The micropolitics of border struggles: migrants’ squats and inhabitance as alternatives to citizenship

Abstract

This paper discusses the struggles of the We Are Here movement in Amsterdam as resistance to both securitarian and humanitarian border regimes. It explores the tensions between everyday forms of commoning emerging in migrants' squats and technologies of enclosure and capture. In first place, the paper contends that the creation of housing squats marked an important shift in migrants' struggles that went from acts of protest, to the performance of resistance at the level of the micropolitics of borders. By squatting buildings and creating common living spaces, current struggles mobilise material, affective and political solidarities and constitute a politics of inhabitance beyond and against dependency on the state and humanitarian practices. The second part of the paper discusses the government's attempts to repress, govern and enclose the We Are Here movement within confined fields of action. With negotiations and humanitarian concessions through the provision of emergency shelters, local authorities attempted to redirect the movement into politics of rights and recognitions. However, these tactics did not succeed to contain the struggle in its entirety: many migrants rejected humanitarian solutions, continued to create radical home spaces through squatting, enacting a politics of inhabitance beyond citizenship.

Equals in Solidarity: Orfanotrofio’s Housing Squat as a Site for Political Subjectification Across Differences Amid the “Greek Crisis”

“…Migrant squats are socio‐material infrastructures that uproot racist regimes by re‐appropriating contested spaces and experimenting with alternative ways of organising everyday social reproduction (Dadusc et al 2019). They are part of a prefigurative praxis of constructing political spaces of equality where care is re‐signified as “a radical praxis of collective liberation” (Dadusc 2019:603). While place‐based, these practices and solidarities are not place‐bound.…”

“…Importantly, this process of making home was entirely different from the housing practices orchestrated by official actors, exceeding statist limits of hospitality not only discursively but also through embodied, material and affective everyday praxis. Orfanotrofio was not just a space for being housed, but demarcated an active appropriation of space and social relations and an “affirmation of presence, a here‐and‐now praxis of existence” (Dadusc 2019:594). It was a “centre of collective life” (Federici 2012:147) where the everyday work of caring and reproduction were collectivised and distinctions such as “citizen” and “noncitizen” were put into question.…”

Counter-mapping citizenship: bordering through domicide in Calais, France

“…According to Deanna Dadusc (2019), home-making practices within squatted housing for irregular migrants build affective relations and communities of care amongst inhabitants which are not constrained by the identity categories in the realm of 'proper'…”

“…Migrants inhabiting autonomous camps and squats are able, to some extent, to remain outside of the state's care/control governance framework and the humanitarian politics of dependence (see Chapter 4; Dadusc, 2019;Dadusc and Mudu, 2020). Therefore, first of all, the stick of material destruction is intended to create misery, hardship, exhaustion, and dependency in order for migrants to continue surviving.…”

We Are Here! Claim-making and Claim-placing of Undocumented Migrants in Amsterdam

“…372-373). If successful, these moments of inclusion challenge the everyday processes of exclusion, and exemplify the 'micropolitics of border struggles' (Dadusc, 2019).…”