Paper short abstract:

This paper traces two initiatives in a rural village in the West of Austria, to look into the law as a source of power in negotiations of citizenship for migrants and non-migrants.

Paper long abstract:

In the spring of 2015, a volunteers' initiative in a rural municipality in the West of Austria announced that it had invented and granted "municipal asylum" to two asylum seekers, in order to protect them from deportation through national authorities. Meanwhile, a second initiative began to look after the "integration" of the men concerned by involving them in voluntary work assignments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the law as a central source of power to articulate and negotiate citizenship "from below". While both initiatives clearly positioned themselves in relation to the law and legality, they did so with very different effects, as they used the law to both politicize and de-politicize their strategies.