Description
This paper explores the unique case of borderzone solidarity between citizens and migrants to consider whether it is being incorporated into the state apparatus through its professionalization. As an empirical focus, I investigate European citizen solidarity with migrants since 2015, focusing on a case study of the Franco-Italian borderzone. There, the solidarity practices that are becoming more permanent and professionalized are those most resembling the state’s definition of humanitarianism. Understanding such humanitarianism as a form of governmentality reveals how the state is co-opting citizen-led solidarity to fit within an acceptable range of actions that maintain the status quo. In contexts of repression of solidarity, people may continue to resist, or they may adapt their activities to make them more legible to the state, while at the same time risking becoming part of that apparatus that they seek to change. Therefore, we can question whether there is a subversive element to this professionalization in the way in which it protects solidarity actors from criminalization while enabling them to continue claiming rights alongside marginalized migrants. Such developments may also contribute to fractures between different groups practicing solidarity in different ways. Certain actors deliberately professionalize to facilitate their work, while others deliberately refuse further organization and structure. Borderzone activism is not only confined to the migration sphere, and this research contributes to new understandings of solidarity activism across borders and how those actors relate to each other and the state.
