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Acts of Disengagement in Border Struggles: Fugitive Practices of Refusal

Acts of Disengagement in Border Struggles: Fugitive Practices of Refusal IntroductionYou need to ask yourself why people are sleeping during the meetings.(Lydia, a 30‐year‐old woman from Uganda, 2016)I had enough; I don't attend these meetings anymore.(Ahmed, a 44‐year‐old man from Iran, 2017)There was an uncomfortable silence that I felt immediately. Most people were leaning back in their chairs, looked at their phones or had their eyes closed.(Research diary entry, 2017)This paper has evolved from long‐term ethnographic work and activist involvement in different forms of border struggle in Berlin (Germany) and London (the United Kingdom [UK]) between October 2015 and July 2018. While the overall research project encompasses a wide range of different forms of resistance, refusal, and action, this paper is inspired by some individuals' acts of disengagement within and from various activist group spaces and political activism at large. These disengagements took the form of staying silent or being distracted, sleeping during activist meetings, distancing oneself from activist groups and objectives during conversations, or completely withdrawing from these spaces. Rather than reading these practices as passive resignation, this paper approaches them, first, as practices of refusal and evasion that expose notions of the political rooted in liberal struggles over power and freedom as not only risky but inherently self‐defeating and, second, as radically optimistic and vitalising practices of recovery and care that insist on alternative modes of thinking, practising, and experiencing sociality and the political.All individuals who participated in this research were engaged in asylum regimes in Germany or the UK. As an aspect of wider border regimes, asylum regimes have become one of the main stakes in the global geopolitics of migration control (De Genova et al. 2018) and everyday bordering (Yuval‐Davis et al. 2019). Herein, I use the term “asylum regime” to refer to the power enacted through the asylum system in addition to the wide range of differently situated subjects and bordering practices engaged within the regime and the broader politics of racialised exclusion, criminalisation, and hostile environment that seek to control the entry, lives, and deaths of people racialised and criminalised as migrants (El‐Enany 2020; Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Webber 2019; see also Meier and Donà 2021).I shall begin by exploring the research context and activist struggles that were ongoing in Germany (Berlin) and the UK (London) while this research took place. The second section of the article will discuss writings on quiet politics, fugitivity, and refusal with the aim of contextualising the disengagements that inspired this article. I shall then proceed to detail my methodological approach before mapping people's fugitive practices of refusal, evasion, recovery, and care in the paper's final section.Research ContextsIn Berlin, between 2015 and 2017, considerable local resistance emerged around the so‐called Lagers (refugee camps), centred on their poor conditions and their increasing securitisation and privatisation that had rendered them uninhabitable spaces at the hands of for‐profit agencies (Campbell and Fábos 2017; Jakil 2020; Sowa 2020). Berlin, with its population of 3.6 million, was temporarily housing around 70,000 people who were racialised and criminalised as migrants (BAMF 2018). According to Flüchtlingsrat Berlin (the German Refugee Council), approximately 85% of people who arrived in Berlin in 2015 and 2016 were housed in mass shelters that were structured like camps. Most such shelters were located in former hotels, gyms, sports halls, schools, and airports. These mass shelters were initially intended as a temporary solution; in December 2016, however, one year after the peak month of November 2015, when close to 10,000 people had arrived in Berlin in search of refuge, around 2,800 people were still living in sports halls and other types of emergency accommodation. These shelters were initially located in the inner city, and their centrality allowed their inhabitants to self‐organise and to derive sustenance from the solidarity offered by groups and local people who lived in close proximity to the Lagers. Alongside the struggles associated with the camps, the occupation and reclamation of spaces of agency and survival became a key tactic of resistance and endurance in Berlin. By the time this research project began, the two‐year‐long Oranienplatz occupation (Bhimji 2016, 2020, 2023; Fontanari 2017; Landry 2015; Wilcke and Lambert 2015) had already been cleared by the police, but the occupation of the former Gerhart Hauptmann school by people who had been racialised and criminalised as migrants, as well as local activist groups in Berlin‐Kreuzberg, was ongoing and persisted until the summer of 2016, when the final remaining 12 individuals received eviction notices.In the UK, between 2015 and 2018, detention centres had emerged as key spaces of resistance and mobilisation. The UK has one of Europe's largest immigration detention industries and is the only European country in which the indefinite administrative detention of people who have been racialised and criminalised as migrants is legal. In comparison to Germany, the number of asylum applications remained relatively stable during those years, with the highest number of people on the move arriving in the UK in 2015 (Refugee Council 2018). The research took place several years after Theresa May's call for the creation of a “really hostile environment”, when the recently implemented 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts prevented many people from accessing housing, healthcare, education, work, bank accounts, and benefits (Goodfellow 2020; Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Webber 2019). The Acts led to increased ID checks within the British National Health Service (NHS), drastically reducing access to healthcare services for people with insecure status, for fear that they would be detained and deported. These Acts also introduced an asylum allowance of a mere £37 per week, reducing by half the basic income support that people trapped in the asylum system had received prior to the introduction of the Acts. The “deport first, appeal later” measure in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts stripped thousands of people of the right to an in‐country appeal, detaining them for many years, with the result that over half of them were placed on ongoing suicide watch (Webber 2019). During the research period, ongoing campaigns against these measures were enacted by groups including Women for Refugee Women, Movement for Justice, the Crossroads Women's Centre, and Sisters Uncut. People racialised and criminalised as migrants and people who are or were formerly imprisoned within the detention estate, as well as those in solidarity with these people, organised regular protests inside and in front of various detention centres across the UK. Yarl's Wood, an immigration removal centre for women operated by Serco in Bedfordshire, is among the detention centres that have received the most public attention owing to its involvement in several controversies, including allegations of sexual abuse, racism, and mistreatment (Gentleman 2015; Taylor 2021).Approaching Alternative Maps of the Political through RefusalA wide range of scholarship within the discipline of geography has emphasised the need for alternative maps of the political. Scholars have approached these alternative maps of the political through counter‐mapping (e.g. Counter Cartographies Collective et al. 2012; Tazzioli 2015; Tazzioli and Garelli 2019) as a tool of “seeing differently or seeing more” (Tazzioli and Garelli 2019:398), through re‐thinking notions of agency (Hughes 2022; Zanotti 2013), and through Black (e.g. Bledsoe & Wright 2019; Harvey and Karina 2022; Mugabo 2019; Noxolo 2022), feminist (e.g. Katz 2018; Pain and Staeheli 2014), decolonial (e.g. Daigle and Ramírez 2019; de Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Smyth 2023; Zaragocin 2019), and abolitionist (e.g. Gilmore 2022; Inwood et al. 2021) approaches to geography.This article interrogates alternative maps of the political through theories of fugitivity and refusal. During the research period, occupations, sit‐ins, hunger strikes, lip sewing, and long marches within and across European borders received considerable media and scholarly attention (Fiske 2016; Steinhilper and Ataç 2019; Swerts 2017). However, the fugitive practices of refusal observed within activist campaign spaces that are the subject of this paper were often not loud and confrontational, but rather quiet and subtle and as such require critical attunement to embodied experiences and their relationship to the political.Within wider feminist geographies of resistance, scholars have explored quiet politics (Askins 2014, 2015; Hankins 2017; Pottinger 2017; Sprengel 2020) as small, embodied, and everyday political practices that frequently go unnoticed. For Pottinger (2017:217), quiet activism constitutes “a form of engagement that emphasises embodied, practical, tactile and creative ways of acting, resisting, reworking and subverting”. Quiet activism is variously described as “unassuming” (Askins 2014), “gradually, episodically” (Hankins 2017), or a form of “micro‐politics” (Mann 1994) that slowly reworks existing power structures by creating new possibilities and openings. The concept of quiet politics draws attention to the entanglement of politics and everyday life and how these “everyday activities in quotidian spaces … are part of a broader continuum of movements for change” (Askins 2015:475). While these feminist approaches to quiet politics offer a useful lens through which to view the complex ways in which intimate and everyday practices are interwoven with wider geopolitics (Pain and Staeheli 2014), the acts of disengagement performed and narrated make sense only when these practices are