“We Are Here to Stay” – Refugee Struggles in Germany Between Unity and Division

Abstract

In the last 5 years, self-organized migratory and refugee struggles have achieved unprecedented public visibility in Germany. This “new era of protest” must be understood as part of a complex history of migratory struggles fighting for the right to stay and social inclusion by articulating their own claims. To provide an overview and compare different forms of self-organizing, we focus on three cases of refugee struggles with particular positionalities: Women in Exile, Youth without Borders (Jugendliche ohne Grenzen), and Lampedusa in Hamburg. We argue that specific social and political positionalities, partly shaped by the German-European migration regime and its hierarchy of legal statuses, influence the diverse and sometimes contradicting narratives and strategies of different initiatives. This hierarchical order and its division of migrants’ positionalities is therefore a cause of conflict and rift within the broader movement of migratory and refugee struggles. According to the positionalities of the participants, the framing of initiatives often oscillates between general claims for the rights of all refugees and migrants and particular claims for the rights of their specific social group.