Migration Protest Movements And The Politics Of Resistance

Migration and cosmopolitanism are said to be complementary. Cosmopolitanism means to be a citizen of the world, and migration, without impediments, should be the natural starting point for a cosmopolitan view. However, the intensification of migration, through an increasing number of refugees and economic migrants, has generated anti-cosmopolitan stances. Using the concept of cosmopolitanism as it emerges from migrant protests like?Sans Papiers, No One Is Illegal, and No Borders, an interdisciplinary group of scholars addresses this discrepancy and explores how migrant protest movements elicit a new form of radical cosmopolitanism. The combination of basic theoretical concepts and detailed empirical analysis in this book will advance the theoretical debate on the inherent cosmopolitan aspects of migrant activism. As such, it will be a valuable contribution to students, researchers and scholars of political science, sociology and philosophy.

Over the past two years, large-scale migratory movements to Europe have gained worldwide attention, and have prompted ever-greater desires to govern and control them. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of political struggles for rights to movement and demands for greater social justice, in both the global ‘north’ and ‘south’. Throughout the world, political mobilizations by refugees, irregularized migrants and solidarity activists have emerged, demanding and enacting the right to move and to stay, struggling for citizenship and human rights, and protesting the violence and deadliness of contemporary border regimes. This collection brings together articles that explore political mobilizations in several countries and (border) regions, including Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Austria, Germany, Greece, Turkey and ‘the Mediterranean’. Many of these political mobilizations can be understood as transnational responses to processes of regionalization and the intensification of restrictive border regimes across the globe, and as illustrative of what might be referred to as a ‘new era of protest’.

Recognizing the radical disparity between migration/border policy and constitutional law "inside these borders.", Kathleen R. Arnold focuses on two main forms of migrant protest to explore the meaning of resistance in a sovereign context: self-harming protest by detainees and faith-based sanctuary of individuals scheduled for detention. This activism creates a "democratic state of exception," interrupting the legal process, altering discretionary forms of sovereign power, and enacting rights not formally granted; these efforts go beyond the assertion of liberal rights or merely restoring the rule of law (even if these are goals), challenging the warfare state while constituting a demos that is formally illegible. Migrant Protest and Democratic States of Exception will be of interest to scholars, migrant advocacy professionals (including INGO and IGO officers), graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in a variety of fields from legal studies to forced migration and refugee studies; political science, human rights, protest history and contemporary movements.

Migrant protest has proliferated worldwide in the last two decades, explicitly posing questions of identity, rights, and equality in a globalized world. Nonetheless, such mobilizations are considered anomalies in social movement studies, and political sociology more broadly, due to 'weak interests' and a particularly disadvantageous position of 'outsiders' to claim rights connected to citizenship. In an attempt to address this seeming paradox, this book explores the interactions and spaces shaping the emergence, trajectory, and fragmentation of migrant protest in unfavourable contexts of marginalization. Such a perspective unveils both the odds of precarious mobilizations, and the ways they can be temporarily overcome. While adopting the encompassing terminology of 'migrant', the book focusses on precarious migrants, including both asylum seekers and 'illegalized' migrants.

Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.

Edited collection on migration and civil society

This book offers a unique contribution, exploring how the intersections among migrants and radical squatter’s movements have evolved over past decades. The complexity and importance of squatting practices are analyzed from a bottom-up perspective, to demonstrate how the spaces of squatting can be transformed by migrants. With contributions from scholars, scholar-activists, and activists, this book provides unique insights into how squatting has offered an alternative to dominant anti-immigrant policies, and the implications of squatting on the social acceptance of migrants. It illustrates the different mechanisms of protest followed in solidarity by migrant squatters and Social Center activists, when discrimination comes from above or below, and explores how can different spatialities be conceived and realized by radical practices. Contributions adopt a variety of perspectives, from critical human geography, social movement studies, political sociology, urban anthropology, autonomous Marxism, feminism, open localism, anarchism and post-structuralism, to analyze and contextualize migrants and squatters’ exclusion and social justice issues. This book is a timely and original contribution through its exploration of migrations, squatting and radical autonomy.

This book brings together philosophical, social-theoretical and empirically oriented contributions on the philosophical and socio-theoretical debate on migration and integration, using the instruments of recognition as a normative and social-scientific category. Furthermore, the theoretical and practical implications of recognition theory are reflected through the case of migration. Migration movements, refugees and the associated tensions are phenomena that have become the focus of scientific, political and public debate in recent years. Migrants, in particular refugees, face many injustices and are especially vulnerable, but the right-wing political discourse presents them as threats to social order and stability. This book shows what a critical theory of recognition can contribute to the debate. The book is suitable for researchers in philosophy, social theory and migration research. "A profound examination of how states and societies struggle to recognize migrants as fellow human beings in all their fullness. The contributions are exceptional for combining astute philosophy and social theory with a discussion of actual politics and real lives." Dr. Hugo Slim (Senior Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and formerly Head of Policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross) “This impressive and timely volume offers an innovative way of understanding the issues of migration and integration by using a critical theory of recognition. Recognition theory has rich potential for effectively responding to the issues of autonomy, identity, integration, and empowerment that are at the core of the current public debates on mass migration, displacement, and the refugee crisis. By examining the normative and policy implications of recognition as they apply to migration, the book offers a pathbreaking look at the human dimension of the debate.” Dr. Helle Porsdam (Professor of Law and Humanities and UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights University of Copenhagen)