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- Convenors:
-
Monika Palmberger
(University of Vienna)
Elissa Helms (Central European University)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
This panel invites ethnographic explorations of how the anthropology of commoning can enrich studies of small-scale and resistant forms of solidarity, citizenship, or humanitarianism by migrants and non-migrants acting in physical and digital arenas to challenge EU border and migration regimes.
Long Abstract:
This panel examines how informal acts in various forms challenge and resist EU border and migration regimes. Recent discussions of commoning in anthropology, particularly mobile commons, bear resemblance to dynamics analyzed through other concepts that aim to theorize similar autonomous or subtle forms of citizenship, solidarity, or humanitarianism. Drawing on feminist perspectives that see citizenship and borders as constructed and gendered processes, we aim to explore how different actors—both "citizens" and "non-citizens" navigate rights, identities, and solidarities through embodied practices in both physical and digital environments, thereby transforming private and public spaces into political arenas.
Our focus is on how decentralized and resistant practices of migrants and non-migrants reshape and redefine communal belonging and structures of solidarity in relation to bordering and citizenship regimes. We ask how these often disparate threads of scholarship can be brought into dialogue with the anthropology of commoning to sharpen our understanding of how small-scale acts attempt to counter or mitigate the power of borders and migration regimes in the contemporary EU context. We invite ethnographically grounded papers that offer theoretical insights into the dynamics of everyday, small-scale acts and activism around the EU border regime in digital and physical arenas. How do these practices challenge dominant forms of knowledge and social relations? How do they navigate inclusion and exclusion in a polycrisis context? Finally, how can the concept of the commons be brought into theoretical dialogue with related concepts such as resistant forms of solidarity, citizenship, humanitarianism or autonomous approaches to migration?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
Based on digital ethnography, this presentation examines everyday strategies of Persian and Arabic speakers planning irregular migration to Europe, revealing a nuanced moral economy and showcasing migrants' agency and decision-making within migration autonomy theory.
Contribution long abstract:
Based on the analysis Persian and Arabic speakers' border-crossing facilitation practices, this article challenges conventional dichotomies between smugglers and migrants, reflecting on the complex and dynamic relationships within emic migration networks.
Unauthorized migrants are active agents engaged in meticulous decision-making processes as they plan their departures and subsequent journeys. Contrary to the portrayal of passive victims ensnared by smugglers, they perceive themselves as resilient navigators who overcome challenges and make calculated decisions to expedite their journeys. Our analysis reveals a relationship between migrants and smugglers, which may fall within a ‘solidarity and reciprocity framework’ rooted in localized moral constructs. Facilitation of unauthorized migration produces a collective repository of migratory knowledge, fostering a community based on shared insights and on the overarching objective of shepherding refugees to safety. In this context, smuggling emerges not as an illegal enterprise but as a grassroots refugee-protection mechanism, characteristic of a bottom-up support system.
Indeed, these practices can be better interpreted if we adopt Papadopoulos and Tsianos's (2013) concept of ‘mobile commons,’ which denotes the ability of unauthorized migrants and other itinerant populations to establish communal spaces of solidarity that transcend borders, engaging in practices of collective resource-sharing, mutual aid, and social support.
Contribution short abstract:
This study explores grassroots solidarity practices along the Balkan routes, focusing on their role in supporting migrants and challenging EU migration policies. Based on engaged ethnographic research, it examines the practical and relational dynamics that foster inclusive alternative
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution examines grassroots solidarity initiatives along the Balkan routes, focusing on their dual role in providing essential support to migrants while challenging exclusionary EU migration policies. Based on ethnographic research in Greece, Bulgaria, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, it explores "debordering" practices (Ambrosini, 2021) employed by grassroots organizations, groups and collectives. These include mutual aid and care, such as distributing food, offering medical and legal assistance, providing recreational activities, and activating aid networks. Though not always overtly confrontational, these initiatives resist exclusionary policies and challenge repressive border regimes.
Drawing on theories of commoning as cooperative practices, the study shows how solidarity efforts manifest commoning through collective acts of providing basic necessities, medical aid, and safe spaces. These practices contest state-imposed divisions by embodying shared responsibility and reciprocity that transcends borders. The study highlights the relational dynamics behind these efforts, arguing that alliances fostered in these contexts are crucial for building alternative forms of recognition and inclusion.