contextualised within wider systems of coloniality and racialisation.This paper draws inspiration from Black radical scholars’ writings on fugitivity as a central approach to thinking about Black life through the lens of abolitionist politics (Campt 2014, 2017a, 2017b; Gumbs 2016; Harney and Moten 2013; Hartman 1997; Hesse and Hocker 2017; Moten 2008; Sharpe 2016). It contemplates how people's acts of disengagement may be understood beyond single acts of resistance, non‐cooperation, or withdrawal, and asks what unsettling is happening if these actions are instead framed as a different collective political practice. What everyday freedoms become available in the absence of resistance and agency?Turning away from state‐centred, formal, or institutionalised practices and ideas of the political—in other words, the political as commonly theorised—scholars working with Afro‐pessimism and other approaches have turned to “constitutively fugitive” Black sociality (Hesse and Hocker 2017) and its “transformative political imaginaries”. This body of scholarship demonstrates that formal political categories actively invisibilise Black agency and that theories and practices must accordingly think and act against and outside the state as the formal arena and horizon of both politics and life. This act of turning away from formal “politics” becomes an important “loophole of retreat” (Jacobs 2009:26) that allows for practices of recovery that both value and defend Black life. In his essay “The Case of Blackness”, Fred Moten (2008) defines fugitivity as a political intervention of disordering based on the status of anti‐Blackness as the “constitutive supplement” of White supremacy. By refusing and evading liberal frameworks of political and its norms, these agencies “make, enjoy, and prefigure ‘another world in this one’” (Shulman 2021:278).Chávez (2017:68) highlights two different conceptualisations of fugitivity: first, drawing on work by Keguro Macharia (2016), fugitivity is approached by “seeing around corners, stockpiling in crevices, knowing the ‘unrules’, being unruly, because the rules are never enough, and not even close”. Second, to quote Jack Halberstam's (2013:11) introduction to Harney and Moten's book The Undercommons, fugitivity is framed as a state of being in motion: “being in motion that has learned that ‘organizations are obstacles to organising ourselves’ (The Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection) and that there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned”.These agencies can therefore not be understood through the concept of resistance, as they are not opposing or resisting a system or political order, but rather are actively refusing a form of existence that presently and historically negates the experiences and social lives of Black people. As such, the vitality of “black sociality” (Harney and Moten 2013:137) is always already a form of refusal. Fugitivity, according to Moten (2008), intrinsically comprises informal practices that give form to Black social life and agency that can be witnessed in day‐to‐day life, Black community, collaboration, care, and experimentation as well as in reflection and religious practice.Fugitivity is rooted in a wider politics of refusal: “It's the refusal to be a subject to a law that refuses to recognize you. Its [sic] defined not by opposition or necessarily resistance, but instead a refusal of the very premises that have historically negated the lived experience of Blackness as either pathological or exceptional to the logic of white supremacy” (Campt 2014, quoted in Sojoyner 2017:527).Formulations of a wider politics of refusal can be traced back to a long tradition of radical and feminist Black thinkers (e.g. Collins 1986; Douglass 2016; Hartman 1997; Lorde 1997; Spillers 1987; Truth 1993). In 2007, Audra Simpson coined the term “ethnographic refusal” to describe the generative practice and collective act of becoming otherwise. Her writings questioned the methods, ethics, politics, and theories underpinning ethnographic research, which she contextualises within ongoing systems and logics of settler colonialism justifying the acquisition of bodies, territories, and knowledge (Simpson 2007; see also Maldonado‐Torres 2007; Tuck and Yang 2014). Simpson draws attention to Mohawk people's refusal to engage with juridical categories that evolved from colonial violence and dispossession and explores how their acts of refusal demand other political orders. Their refusal to “play the game” (Simpson 2017) recognises the broader power imbalances already entrenched through these orders and exposes the falsity of the underlying promise of their inclusion and agency within the system. These practices of refusal are generative in that they constitute a “redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned” (Tuck and Yang 2014:239). As such, Simpson (2017:21) also frames refusal as a “theory of the political” that “was being pronounced over and over again”.Refusal is thus a mode of engagement (Ferreira da Silva 2018), a method (Zahara 2016), an analytical tool, and a theory of the political (Simpson 2017) that is generative and optimistic, by means of the fact that it inspires alternative approaches to thinking and living in the world. As such, refusal cannot be wholly removed from its genealogy and roots in Black and Indigenous life and struggles: the disembodiment of a politics of refusal from a mode of engagement, a way of being in the world, reducing it to a single act of resistance or non‐cooperation would fail to do justice to the radical disruption and disordering that such forms of engagement produce.Thinking with and through a politics of refusal and fugitivity in the context of EU border struggles and the vast numbers of differently situated people racialised and criminalised as migrants engaged within them offers important learning points. First, it supports reflection on how political ontologies of resistance can also function as technologies of racialisation and ordering as they function within the same symbolic orders and norms of subjectivity, governmentality, and sovereignty by striving for status and state recognition (Harney and Moten 2013). This can cause people to become trapped in a cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) as the existing system and aligned project of modernity “disavowed the constitutive power of empire and race as well as black engagement with them” (Shulman 2021:273). As such, thinking with and through a politics of refusal can inspire “re‐imagining the form and content of a radically democratic politics” (Shulman 2021:275).Second, while concepts such as borderscapes (Brambilla 2015; Rajaram and Grundy‐Warr 2007) approach borders as spaces of transformation, dialogical tension, and constant negotiation (Rajaram and Grundy‐Warr 2007), focusing on the permeability of borders, writings on fugitivity and refusal elucidate the impermeability of many borders within existing systems and the need to reject false promises of agency and inclusion within the system as it is. Rather, such approaches advocate shifting the focus to the possibility and hope that may be found in collective politics, imagining, theorising, and practising other forms of relating, radical sociability, and modes of political action.Thirdly, thinking through politics of refusal in the context of EU border struggles encourages us to ask critical questions as to what extent the border and migration scholarship we engage with as writers becomes complicit in erasing histories and presents of racism and logics of coloniality and what effects that has (e.g. Whitley 2017). Although generations of Black and critical ethnic studies have offered detailed analysis of dehumanisation, techniques of power and domination, exploitation, and violence that would provide important correctives to Foucault's and Agamben's considerations of racism and biopolitics (see Weheliye 2014), these theories are often overlooked. According to Weheliye (2014:6), this “bespeaks a broader tendency in which theoretical formulations by white European thinkers are granted a conceptual carte blanche, while those uttered from the purview of minority discourse that speak to the same questions are almost exclusively relegated to the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality”.MethodologyThis paper emerged from long‐term ethnographic work and activist involvement between October 2015 and July 2018 at two international sites: London (UK) and Berlin (Germany). Both cities have robust and wide‐reaching networks of activism and resistance movements that take various shapes and forms and through which people mobilise for the abolition of borders and detention centres and to advocate for migrants’ rights. These movements also typically have connections to feminist struggles, racial capitalism, and austerity. The research reported herein was based on participatory observation of campaign meetings, local actions, and larger demonstrations, as well as in‐depth interviews in the form of ongoing conversations with 20 people in each city about their everyday lives and experience of activist spaces. The research project captures the experiences of a wide range of differently situated people racialised and criminalised as migrants: some of whom had had their claims refused; some of whom had received temporary leave to remain but were still subject to illegalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation; and some of whom were still waiting to enter the asylum system or had made the decision not to enter the system. The interviewees had arrived in Germany and the UK between 2005 and 2016, having undertaken dangerous, sometimes life‐threatening, journeys from 17 different countries. The people quoted in this paper came from Uganda, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Iran, Nigeria, and Egypt. Mara, a 35‐year‐old middle‐class woman from Egypt, arrived in Germany in 2015 after living in the Netherlands for 8 months. Mara was a PhD student before having to flee the country after receiving several life threats. At the time of writing, she is still waiting for her leave to