében. A mindent átható kormánypropaganda óriásplakátjai és a parodisztikus közösségi médiatartalmak esztétikája közötti hasonlóságot felismerve, ezek a fiatalok egyre inkább internet mémekben ragadják meg a hétköznapok történéseit. A generációs különbségek, a társadalmi osztályok közti antagonizmusok és a vidék-város megosztottság gondolati terében egyensúlyozva, a világot mémeken keresztül látva, ezek segítenek a fiataloknak eligazodni igazság- és valótlanság között, és irányt mutatnak liberális identitásuk megéléséhez egy kiélezett politikai erőtérben. Azokat a mindennapi mém-gyártó gyakorlatokat követjük nyomon, amelyeken keresztül a konspiratív plakátkampányok és a parodisztikus internet mémek összekapcsolódnak, megfigyelve, hogy a mémkultúra vizuális, zsigeri és hálózatba rendeződő érzékenysége hogyan semlegesíti az illiberális propagandát azáltal, hogy az önkifejezés és öndefiníció forrásává teszi.