By examining processes of sharing, exchanging, and commoning between solidarians and people on the move, the study reveals how grassroots initiatives experiment with commons-based approaches to life sustenance and mutual aid, thereby forging new political capacities. These initiatives create spaces that reimagine solidarity and care, embodying what Berlant (2016) describes as the commons' "generative capacity beyond brokenness." They offer ways to navigate and transform contexts of institutional abandonment and systemic exclusion. In doing so, they provide pathways to rethink solidarity, belonging, and life sustenance in the face of systemic border violence.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores how a grassroots mission at the EU border blends aid with radical solidarity, building informal networks that resist border regimes. Drawing on ethnographic analysis, it shows how evolving political philosophies shape transnational social actions and forms of resistance.
Contribution long abstract:
After nearly a decade at the center of political debate, crisis narratives around borders and migration—once driving civil society engagement—are now eroding solidarity, fueled by the rise of right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric. In this climate of growing repression, grassroots organizations that emerged during the “long summer of migration” confront tensions between their roles as humanitarian actors and proponents of radical solidarity.
This paper examines the “humanitarian mission” of an Italian grassroots organization operating at the EU’s external border between Bosnia and Croatia in November 2021, highlighting how such interventions combine traditional humanitarianism with elements of “mobile commons.” While providing basic aid and engaging in advocacy, the mission also fosters informal transnational solidarity networks aimed at counter-mapping borderscapes and supporting unauthorized crossings. These practices, guided by principles of global equality, anti-racism, and freedom of movement, consciously seek to minimize structural hierarchies in interactions among local and international activists and people on the move.
By producing an ethnographic account of how these two paradigms—humanitarian aid and radical solidarity—intertwine in practice, this paper reveals how grassroots actors balance diverse values and tactics. The blending of heterogeneous practices reflects both participants’ varied ideological frameworks and the strategic need to navigate unfavorable power relations within the EU’s multi-actor, multi-layered governance of migration and borders.
Ultimately, this study offers insights into how the political philosophies underlying different forms of social action and the meanings associated by activists with core concepts —such as solidarity, humanitarianism, and resistance—are reshaped and transformed over time.
Contribution short abstract:
Based on ongoing ethnographic research, the paper examines some of the undercommons of biometric citizenship in Sierra Leone that entail prolific practices of critique addressing global exclusions and mobility control as well as potentials of living and feeling otherwise.
Contribution long abstract:
In Sierra Leone, citizenship has historically been at the forefront of controversies around rights, resources and belonging. At the same time, holding the Sierra Leonean passport as one of the least powerful ones worldwide can in some instances be considered more of a burden than a property. As a postcolonial and imperial tool, it delegates its owners to one of the last ranks in livelihood and freedom of movement globally. These tensions have become more apparent with the formalization of non-/citizen status in the wake of the global push for “legal identity for all” (Sustainable Development Goal 16.9). Sierra Leone introduced a biometric civil register in 2017, followed by a digital ID card in 2023. This project has received major funding from the European Union which thereby seeks to control irregular migration from West Africa to Europe.
Based on ongoing ethnographic research, the paper examines some of the undercommons of biometric citizenship in Sierra Leone. People subvert such nation-state identification linked to digital identifies for example by doing without it, mobilizing intermediaries or playing with identities. The paper then examines the prolific practices of critique and potentials of living and feeling otherwise associated with these undercommons. They may temporarily achieve to dissolve these dichotomies between local belonging and global exclusion.
Contribution short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research in a town on the Bosnian border with Croatia/EU, this paper uses small-scale autonomous aid to migrants in defiance of prohibitions on giving aid to carve conceptual space for such actions within frameworks of humanitarianism, citizenship, solidarity, and commoning.
Contribution long abstract:
Since 2018, Bihac, a small town in northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina close to the Croatia/EU border, has been a gathering site for irregularized migrants traveling the Balkan Route to the EU. Expectations were that local residents, the majority being Bosnian Muslims, would feel solidarity with the mostly Muslim migrants. However, as in neighboring countries without Muslim populations, many soon turned against people on the move, casting them as illegal “economic” migrants, leading to vocal initiatives to drive them away. Local authorities began to restrict migrants’ movement and to de-facto forbid people from offering food, lodging, or transportation, while EU money funded the establishment of reception centers, or camps, where minimal care combined with control and containment. During my ethnographic research in Bihac in 2019-2020, many migrants preferred to avoid the camps in favor of squats and make-shift shelters in and around the town. Despite the near criminalization of offering aid, there were local residents who continued to quietly support migrants from their own resources and as autonomous actors not affiliated with organizations or aid groups. This paper addresses this spontaneous and autonomous aid as a way to bring together concepts typically applied to similar activities - vernacular humanitarianism, everyday citizenship, or migrant solidarity – with the idea of mobile commons in an attempt to call attention to these acts of generosity that are not only invisible in dominant accounts of responses to migrants but also made invisible through the emphasis on political resistance present in most scholarly assessments of small-scale aid.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper examines digital commons in migrant solidarity practices in European borderlands. Drawing on ethnography among Afghans on the move in Southeastern Europe, it explores the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the everyday use of digital technologies.
