Paper details

Paper authors	Philip Proudfoot
In panel on	Transitory Spaces and Insurgent Citizenship Practices: Refugee and Migrant Activists as Humanitarian and Political Actors
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper compares insurgent citizenship practices among refugees and activists in two transit destinations: Athens and Beirut. ‘Outed’ refugees face evictions, violence, and the loss of kinship support networks. LGBT refugees and their allies have responded by attempting to establish networks of solidarity that replace formal and heterosexually-based kinship and access to services.

Through fieldwork in Beirut and Athens we examine how two alternative grassroots and NGO responses (respectively) to the predicament of LGBT refugees. In doing so, we reveal the limitations of citizenship ‘as an ultimate goal’ in two country’s both suffering from an incapacitated welfare state. Instead we reveal how two different forms of solidarity seek to address directly the material basis for queer refugee precarity. In so doing we argue against an overbearing ‘neoliberalization/resistance’ framework and instead describe, ethnographically, how refugees found value (re-)invested in their lives through activism and friendships, how they strategized around advancing their asylum cases, and healed from the trauma of persecution. We conclude that humanitarianism, while operating within the logic of modern governance, opens up a political space in which welfare rights are centralized. These rights are demanded through (and against) the grain of resiliency humanitarianism.

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