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Paper short abstract:

This papers investigates the multiple contexts where migrants resort to notions of rights to contest border regimes. It examines how equal notions of rights inspired the opposition to state legal categories and the formulation of rights'claims in the mobilization against border regimes in Germany.

Paper long abstract:

My paper addresses the interplay between legal status, collective identities and mobilization against border regimes in Berlin (Germany). The paper will draw on on a 11-month ethnography that I conducted in Berlin in 2018.

The paper explores how precarious legal status can become a salient collective identity enabling the mobilization of migrants against border regimes. It investigates how political mobilization challenges state-assigned legal categories and contests the legal notion of refugees.

Equal notions of rights inspired the mobilization against legal hierarchies and contested the stratified access to rights that migrants have access to as a function of their legal status.

My paper investigates the multiple interactions between migrants' mobilization and the law. Notions of rights shape collective identities and inspire the opposition against state legal categories. However, migrants and other social actors opposing border regimes in Berlin also resorted to notions of rights to frame their claims.

This papers analysed their claims, in particular the claim to universal freedom of movement and the right to stay. It explores how migrants interpreted that claim, whether they considered it as a human right and how they construct human rights.

The paper will examine the approach of migrants and other social actors that oppose border regime towards human rights and the law. Little is known about the interpretation of human rights of marginalized, subaltern groups such as migrants. This paper will resort to ethnographic data to shedding light on this area that has received little attention within the scholarship of social movements.