Contribution long abstract:
Over the past decade, digital technologies have become deeply embedded in EU border regimes. Tools such as smartphones, social media, and messaging platforms play an important role among people on the move, providing access to resources and knowledge for navigating perilous, illegalised, journeys. The nature of these journeys and the reliance on digital technologies are increasingly shaped by the growing barriers to legal mobility faced by people in search of international protection.
This paper draws on multisited ethnographic research conducted between 2021 and 2023 among Afghans on the move and grassroots solidarity networks in Southeastern Europe. Focusing on border regions in Bosnia-and-Herzegovina and Serbia, where online communication often served as the primary connection between dispersed people on the move and solidarians, it investigates the dynamics of digital infrastructures' inclusion and exclusion within the constraints of EU migration regimes. To theorize these dynamics, the paper engages with the concept of the digital commons and practices of digital commoning, framing digital spaces and materialities as important sites for solidarity practices but also exploitation to emerge. Then, how do dynamics of inclusion and exclusion play out on digital media among people on the move in relation to the EU border regimes? How can the concepts of digital commons help us understand practices of solidarity and exploitation in borderlands?
Through ethnographic vignettes presenting interactions between and among people on the move and grassroots workers, I examine how resources and knowledge are shared and how people navigate the tensions between exclusion and inclusion.
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on longitudinal visual research of everyday migrant activism this paper seeks to better understand and theorise various activist engagements of transborder workers in the Polish-German border zone and recent migrants in Berlin-Brandenburg region.
Contribution long abstract:
In the VISION Project we work both with people who still leave in Poland and commute every day to warehouses and factories in Brandenburg, and those who have recently moved to Germany, but often keep strong ties to Poland and go back on very regular basis. We conduct ethnography and interviews and use collaborative artistic methods to better understand this geographically broad and socially diverse field. My particular interest in the project lies in tracing informal, everyday engagements of our research participants. In doing so, I draw from my earlier research on everyday activism, everyday migrant activism and using (longitudinal) visual ethnography to 'visualise' these, otherwise mostly invisible, engagements (Goldstein 2017, 2021, 2025-forthcoming; Goldstein & Lorenz 2019, 2022).
Engaging in an artistic collaborative project with them and tracing their life stories and histories of their often 'everyday' activism allows us to notice and better understand the broad spectrum and discreet forms of their social engagement on both sides of the border. It also sheds new light on their relationships not only with their compatriots and the host community but also with Ukrainian refugees, who are still an often overlooked but important actor in the Polish-German border region.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper presents ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the author worked as an activist with People on the Move (PoM) in squats. It examines how in the betwixtness of illegalized border crossing resistive knowledge commons arise and create solidary relationships.
Contribution long abstract:
My paper presents findings of my ethnografic field work in the border town of Velika Kladuša, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), while working as an activist with People on the Move (PoM). Here, I only went into squats, not official camps. My aim was to find everyday life-making practices in liminality through participant observation, interviews and digital data collection. The concept of liminality is reproducing, reaffirming and at the same time challenging borders and categories. In this betwixtness new knowledge orders are formed: The official ‚helpers‘ like Red Cross, IOM, Danish Refugee Council become dangerous for PoM and grassroots activists by collaborating with state authorities and police. So, not only warning texts on the Facebook Messenger like „no come today, police is here“ by PoM are usual, but also „hide, red cross coming“ or distracting these NGOs, so the activists, who are illegalised as well in BiH, can sneak away. This act of care and trust towards certain people and organisations are signs of resistance, they form and strengthen solidary relationships between PoM and regular EU citizens, groups pitted against each other in the hegemonic discourse. I want to discuss to what extend these practices of commoning knowledge (what is to be said to whom and how) can be un/commoning at the same time – since the practiced divide between nationality, ethnicity, and sometimes native town, even in the very same squat, is excluding by nature – and how concepts of liminality, resistance and commoning can be utilised productively together.