remain. John, a 42‐year‐old working‐class man from Uganda, fled his small home town in 2013 due to discrimination and fear of imprisonment due to his family uncovering his secret relationship with a man. Godfrey, a 39‐year‐old middle‐class man from Uganda, came to the UK in 2005 for a better life. He was working for over ten years, avoiding to enter the asylum system, until he was stopped and detained by the police in the summer of 2015. He received his leave to remain in 2020. Dara, a 37‐year‐old middle‐class woman came to the UK in 2014 as a student, escaping imprisonment after her family found out that she was having a relationship with a woman. After her student visa expired, Dara entered the asylum system and received leave to remain in 2019. Afshanesh, a 25‐year‐old working‐class woman, left Afghanistan for Germany in 2012, after being internally displaced for years. She is still waiting for her leave to remain. Mina, a 37‐year‐old middle‐class woman from Iran, left Iran in 2014, together with her two children, after her husband was killed. She is still waiting for her leave to remain. Jalila, a 33‐year‐old middle‐class woman from Cameroon, left Cameroon in 2014 after several attacks due to her relationship with a woman. Grace, a 46‐year‐old working‐class woman from Nigeria, arrived in the UK in 2012. She was detained twice and is still waiting for her leave to remain. Everyone who participated in this research was assigned a pseudonym, and all identifying aspects of their campaign groups/organisations or activist networks have been omitted.In this research, I applied the methodological and epistemological lens of everyday situated intersectionality (Yuval‐Davis 2015) and ethnographic refusal (Simpson 2007, 2017) to explore peoples’ experiences and agencies from a wide range of different perspectives and through a praxis of historical consciousness and deep awareness of how life continues to be shaped by colonial systems and logics. My ethnographic practice was rooted in ongoing reflection on my own positionality as a white, middle‐class woman from Central Europe and the risks and violence exerted through and against knowledge through academic, colonial, and racialised modes of extraction. My work is inspired by Suryia Nayak's (2017:202) call “to inhabit the tension of implicated necropower relations in research and writing practices” involved much reflection about my own entanglements with these regimes. My research is moreover guided by the aim to render visible the multiple complex forms of vulnerability experienced by those consigned to these regimes and how these vulnerabilities have intensified divisions along lines of racialised citizenship, class power, and gender (Spathopoulou and Meier 2020). I use the term “people racialised and criminalised as migrants” throughout this paper to highlight the shared experience of being systemically racialised and criminalised and the need to navigate the associated legal processes and structures on a day‐to‐day basis.Evading “Capture” through DisengagementsDuring my participatory observation of campaign meetings, I noticed a strategy employed by people racialised and criminalised as migrants that consisted of remaining silent or distracted during meetings and discussions: some people read newspapers, others quietly watched content on their phones, and still others kept their eyes closed or even slept. During interviews conducted outside these campaign meetings, several months after commencing my research in 2016, several people with whom I had ongoing conversations mentioned their intentions to cease their involvement in campaign groups or to withdraw from activism altogether.Mara, a 35‐year‐old woman from Egypt, arrived in Germany in 2015. She was initially involved in many activist groups that sought to create better conditions for people living in the camps—the so‐called Lagers—as she explained to me in the late summer of 2016:I was involved in a lot of different campaigns but then I realised: It doesn't matter what group you get involved in; there are always the same power structures. I'm tired of seeing them. People with secure status take up too much space, and the situation of asylum seekers is not taken into consideration when organising protest events. It's dangerous, seriously, it's dangerous! Being involved in these actions can have bad consequences for people in the asylum process; they can lose their accommodation or be deported. Other activists fail to see that.John, a 42‐year‐old man from Uganda, who had received his leave to remain in the United Kingdom after having waited for seven years, recalled a situation during a public action:I don't have the same rights as you; you can stand in Parliament Square because it doesn't really affect you but I … And you remember the last time we went to that demonstration together? There was this guy, this speaker, next to you, and he called me twice to tell me that he was spat at. He told me it was some kind of racism and when the police came and he was holding the mic and the two of them were shouting—guess who they came for to take the details? They came for him. The Black guy. You know they just feel like you are the victim. You are Black—why are you shouting? And then, there is of course also the police that could detain you … So I ask myself, what am I doing here? It's not safe.Sitting on a park bench in Kreuzberg (Berlin) together, sometime during the summer of 2017, Afshanesh, a 25‐year‐old woman from Afghanistan, shared the risks that she perceived as a result of engagement with various political initiatives:You know, I worked with political initiatives for more than six months, and some of them make very big mistakes that are tremendous for the women, asylum seekers, but for the activist—oh I made a mistake, I'm human—but for the asylum seekers. Like, one time, a complaint was sent to an organisation (I'm not going to name the organisation), and that complaint was sent to the representatives of the camp, and it turned out that these emails are controlled by the social workers of the administration. So they reported the women. So a small mistake can ruin a life. It is always like that. Even social workers say, “Oh, small mistake, I forgot to give you your mail”—for another woman, this means deportation because she didn't show up to the appointment; and then a woman and her children get deported to Afghanistan and killed. And the woman says, “Oh sorry, I have had a really bad day today”. So I decided to stay away.All three accounts characterise involvement in campaign work and activist groups as risky and ultimately self‐defeating. These accounts challenge the ways in which politics are imagined and practised within these activist groups and organisations as involvement in public or direct actions that may culminate in arrest, verbal or physical aggression, homelessness or even deportation. These stories refuse to further exhaust the idea of public action and organised resistance and the false and dangerous promise that engagement in these politics will lead to their acceptance as self‐governing subjects and citizens.These deliberate acts of withdrawal may be read as a form of capitulation. Being political is often considered to mean “active” engagement in various organised political spaces: protest events, meetings, boycotts, sit‐ins—in other words, spaces in which people assemble to discuss and resist border violence and the struggles of people engaged within and against asylum regimes. This paper, instead, thinking with and through the term of fugitivity, asks in Weheliye's (2014:2) words: “What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?”These engagements can be read as a sort of “seeing around corners” (Macharia 2016), manoeuvring, and locating spaces of recovery, refuge, and survival. They also constitute a strategy aimed at sustaining momentum and avoiding the resigned acceptance and “capture” of systems of organisation that are not wholly trustworthy.These practices of disengagement may also be read as a methodology and theory of exposure that is anticipatory and reflective, as they confront the inability of (even) these radical left spaces to practice and re‐imagine real radically democratic politics within existing political frameworks. This paper examines the merit of reading these acts of disengagement as a means of evading capture by refusing what is refused to those engaged in asylum regimes—“the ideal of self‐possession as a subject and self‐determination as a citizen, and by affirming what has been imposed on them, radical dispossession and indebtedness, as a condition of possibility” (Shulman 2021:278).Some acts of disengagement explicitly reject recourse to politics and its norms by juxtaposing politics with a radical notion of solidarity or sociality. Distancing herself from the group's practices and objectives, Dara, a 37‐year‐old woman from Cameroon, shared the following:Activist groups have their objectives, have their cause. Most groups’ objective is not solidarity—it's politics. Sometimes, I have no idea what we are doing. What am I doing there?Along similar lines, Godfrey (introduced earlier), and Mina, a 37‐year‐old woman from Iran, shared their experiences of activist spaces in the summer of 2017:They have nothing to do with the challenges of the people but have a lot to do with their own political agenda. (Godfrey)There are times when you are so stressed, you can just bring people together and give them sandwiches. We just get here and eat sandwiches. That's how you come to know people as one. Why are we not doing that? (Mina)These accounts reveal the ways in which politics are perceived indicate that the practices enacted within these groups were not the interventions that were needed. Dara, Godfrey and Mina exposed the political practices that they observed as part of a wider political framework to which they could not and did not wish to belong. As such, the haunting nature of the “politics” that produced this juxtaposing and questioning makes and disorders meaning in evading the norms of political practice. Without any explicit coordination, peoples’ acts of disengagement and silence during