Resisting Citizenship

Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. This book focuses on migrants’ self-organised housing strategies in Europe and the collective squatting of buildings and land.

In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. The solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists in these radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship. These do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. The contributions to this book address these struggles as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Deanna Dadusc is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton, UK. She conducts research on the criminalisation of migrants' solidarity and of urban struggles. Her research and teaching are informed by anti-racist and feminist approaches.

Margherita Grazioli is postdoctoral research fellow in the Urban Studies unit of the Social Sciences Department of the GSSI (Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy). She has conducted research about housing rights movements and policies in Rome, Italy, through activist ethnographic methodologies.

Miguel A. Martínez is Professor of Housing and Urban Sociology at the IBF (Institute for Housing and Urban Research) at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has conducted studies about urban sociology, housing, social movements, migration and participatory-activist methodologies. He is the author of Squatters in the Capitalist City (Routledge, 2020).