Paper details

Paper authors	Robin Vandevoordt
In panel on	“Humanitarian borders” between care and control
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Several European governments have intensified their attempts to arrest, detain and deport migrants in transit. Resistance to this ‘politics of exhaustion’ (Devries & Welander 2016; Welander 2019) has come from a wide range of actors and collectives. In this presentation, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with citizen collectives in Belgium and across Europe, to describe how they have engaged in specific modes of political action that are in line with the humanitarian support they provide. While they have developed different repertoires of political action, they share two characteristics that distinguish them from most professional NGOs, and from more radical social movements. First, these civil actors use their everyday humanitarian work to maintain a continuous presence in the field, which shapes and feeds their political actions. Second, these civil actors embody a more particularist solidarity with a specific, localised group of migrants, which contrasts with the universalist reasoning that commonly underlies professional humanitarian action. Civil actors combining these two characteristics, I argue, represent a particularly ‘subversive’, politically reflexive form of humanitarianism (Vandevoordt 2019).

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