During the so-called "refugee crisis", the notion of an unparalleled German hospitality toward asylum seekers circulated within the (inter)national public sphere, often encapsulated by the blurry buzzword "Welcome Culture". In this article, we scrutinize these developments and suggest that the image of the so-called "crisis" has activated an unprecedented number of German citizens to engage in practices of "apolitical" helping. We argue that this trend has contributed to the emergence of what we term a new dispositif of helping, which embeds refugee solidarity in humanitarian parameters and often avoids an explicit political, spatial, and historical contextualization. This shift has activated individuals from the socio-political centre of society, well beyond the previously committed radical-left, antiracist, and faith-based groups. However, we aim to unmask forms of "apolitical" volunteering for refugees as a powerful myth: the new dispositif of helping comes with ambivalent and contradictory effects that range from forms of antipolitics to transformative political possibilities within the European border regime.

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While humanitarian action is often criticised for its focus on immediate needs in the present, social movements and political activists are usually thought to work towards a different future. With this article, we aim to complicate these clear-cut distinctions. We investigate how grassroots initiatives supporting migrants navigate different temporalities, relating their actions both to the present and to the future. These interwoven temporalities, however, come with ambivalent political effects. Drawing on cases from Belgium and Germany, we show how they range from potentially shrinking grassroots’ power to intervene to opening windows of political possibility. On the one hand, we illustrate how grassroots initiatives in Belgium feel stuck in a temporal dilemma, when they are forced to focus on the present. On the other hand, initiatives in Belgium and Germany have nonetheless engaged in strategies of future-making, trying to bring about more structural changes to migrants’ living conditions.

This article investigates the manifold attempts of governmental actors to make volunteering with refugees governable in light of the so-called German Welcome Culture in 2015. Driven by the notion of a need to interfere, authorities introduced numerous programmes and efforts seeking to order, coordinate, influence, and enhance volunteering with refugees in order to make it more “effective”. This investigation will suggest reading these interventions as attempts to (re)gain control and power over the conduct of committed citizens, making them complicit in the governance of asylum seekers, while co-opting potentially dissenting behaviour amongst them. Yet, it will also reveal how certain volunteers proved to contest their ascribed roles and responsibilities, demanding space for disagreement. Volunteering with refugees thus also constantly exceeded and defied governmental control and interference—and thereby remained, at least to a certain extent, ungovernable.

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