‘I take care and the state sabotages from the beginning to the end!’: tracing ‘volunteering’ in European provision arrangements for refugees and asylum seekers

Abstract

In the spring of 2015, the citizens’ initiative ‘We Welcome’ in a small municipality in Western Austria published a manifesto to announce that it had invented and granted ‘municipal asylum’ to two asylum seekers, to protect them from deportation by national authorities. In this article, I follow the logics of the extended case method as I discuss the initiative We Welcome as an extraordinary example of volunteering in the asylum regime. Recent literature on the role of volunteers in refugee reception fails to historically situate volunteering as part and parcel of provision arrangements for asylum seekers and refugees. I address this gap by looking into the emergence of ‘volunteering’ as an object of knowledge production and policy-making since the 1980s. I further show that the experiences of the initiative’s participants run counter to hegemonic discourses, which picture ‘volunteering’ as a means to produce trust and social cohesion. Instead of eliciting their trust, their experiences as volunteers deeply alienated them from the nation-state, and their citizenship was unsettled.