Claiming Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Migrants’ Protests and Border Controls

Abstract

The chapter will defend the argument that a certain interpretation of migrants’ (particularly refugees in our case) protests against border controls should be taken as a manifestation of claiming cosmopolitan citizenship. The argument has both an empirical and a normative dimension. On the empirical dimension of the argument, we will present and interpret migrants’ protests in Idomeni, Greece, regarding the closure of the EU borders in 2016. Did migrants claim certain rights, such as the right to mobility? Did they claim state citizenship? It will be argued that none of these claims represented their political subjectivity at the time. Moving on to the normative dimension of the argument it will be revealed that there is something inherent in migrants’ acts of protesting that might be taken as claiming cosmopolitan citizenship of a certain kind, challenging, among other things, methodological nationalism. Migrants’ protests challenge border controls, the state’s supposed ‘right to exclude,’ and strive for occupying a ‘place’ in the world.