meetings—their retreat from spaces of interaction—constituted a collective and embodied refusal that insisted on the existence of other modes of engagement and relation.Disengagements as Fugitive Practices of Recovery and CareThis section explores acts of disengagement as fugitive practices of recovery and care and asks more broadly how we can understand radical sociality and political practice not enunciated in speech or formal political intervention as well as how action, communication, and symbolisation might be enacted within a more expansive political space.While disengaging from spaces of formal political action, people turned to alternative socialities and practices of collaboration and care that they had encountered in local Black communities and religious communities that functioned as “loopholes of retreat” (Jacobs 2009:26). As people shared during interviews, within these networks, all manner of different tasks (from childcare to plumbing work to translation) and financial and emotional resources were exchanged that were otherwise difficult to access. Given that political commonality and organisation were experienced (at least to some extent) as contaminated by the constitutive power of empire and race, these alternative socialities may be read as fugitive forms of commonality (Harney and Moten 2013). As such, retreat from these campaign and activist group spaces may be read as a practice of rest, maintenance, recovery, and care.In spring 2016, when I joined John (introduced earlier) for a walk somewhere in the north of London, he explained why he had stopped attending the meetings and events of groups with which he had previously been involved:You have to remember, I'm not allowed to work. You have to remember that I live far—now, I am speaking for me—I have people that support me financially; most people don't. You have to remember that I sometimes don't even have food in the house. You have to remember that sometimes I have to take a bus instead of a train because it is cheaper and then … the journey that used to take me 30 minutes takes me three hours. You have to remember …In June 2017, Jalila, a 33‐year‐old woman from Cameroon, shared:Honestly, I've not been ok. The last few weeks have been horrible. I feel there are days where I wake up and think I need to do something for myself like going for a walk. I can't go to attend a meeting or demonstration. It's too much, it's the stress. Honestly it's just been so stressful. It's been a year now.By disengaging, John and Jalila reclaim bodily and temporal space and moments of comfort and ease (see also Meier 2020). Disengagement is thus also a creative practice of intentionally pausing, resting, and maintaining. A large body of scholarship has attended to the emotional and affective politics of borders (e.g. Ahmed 2004, 2014) and how specific affects, such as exhaustion (Emejulu and Bassel 2020), unease (Gill 2009), and discomfort (Meier 2020), as well as affective pressures (Lobo 2014), are mobilised against people who are racialised and criminalised as migrants. These emotions and pressures have the “potential to wound, numb and immobilise bodies affecting what they can do or what they become” (Lobo 2014:101). To survive under these intensities and pressures and regain some level of emotional, psychological and mental well‐being requires taxing emotional labour on the part of those living under such impossible conditions (Meier 2020). The observed acts of disengagement may thus be read as fugitive practices of recovery and care—a means of forging a healthy distance and boundaries to ensure the possibility of rest and survival.In the following, this section wants to reconsider radical politics and sociality through and with the body. While attending a detention centre protest in May 2016, Grace, a 46‐year‐old woman from Nigeria, recounted her experience of speaking publicly at protest events:They want me to say political things. I won't say what you want me to say. I cannot say what you want me to say. I can only say how I feel right now. They want me to tell me this political stuff, but I will tell my story, how I feel. I just want to say my own things, and how I would say it in my own words, and trust how I feel.Several weeks later, in a café in Central London, Godfrey, a 39‐year‐old man from Uganda who had recently received a five‐year status, shared his experiences of his time in a detention centre, where he had been detained for three and a half months in 2013:These groups couldn't offer me the help I needed. I helped myself, my body, my mind, my heart … I tried not to think about how bad things are. Others did and I always tried to take away some of the pressures that person was feeling by offering my company, my support.Grace's refusal made and disordered meaning as it evaded the norms of political speech and action and exposed how the hauntings of empire and race continued to exert power over her body and knowledge. Godfrey, rather than relying on organisations, groups, and political speech to help himself and to articulate demands for recognition from a system and state, decided to ask what he already had that he could offer to others. Harney and Moten (2013), among others, have emphasised the existing system's reliance on correcting and improving racialised people by asking “what do we not have that we need?’: “But defining deficiency and addressing the state ‘privatizes reproduction’ and forecloses asking, ‘what do we already have and do that we must militantly preserve?’” (Shulman 2021:286, quoting Harney and Moten 2013). Both accounts inspire us to reconsider radical sociality and the political through and with the body as a site of “intergenerational praxis of acting from one's conditions in order to reorganize the field of ‘truth’” (Spillers 1987, quoted in Paris 2018).Hortense Spillers (1987), in her work “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, explores the political possibilities of bodies by acknowledging the Black body as a site of knowledge production and power. Histories and present narratives of colonial violence and its institutions have developed the Black body as a known quantity. Spiller introduces the concept of flesh as distinct from the body in an attempt to draw attention to the creative, unruly, and disordering potential of Black bodies. These possibilities are hidden through dominant gazes, discourses, and epistemological structures that recognise the body as a body of extraction, “thingification”, and “fetish object” (Apter 2018). While the body exists within and through norms and discourses, flesh is, according to Spillers (1987:67), “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse”. Flesh as concept, according to Spillers, retains materiality, the possibility of agencies, experiences, emotions, and bodies beyond the reach of dominant discourses and orders: “flesh spills forth in excess of the discourses that seek to locate it, to know it, to translate its ‘noncommunicability’” (Shange 2019:8). Hortense Spillers concept of flesh and many scholars’ interpretation thereof (e.g. Pinto 2017; Shange 2019; Weheliye 2014) offers us an interesting lens through which we might imagine agencies beyond the liberal frameworks of the political, freedom narratives, and the privileging of resistance.ConclusionThis paper has explored acts of disengagement from campaign and activist group spaces associated with border struggle activism in Germany and the UK as fugitive practices of refusal. Inspired by Black radical scholars’ writing on fugitivity and the politics of refusal, as well as by the observed acts of disengagement, the paper contributes to the debates surrounding political agencies of people racialised and criminalised as migrants as well as emergent spaces of the political.As means of distancing oneself from public actions and organisational politics, the acts of disengagement discussed in this paper expose the fact that engagement in campaigns and activist groups is, for some, not only risky but also inherently self‐defeating. The paper advocated reframing these practices as optimistic and vitalising practices of evading capture, recovery, care and refuge that insist on other ways of thinking, practising and experiencing sociality and the political that can inspire us to consider political agency in relation to broader abolitionist projects. People's disengagements disrupted the subjectivities and agencies that people who are racialised and criminalised as migrants are predominantly prescribed. The paper also briefly explored approaches to the political with and through the body.Scholars within critical border studies have called for alternative border imaginaries (Brambilla 2021; Paasi 2021). This paper has revealed how working with concepts such as fugitivity and refusal can offer such alternative imaginaries as they provide tools with which we might reflect on how political ontologies and epistemologies of resistance can also function as technologies of racialisation and ordering, as they function within the same symbolic orders and norms of subjectivity, governmentality, and sovereignty (Harney and Moten 2013) by striving for status and state recognition. This may cause people to become entrenched in cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) as the existing system and aligned project of modernity has “disavowed the constitutive power of empire and race as well as black engagement with them” (Shulman 2021:273). Learning and finding inspiration from these fugitive practices prompts us to contemplate the need to think through how empire and racialisation rather than marginality have an institutional life that scholars and activists may also endorse. The alternative to these entrapments then appears to be the encouragement of radical politics as an embodied, generative, experimental, and imaginative practice of refiguring “another world” (Harney and Moten 2013) in this one.Data Availability StatementThe data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.ReferencesAhmed S (2004) Affective economies. 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Acts of Disengagement in Border Struggles: Fugitive Practices of Refusal

