Resisting Bare Life: Civil Solidarity and the Hunt for Illegalized Migrants

Abstract

While European governments have pursued illegalized migrants for decades, the techniques through which they do so have taken a more radical turn since 2015. Focusing on the particular case of Belgium, this paper documents how its Federal government has increasingly tried to “police” migrants into the European refugee regime, while migrants and citizens have continued to resist these efforts through a series of “political” actions. Drawing on ethnographic work with the Brussels-based Citizen Platform for the Support of Refugees, I pursue two aims: first, I demonstrate how the Belgian state has consciously produced a humanitarian crisis as part of a broader “politics of exhaustion”; and second, I explore the specific forms and types of humanitarian action that emerge from citizens’ response to these policies. I do so by describing three moments in which these opposing logics of policing and politicization conjure.