Political agency of refugees and asylum seekers is usually recognised as different forms of activism, focusing on rights claiming or protesting on inferior living conditions. While these activities are vitally important in the struggle over refugee rights and policies, they are not the only ways in which asylum seekers and refugees act politically. Perhaps paradoxically, the publicly visible activities may hide from the view other forms of effective and critical agency. Based on research with asylum seekers in precarious situations, this paper discusses their subtle forms of agency seldom identified as political -least by those enacting them. Many asylum seekers and refugees have little faith in exerting change though public protest and explicitly dissociate themselves from politics. With focus on mundane critical attitudes and activities, this paper suggests that thin political possibilities open through agency motivated by 'radical hope'. The radically hopeful agencies in hopeless asylum situations, and their political dimensions, are identified through a non-linear understanding of temporality that challenges the received notion of refugeeness as generated in the past, struggled for in the present, and orienting towards a desired-for future.

No abstract

The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic.

This paper explores people's acts of disengagement from activist campaign and group spaces in the context of border struggle activism in Germany and the UK as fugitive practices of refusal. These acts of disengagement took the form of remaining silent or intentionally distracted, sleeping during activist meetings, distancing oneself from activist groups during conversations, or completely withdrawing from these spaces. The paper approaches these acts, first, as practices of refusal that expose notions of the political rooted in liberal struggles over power and freedom as not only risky but also inherently self‐defeating and, second, as radically optimistic and vitalising practices of recovery and care that insist on alternative modes of thinking, practising, and experiencing sociality and the political that can inspire us to consider political agency in relation to wider abolitionist projects.

No abstract