Meier, Isabel
Antipode , Volume 55 (6) – Nov 1, 2023
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Abstract

IntroductionYou need to ask yourself why people are sleeping during the meetings.(Lydia, a 30‐year‐old woman from Uganda, 2016)I had enough; I don't attend these meetings anymore.(Ahmed, a 44‐year‐old man from Iran, 2017)There was an uncomfortable silence that I felt immediately. Most people were leaning back in their chairs, looked at their phones or had their eyes closed.(Research diary entry, 2017)This paper has evolved from long‐term ethnographic work and activist involvement in different forms of border struggle in Berlin (Germany) and London (the United Kingdom [UK]) between October 2015 and July 2018. While the overall research project encompasses a wide range of different forms of resistance, refusal, and action, this paper is inspired by some individuals' acts of disengagement within and from various activist group spaces and political activism at large. These disengagements took the form of staying silent or being distracted, sleeping during activist meetings, distancing oneself from activist groups and objectives during conversations, or completely withdrawing from these spaces. Rather than reading these practices as passive resignation, this paper approaches them, first, as practices of refusal and evasion that expose notions of the political rooted in liberal struggles over power and freedom as not only risky but inherently self‐defeating and, second, as radically optimistic and vitalising practices of recovery and care that insist on alternative modes of thinking, practising, and experiencing sociality and the political.All individuals who participated in this research were engaged in asylum regimes in Germany or the UK. As an aspect of wider border regimes, asylum regimes have become one of the main stakes in the global geopolitics of migration control (De Genova et al. 2018) and everyday bordering (Yuval‐Davis et al. 2019). Herein, I use the term “asylum regime” to refer to the power enacted through the asylum system in addition to the wide range of differently situated subjects and bordering practices engaged within the regime and the broader politics of racialised exclusion, criminalisation, and hostile environment that seek to control the entry, lives, and deaths of people racialised and criminalised as migrants (El‐Enany 2020; Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Webber 2019; see also Meier and Donà 2021).I shall begin by exploring the research context and activist struggles that were ongoing in Germany (Berlin) and the UK (London) while this research took place. The second section of the article will discuss writings on quiet politics, fugitivity, and refusal with the aim of contextualising the disengagements that inspired this article. I shall then proceed to detail my methodological approach before mapping people's fugitive practices of refusal, evasion, recovery, and care in the paper's final section.Research ContextsIn Berlin, between 2015 and 2017, considerable local resistance emerged around the so‐called Lagers (refugee camps), centred on their poor conditions and their increasing securitisation and privatisation that had rendered them uninhabitable spaces at the hands of for‐profit agencies (Campbell and Fábos 2017; Jakil 2020; Sowa 2020). Berlin, with its population of 3.6 million, was temporarily housing around 70,000 people who were racialised and criminalised as migrants (BAMF 2018). According to Flüchtlingsrat Berlin (the German Refugee Council), approximately 85% of people who arrived in Berlin in 2015 and 2016 were housed in mass shelters that were structured like camps. Most such shelters were located in former hotels, gyms, sports halls, schools, and airports. These mass shelters were initially intended as a temporary solution; in December 2016, however, one year after the peak month of November 2015, when close to 10,000 people had arrived in Berlin in search of refuge, around 2,800 people were still living in sports halls and other types of emergency accommodation. These shelters were initially located in the inner city, and their centrality allowed their inhabitants to self‐organise and to derive sustenance from the solidarity offered by groups and local people who lived in close proximity to the Lagers. Alongside the struggles associated with the camps, the occupation and reclamation of spaces of agency and survival became a key tactic of resistance and endurance in Berlin. By the time this research project began, the two‐year‐long Oranienplatz occupation (Bhimji 2016, 2020, 2023; Fontanari 2017; Landry 2015; Wilcke and Lambert 2015) had already been cleared by the police, but the occupation of the former Gerhart Hauptmann school by people who had been racialised and criminalised as migrants, as well as local activist groups in Berlin‐Kreuzberg, was ongoing and persisted until the summer of 2016, when the final remaining 12 individuals received eviction notices.In the UK, between 2015 and 2018, detention centres had emerged as key spaces of resistance and mobilisation. The UK has one of Europe's largest immigration detention industries and is the only European country in which the indefinite administrative detention of people who have been racialised and criminalised as migrants is legal. In comparison to Germany, the number of asylum applications remained relatively stable during those years, with the highest number of people on the move arriving in the UK in 2015 (Refugee Council 2018). The research took place several years after Theresa May's call for the creation of a “really hostile environment”, when the recently implemented 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts prevented many people from accessing housing, healthcare, education, work, bank accounts, and benefits (Goodfellow 2020; Griffiths and Yeo 2021; Webber 2019). The Acts led to increased ID checks within the British National Health Service (NHS), drastically reducing access to healthcare services for people with insecure status, for fear that they would be detained and deported. These Acts also introduced an asylum allowance of a mere £37 per week, reducing by half the basic income support that people trapped in the asylum system had received prior to the introduction of the Acts. The “deport first, appeal later” measure in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts stripped thousands of people of the right to an in‐country appeal, detaining them for many years, with the result that over half of them were placed on ongoing suicide watch (Webber 2019). During the research period, ongoing campaigns against these measures were enacted by groups including Women for Refugee Women, Movement for Justice, the Crossroads Women's Centre, and Sisters Uncut. People racialised and criminalised as migrants and people who are or were formerly imprisoned within the detention estate, as well as those in solidarity with these people, organised regular protests inside and in front of various detention centres across the UK. Yarl's Wood, an immigration removal centre for women operated by Serco in Bedfordshire, is among the detention centres that have received the most public attention owing to its involvement in several controversies, including allegations of sexual abuse, racism, and mistreatment (Gentleman 2015; Taylor 2021).Approaching Alternative Maps of the Political through RefusalA wide range of scholarship within the discipline of geography has emphasised the need for alternative maps of the political. Scholars have approached these alternative maps of the political through counter‐mapping (e.g. Counter Cartographies Collective et al. 2012; Tazzioli 2015; Tazzioli and Garelli 2019) as a tool of “seeing differently or seeing more” (Tazzioli and Garelli 2019:398), through re‐thinking notions of agency (Hughes 2022; Zanotti 2013), and through Black (e.g. Bledsoe & Wright 2019; Harvey and Karina 2022; Mugabo 2019; Noxolo 2022), feminist (e.g. Katz 2018; Pain and Staeheli 2014), decolonial (e.g. Daigle and Ramírez 2019; de Leeuw and Hunt 2018; Smyth 2023; Zaragocin 2019), and abolitionist (e.g. Gilmore 2022; Inwood et al. 2021) approaches to geography.This article interrogates alternative maps of the political through theories of fugitivity and refusal. During the research period, occupations, sit‐ins, hunger strikes, lip sewing, and long marches within and across European borders received considerable media and scholarly attention (Fiske 2016; Steinhilper and Ataç 2019; Swerts 2017). However, the fugitive practices of refusal observed within activist campaign spaces that are the subject of this paper were often not loud and confrontational, but rather quiet and subtle and as such require critical attunement to embodied experiences and their relationship to the political.Within wider feminist geographies of resistance, scholars have explored quiet politics (Askins 2014, 2015; Hankins 2017; Pottinger 2017; Sprengel 2020) as small, embodied, and everyday political practices that frequently go unnoticed. For Pottinger (2017:217), quiet activism constitutes “a form of engagement that emphasises embodied, practical, tactile and creative ways of acting, resisting, reworking and subverting”. Quiet activism is variously described as “unassuming” (Askins 2014), “gradually, episodically” (Hankins 2017), or a form of “micro‐politics” (Mann 1994) that slowly reworks existing power structures by creating new possibilities and openings. The concept of quiet politics draws attention to the entanglement of politics and everyday life and how these “everyday activities in quotidian spaces … are part of a broader continuum of movements for change” (Askins 2015:475). While these feminist approaches to quiet politics offer a useful lens through which to view the complex ways in which intimate and everyday practices are interwoven with wider geopolitics (Pain and Staeheli 2014), the acts of disengagement performed and narrated make sense only when these practices are contextualised within wider systems of coloniality and racialisation.This paper draws inspiration from Black radical scholars’ writings on fugitivity as a central approach to thinking about Black life through the lens of abolitionist politics (Campt 2014, 2017a, 2017b; Gumbs 2016; Harney and Moten 2013; Hartman 1997; Hesse and Hocker 2017; Moten 2008; Sharpe 2016). It contemplates how people's acts of disengagement may be understood beyond single acts of resistance, non‐cooperation, or withdrawal, and asks what unsettling is happening if these actions are instead framed as a different collective political practice. What everyday freedoms become available in the absence of resistance and agency?Turning away from state‐centred, formal, or institutionalised practices and ideas of the political—in other words, the political as commonly theorised—scholars working with Afro‐pessimism and other approaches have turned to “constitutively fugitive” Black sociality (Hesse and Hocker 2017) and its “transformative political imaginaries”. This body of scholarship demonstrates that formal political categories actively invisibilise Black agency and that theories and practices must accordingly think and act against and outside the state as the formal arena and horizon of both politics and life. This act of turning away from formal “politics” becomes an important “loophole of retreat” (Jacobs 2009:26) that allows for practices of recovery that both value and defend Black life. In his essay “The Case of Blackness”, Fred Moten (2008) defines fugitivity as a political intervention of disordering based on the status of anti‐Blackness as the “constitutive supplement” of White supremacy. By refusing and evading liberal frameworks of political and its norms, these agencies “make, enjoy, and prefigure ‘another world in this one’” (Shulman 2021:278).Chávez (2017:68) highlights two different conceptualisations of fugitivity: first, drawing on work by Keguro Macharia (2016), fugitivity is approached by “seeing around corners, stockpiling in crevices, knowing the ‘unrules’, being unruly, because the rules are never enough, and not even close”. Second, to quote Jack Halberstam's (2013:11) introduction to Harney and Moten's book The Undercommons, fugitivity is framed as a state of being in motion: “being in motion that has learned that ‘organizations are obstacles to organising ourselves’ (The Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection) and that there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned”.These agencies can therefore not be understood through the concept of resistance, as they are not opposing or resisting a system or political order, but rather are actively refusing a form of existence that presently and historically negates the experiences and social lives of Black people. As such, the vitality of “black sociality” (Harney and Moten 2013:137) is always already a form of refusal. Fugitivity, according to Moten (2008), intrinsically comprises informal practices that give form to Black social life and agency that can be witnessed in day‐to‐day life, Black community, collaboration, care, and experimentation as well as in reflection and religious practice.Fugitivity is rooted in a wider politics of refusal: “It's the refusal to be a subject to a law that refuses to recognize you. Its [sic] defined not by opposition or necessarily resistance, but instead a refusal of the very premises that have historically negated the lived experience of Blackness as either pathological or exceptional to the logic of white supremacy” (Campt 2014, quoted in Sojoyner 2017:527).Formulations of a wider politics of refusal can be traced back to a long tradition of radical and feminist Black thinkers (e.g. Collins 1986; Douglass 2016; Hartman 1997; Lorde 1997; Spillers 1987; Truth 1993). In 2007, Audra Simpson coined the term “ethnographic refusal” to describe the generative practice and collective act of becoming otherwise. Her writings questioned the methods, ethics, politics, and theories underpinning ethnographic research, which she contextualises within ongoing systems and logics of settler colonialism justifying the acquisition of bodies, territories, and knowledge (Simpson 2007; see also Maldonado‐Torres 2007; Tuck and Yang 2014). Simpson draws attention to Mohawk people's refusal to engage with juridical categories that evolved from colonial violence and dispossession and explores how their acts of refusal demand other political orders. Their refusal to “play the game” (Simpson 2017) recognises the broader power imbalances already entrenched through these orders and exposes the falsity of the underlying promise of their inclusion and agency within the system. These practices of refusal are generative in that they constitute a “redirection to ideas otherwise unacknowledged or unquestioned” (Tuck and Yang 2014:239). As such, Simpson (2017:21) also frames refusal as a “theory of the political” that “was being pronounced over and over again”.Refusal is thus a mode of engagement (Ferreira da Silva 2018), a method (Zahara 2016), an analytical tool, and a theory of the political (Simpson 2017) that is generative and optimistic, by means of the fact that it inspires alternative approaches to thinking and living in the world. As such, refusal cannot be wholly removed from its genealogy and roots in Black and Indigenous life and struggles: the disembodiment of a politics of refusal from a mode of engagement, a way of being in the world, reducing it to a single act of resistance or non‐cooperation would fail to do justice to the radical disruption and disordering that such forms of engagement produce.Thinking with and through a politics of refusal and fugitivity in the context of EU border struggles and the vast numbers of differently situated people racialised and criminalised as migrants engaged within them offers important learning points. First, it supports reflection on how political ontologies of resistance can also function as technologies of racialisation and ordering as they function within the same symbolic orders and norms of subjectivity, governmentality, and sovereignty by striving for status and state recognition (Harney and Moten 2013). This can cause people to become trapped in a cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) as the existing system and aligned project of modernity “disavowed the constitutive power of empire and race as well as black engagement with them” (Shulman 2021:273). As such, thinking with and through a politics of refusal can inspire “re‐imagining the form and content of a radically democratic politics” (Shulman 2021:275).Second, while concepts such as borderscapes (Brambilla 2015; Rajaram and Grundy‐Warr 2007) approach borders as spaces of transformation, dialogical tension, and constant negotiation (Rajaram and Grundy‐Warr 2007), focusing on the permeability of borders, writings on fugitivity and refusal elucidate the impermeability of many borders within existing systems and the need to reject false promises of agency and inclusion within the system as it is. Rather, such approaches advocate shifting the focus to the possibility and hope that may be found in collective politics, imagining, theorising, and practising other forms of relating, radical sociability, and modes of political action.Thirdly, thinking through politics of refusal in the context of EU border struggles encourages us to ask critical questions as to what extent the border and migration scholarship we engage with as writers becomes complicit in erasing histories and presents of racism and logics of coloniality and what effects that has (e.g. Whitley 2017). Although generations of Black and critical ethnic studies have offered detailed analysis of dehumanisation, techniques of power and domination, exploitation, and violence that would provide important correctives to Foucault's and Agamben's considerations of racism and biopolitics (see Weheliye 2014), these theories are often overlooked. According to Weheliye (2014:6), this “bespeaks a broader tendency in which theoretical formulations by white European thinkers are granted a conceptual carte blanche, while those uttered from the purview of minority discourse that speak to the same questions are almost exclusively relegated to the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality”.MethodologyThis paper emerged from long‐term ethnographic work and activist involvement between October 2015 and July 2018 at two international sites: London (UK) and Berlin (Germany). Both cities have robust and wide‐reaching networks of activism and resistance movements that take various shapes and forms and through which people mobilise for the abolition of borders and detention centres and to advocate for migrants’ rights. These movements also typically have connections to feminist struggles, racial capitalism, and austerity. The research reported herein was based on participatory observation of campaign meetings, local actions, and larger demonstrations, as well as in‐depth interviews in the form of ongoing conversations with 20 people in each city about their everyday lives and experience of activist spaces. The research project captures the experiences of a wide range of differently situated people racialised and criminalised as migrants: some of whom had had their claims refused; some of whom had received temporary leave to remain but were still subject to illegalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation; and some of whom were still waiting to enter the asylum system or had made the decision not to enter the system. The interviewees had arrived in Germany and the UK between 2005 and 2016, having undertaken dangerous, sometimes life‐threatening, journeys from 17 different countries. The people quoted in this paper came from Uganda, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Iran, Nigeria, and Egypt. Mara, a 35‐year‐old middle‐class woman from Egypt, arrived in Germany in 2015 after living in the Netherlands for 8 months. Mara was a PhD student before having to flee the country after receiving several life threats. At the time of writing, she is still waiting for her leave to remain. John, a 42‐year‐old working‐class man from Uganda, fled his small home town in 2013 due to discrimination and