Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have brought food, clothes, medicines, and numerous others forms of support to newly arrived refugees. While humanitarian action has always been subversive, I argue that the recent wave of civil actions has pushed its subversive effects one step further. Whereas more modest forms of humanitarian action tend to misrecognise recipients’ social and political subjectivities, their more subversive counterparts can be better understood as enacting a particularistic form of solidarity that emphasises precisely those subjectivities. To explore the potential for political innovation in these civil initiatives, I argue that it can be useful to do so through the lens of “subversive humanitarianism”. More concretely, I suggest the following seven dimensions with which the subversive character of any humanitarian action can be compared across time and space: acts of civil disobedience; the reconstitution of social subjects; contending symbolic spaces; the creation of social spaces and personal bonds; assuming equality; putting minds into motion; and the transformation of individuals’ life-worlds. I support the argument by drawing upon the recent wave of empirical studies on civil initiatives across the continent as well as my own ethnographic data on the Brussels-based Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés.

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While European governments have increasingly externalised restrictive migration policies to civil actors, the latter's main interests lie in improving or defending immigrants' well-being.This raises the crucial question as to how civil actors deal with the puzzling position they find themselves in: to what extent do they execute or transform their funders' policy objectives?And which mechanisms enable them to do so?This article contributes to answering these puzzles by detailing the historical shifts in the roles played by civil actors in the Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programme in Belgium. Most importantly, the article argues that the considerable autonomy these civil actors achieved, resulted in two seemingly opposite effects. On the one hand, they developed a wealth of expertise in ensuring the quality of return, thereby transforming the national government's goals of managing migration into humanitarian ones. On the other hand, in recent developments their autonomy paradoxically became instrumental to migration management, not so much by changing their practices or values, but by changing their functioning within the wider field of migration policies. The article concludes by proposing the metaphor of 'immunisation' as an apt way of describing civil actors' practical and functionally role in migration management.

In 2015, hundreds of new civil initiatives emerged to provide stopgap help to refugees arriving in Belgium. This article zooms out from this moment of solidarity and explores the broader socio-political conditions that allowed these initiatives to emerge and, in some cases, solidify into professional service-providers or powerful political actors. The article focuses on two case studies, one in Flanders and one in Brussels. In Flanders, the Hospitable Network brings together local civil initiatives which have drawn upon the networks and skills of senior citizens with considerable experience in civic associations, NGOs and social movements. While these initiatives have partly filled the gaps that were created by a series of neoliberal reforms in Flanders’ citizenship regime, the same neoliberal outlook has prevented these initiatives from being institutionalised. In Brussels, the Citizen Platform for the Support of Refugees has mobilised largely among the city’s super-diverse population. The Platform’s development has been shaped by Brussels’ continuing attractiveness to immigrants, as well as by the city’s complex governance structure, which has provided it with both material support and increasing opposition. As a result, the Platform has become a highly visible political actor offering partly professionalised support to refugees.

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