Humanitarian Capture, Solidarity’s Excess: Affect, Experience, and the Mobile Commons in Migrant Solidarity

Abstract

This article focuses on the relation of affect and the mobile commons by drawing on the case of migrant solidarity in the Spanish state during the so-called “refugee crisis”. I begin by portraying the context of emergence of migrant solidarity in Catalonia and its relation to the “humanitarian affective governmentality” (HAG) of both migrants and their supporters—a regime that redirects affects in collective organising to reinforce European borders. Despite these attempts of co-option, however, I argue that migrant solidarity may exceed the capture from HAG. Excess refers, in a first instance, to the role of affects in the social production of experience; and in a second instance, to how collective organising feeds the virtuality that freedom of movement is still possible. I thus argue for the consideration of affects, understood as that emerging in the encounters between bodies, as part of the mobile commons.