fear of imprisonment due to his family uncovering his secret relationship with a man. Godfrey, a 39‐year‐old middle‐class man from Uganda, came to the UK in 2005 for a better life. He was working for over ten years, avoiding to enter the asylum system, until he was stopped and detained by the police in the summer of 2015. He received his leave to remain in 2020. Dara, a 37‐year‐old middle‐class woman came to the UK in 2014 as a student, escaping imprisonment after her family found out that she was having a relationship with a woman. After her student visa expired, Dara entered the asylum system and received leave to remain in 2019. Afshanesh, a 25‐year‐old working‐class woman, left Afghanistan for Germany in 2012, after being internally displaced for years. She is still waiting for her leave to remain. Mina, a 37‐year‐old middle‐class woman from Iran, left Iran in 2014, together with her two children, after her husband was killed. She is still waiting for her leave to remain. Jalila, a 33‐year‐old middle‐class woman from Cameroon, left Cameroon in 2014 after several attacks due to her relationship with a woman. Grace, a 46‐year‐old working‐class woman from Nigeria, arrived in the UK in 2012. She was detained twice and is still waiting for her leave to remain. Everyone who participated in this research was assigned a pseudonym, and all identifying aspects of their campaign groups/organisations or activist networks have been omitted.In this research, I applied the methodological and epistemological lens of everyday situated intersectionality (Yuval‐Davis 2015) and ethnographic refusal (Simpson 2007, 2017) to explore peoples’ experiences and agencies from a wide range of different perspectives and through a praxis of historical consciousness and deep awareness of how life continues to be shaped by colonial systems and logics. My ethnographic practice was rooted in ongoing reflection on my own positionality as a white, middle‐class woman from Central Europe and the risks and violence exerted through and against knowledge through academic, colonial, and racialised modes of extraction. My work is inspired by Suryia Nayak's (2017:202) call “to inhabit the tension of implicated necropower relations in research and writing practices” involved much reflection about my own entanglements with these regimes. My research is moreover guided by the aim to render visible the multiple complex forms of vulnerability experienced by those consigned to these regimes and how these vulnerabilities have intensified divisions along lines of racialised citizenship, class power, and gender (Spathopoulou and Meier 2020). I use the term “people racialised and criminalised as migrants” throughout this paper to highlight the shared experience of being systemically racialised and criminalised and the need to navigate the associated legal processes and structures on a day‐to‐day basis.Evading “Capture” through DisengagementsDuring my participatory observation of campaign meetings, I noticed a strategy employed by people racialised and criminalised as migrants that consisted of remaining silent or distracted during meetings and discussions: some people read newspapers, others quietly watched content on their phones, and still others kept their eyes closed or even slept. During interviews conducted outside these campaign meetings, several months after commencing my research in 2016, several people with whom I had ongoing conversations mentioned their intentions to cease their involvement in campaign groups or to withdraw from activism altogether.Mara, a 35‐year‐old woman from Egypt, arrived in Germany in 2015. She was initially involved in many activist groups that sought to create better conditions for people living in the camps—the so‐called Lagers—as she explained to me in the late summer of 2016:I was involved in a lot of different campaigns but then I realised: It doesn't matter what group you get involved in; there are always the same power structures. I'm tired of seeing them. People with secure status take up too much space, and the situation of asylum seekers is not taken into consideration when organising protest events. It's dangerous, seriously, it's dangerous! Being involved in these actions can have bad consequences for people in the asylum process; they can lose their accommodation or be deported. Other activists fail to see that.John, a 42‐year‐old man from Uganda, who had received his leave to remain in the United Kingdom after having waited for seven years, recalled a situation during a public action:I don't have the same rights as you; you can stand in Parliament Square because it doesn't really affect you but I … And you remember the last time we went to that demonstration together? There was this guy, this speaker, next to you, and he called me twice to tell me that he was spat at. He told me it was some kind of racism and when the police came and he was holding the mic and the two of them were shouting—guess who they came for to take the details? They came for him. The Black guy. You know they just feel like you are the victim. You are Black—why are you shouting? And then, there is of course also the police that could detain you … So I ask myself, what am I doing here? It's not safe.Sitting on a park bench in Kreuzberg (Berlin) together, sometime during the summer of 2017, Afshanesh, a 25‐year‐old woman from Afghanistan, shared the risks that she perceived as a result of engagement with various political initiatives:You know, I worked with political initiatives for more than six months, and some of them make very big mistakes that are tremendous for the women, asylum seekers, but for the activist—oh I made a mistake, I'm human—but for the asylum seekers. Like, one time, a complaint was sent to an organisation (I'm not going to name the organisation), and that complaint was sent to the representatives of the camp, and it turned out that these emails are controlled by the social workers of the administration. So they reported the women. So a small mistake can ruin a life. It is always like that. Even social workers say, “Oh, small mistake, I forgot to give you your mail”—for another woman, this means deportation because she didn't show up to the appointment; and then a woman and her children get deported to Afghanistan and killed. And the woman says, “Oh sorry, I have had a really bad day today”. So I decided to stay away.All three accounts characterise involvement in campaign work and activist groups as risky and ultimately self‐defeating. These accounts challenge the ways in which politics are imagined and practised within these activist groups and organisations as involvement in public or direct actions that may culminate in arrest, verbal or physical aggression, homelessness or even deportation. These stories refuse to further exhaust the idea of public action and organised resistance and the false and dangerous promise that engagement in these politics will lead to their acceptance as self‐governing subjects and citizens.These deliberate acts of withdrawal may be read as a form of capitulation. Being political is often considered to mean “active” engagement in various organised political spaces: protest events, meetings, boycotts, sit‐ins—in other words, spaces in which people assemble to discuss and resist border violence and the struggles of people engaged within and against asylum regimes. This paper, instead, thinking with and through the term of fugitivity, asks in Weheliye's (2014:2) words: “What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?”These engagements can be read as a sort of “seeing around corners” (Macharia 2016), manoeuvring, and locating spaces of recovery, refuge, and survival. They also constitute a strategy aimed at sustaining momentum and avoiding the resigned acceptance and “capture” of systems of organisation that are not wholly trustworthy.These practices of disengagement may also be read as a methodology and theory of exposure that is anticipatory and reflective, as they confront the inability of (even) these radical left spaces to practice and re‐imagine real radically democratic politics within existing political frameworks. This paper examines the merit of reading these acts of disengagement as a means of evading capture by refusing what is refused to those engaged in asylum regimes—“the ideal of self‐possession as a subject and self‐determination as a citizen, and by affirming what has been imposed on them, radical dispossession and indebtedness, as a condition of possibility” (Shulman 2021:278).Some acts of disengagement explicitly reject recourse to politics and its norms by juxtaposing politics with a radical notion of solidarity or sociality. Distancing herself from the group's practices and objectives, Dara, a 37‐year‐old woman from Cameroon, shared the following:Activist groups have their objectives, have their cause. Most groups’ objective is not solidarity—it's politics. Sometimes, I have no idea what we are doing. What am I doing there?Along similar lines, Godfrey (introduced earlier), and Mina, a 37‐year‐old woman from Iran, shared their experiences of activist spaces in the summer of 2017:They have nothing to do with the challenges of the people but have a lot to do with their own political agenda. (Godfrey)There are times when you are so stressed, you can just bring people together and give them sandwiches. We just get here and eat sandwiches. That's how you come to know people as one. Why are we not doing that? (Mina)These accounts reveal the ways in which politics are perceived indicate that the practices enacted within these groups were not the interventions that were needed. Dara, Godfrey and Mina exposed the political practices that they observed as part of a wider political framework to which they could not and did not wish to belong. As such, the haunting nature of the “politics” that produced this juxtaposing and questioning makes and disorders meaning in evading the norms of political practice. Without any explicit coordination, peoples’ acts of disengagement and silence during meetings—their retreat from spaces of interaction—constituted a collective and embodied refusal that insisted on the existence of other modes of engagement and relation.Disengagements as Fugitive Practices of Recovery and CareThis section explores acts of disengagement as fugitive practices of recovery and care and asks more broadly how we can understand radical sociality and political practice not enunciated in speech or formal political intervention as well as how action, communication, and symbolisation might be enacted within a more expansive political space.While disengaging from spaces of formal political action, people turned to alternative socialities and practices of collaboration and care that they had encountered in local Black communities and religious communities that functioned as “loopholes of retreat” (Jacobs 2009:26). As people shared during interviews, within these networks, all manner of different tasks (from childcare to plumbing work to translation) and financial and emotional resources were exchanged that were otherwise difficult to access. Given that political commonality and organisation were experienced (at least to some extent) as contaminated by the constitutive power of empire and race, these alternative socialities may be read as fugitive forms of commonality (Harney and Moten 2013). As such, retreat from these campaign and activist group spaces may be read as a practice of rest, maintenance, recovery, and care.In spring 2016, when I joined John (introduced earlier) for a walk somewhere in the north of London, he explained why he had stopped attending the meetings and events of groups with which he had previously been involved:You have to remember, I'm not allowed to work. You have to remember that I live far—now, I am speaking for me—I have people that support me financially; most people don't. You have to remember that I sometimes don't even have food in the house. You have to remember that sometimes I have to take a bus instead of a train because it is cheaper and then … the journey that used to take me 30 minutes takes me three hours. You have to remember …In June 2017, Jalila, a 33‐year‐old woman from Cameroon, shared:Honestly, I've not been ok. The last few weeks have been horrible. I feel there are days where I wake up and think I need to do something for myself like going for a walk. I can't go to attend a meeting or demonstration. It's too much, it's the stress. Honestly it's just been so stressful. It's been a year now.By disengaging, John and Jalila reclaim bodily and temporal space and moments of comfort and ease (see also Meier 2020). Disengagement is thus also a creative practice of intentionally pausing, resting, and maintaining. A large body of scholarship has attended to the emotional and affective politics of borders (e.g. Ahmed 2004, 2014) and how specific affects, such as exhaustion (Emejulu and Bassel 2020), unease (Gill 2009), and discomfort (Meier 2020), as well as affective pressures (Lobo 2014), are mobilised against people who are racialised and criminalised as migrants. These emotions and pressures have the “potential to wound, numb and immobilise bodies affecting what they can do or what they become” (Lobo 2014:101). To survive under these intensities and pressures and regain some level of emotional, psychological and mental well‐being requires taxing emotional labour on the part of those living under such impossible conditions (Meier 2020). The observed acts of disengagement may thus be read as fugitive practices of recovery and care—a means of forging a healthy distance and boundaries to ensure the possibility of rest and survival.In the following, this section wants to reconsider radical politics and sociality through and with the body. While attending a detention centre protest in May 2016, Grace, a 46‐year‐old woman from Nigeria, recounted her experience of speaking publicly at protest events:They want me to say political things. I won't say what you want me to say. I cannot say what you want me to say. I can only say how I feel right now. They want me to tell me this political stuff, but I will tell my story, how I feel. I just want to say my own things, and how I would say it in my own words, and trust how I feel.Several weeks later, in a café in Central London, Godfrey, a 39‐year‐old man from Uganda who had recently received a five‐year status, shared his experiences of his time in a detention centre, where he had been detained for three and a half months in 2013:These groups couldn't offer me the help I needed. I helped myself, my body, my mind, my heart … I tried not to think about how bad things are. Others did and I always tried to take away some of the pressures that person was feeling by offering my company, my support.Grace's refusal made and disordered meaning as it evaded the norms of political speech and action and exposed how the hauntings of empire and race continued to exert power over her body and knowledge. Godfrey, rather than relying on organisations, groups, and political speech to help himself and to articulate demands for recognition from a system and state, decided to ask what he already had that he could offer to others. Harney and Moten (2013), among others, have emphasised the existing system's reliance on correcting and improving racialised people by asking “what do we not have that we need?’: “But defining deficiency and addressing the state ‘privatizes reproduction’ and forecloses asking, ‘what do we already have and do that we must militantly preserve?’” (Shulman 2021:286, quoting Harney and Moten 2013). Both accounts inspire us to reconsider radical sociality and the political through and with the body as a site of “intergenerational praxis of acting from one's conditions in order to reorganize the field of ‘truth’” (Spillers 1987, quoted in Paris 2018).Hortense Spillers (1987), in her work “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, explores the political possibilities of bodies by acknowledging the Black body as a site of knowledge production and power. Histories and present narratives of colonial violence and its institutions have developed the Black body as a known quantity. Spiller introduces the concept of flesh as distinct from the body in an attempt to draw attention to the creative, unruly, and disordering potential of Black bodies. These possibilities are hidden through dominant gazes, discourses, and epistemological structures that recognise the body as a body of extraction, “thingification”, and “fetish object” (Apter 2018). While the body exists within and through norms and discourses, flesh is, according to Spillers (1987:67), “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse”. Flesh as concept, according to Spillers, retains materiality, the possibility of agencies, experiences, emotions, and bodies beyond the reach of dominant discourses and orders: “flesh spills forth in excess of the discourses that seek to locate it, to know it, to translate its ‘noncommunicability’” (Shange 2019:8). Hortense Spillers concept of flesh and many scholars’ interpretation thereof (e.g. Pinto 2017; Shange 2019; Weheliye 2014) offers us an interesting lens through which we might imagine agencies beyond the liberal frameworks of the political, freedom narratives, and the privileging of resistance.ConclusionThis paper has explored acts of disengagement from campaign and activist group spaces associated with border struggle activism in Germany and the UK as fugitive practices of refusal. Inspired by Black radical scholars’ writing on fugitivity and the politics of refusal, as well as by the observed acts of disengagement, the paper contributes to the debates surrounding political agencies of people racialised and criminalised as migrants as well as emergent spaces of the political.As means of distancing oneself from public actions and organisational politics, the acts of disengagement discussed in this paper expose the fact that engagement in campaigns and activist groups is, for some, not only risky but also inherently self‐defeating. The paper advocated reframing these practices as optimistic and vitalising practices of evading capture, recovery, care and refuge that insist on other ways of thinking, practising and experiencing sociality and the political that can inspire us to consider political agency in relation to broader abolitionist projects. People's disengagements disrupted the subjectivities and agencies that people who are racialised and criminalised as migrants are predominantly prescribed. The paper also briefly explored approaches to the political with and through the body.Scholars within critical border studies have called for alternative border imaginaries (Brambilla 2021; Paasi 2021). This paper has revealed how working with concepts such as fugitivity and refusal can offer such alternative imaginaries as they provide tools with which we might reflect on how political ontologies and epistemologies of resistance can also function as technologies of racialisation and ordering, as they function within the same symbolic orders and norms of subjectivity, governmentality, and sovereignty (Harney and Moten 2013) by striving for status and state recognition. This may cause people to become entrenched in cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) as the existing system and aligned project of modernity has “disavowed the constitutive power of empire and race as well as black engagement with them” (Shulman 2021:273). Learning and finding inspiration from these fugitive practices prompts us to contemplate the need to think through how empire and racialisation rather than marginality have an institutional life that scholars and activists may also endorse. The alternative to these entrapments then appears to be the encouragement of radical politics as an embodied, generative, experimental, and imaginative practice of refiguring “another world” (Harney and Moten 2013) in this one.Data Availability StatementThe data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.ReferencesAhmed S (2004) Affective economies. 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Journal

Antipode – Wiley

Published: Nov 1, 2023

Keywords: borders; refusals; fugitivity; disengagement; care

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