Acting citizenship in the city

Related to borders, it is necessary to focus on citizenship. Formal belonging serves as a criterion for rights and entitlement to different sets of rights is at the core of understanding belonging to a community of citizen-insiders.

Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos (2013) emphasize the relation between borders and citizenship. One becomes obsolete without the other.

Different legal practices and policies, even within Europe, together with executive practices by civil servants such as the police, shape the prospects of a person to act within a society and on the labour market. Borders are not there for simply differentiating between those who belong and those who do not (citizens vs. non-citizens), but migration experience is hierarchical.

Within borders, the sets of rights differ due to the nationality and type of residence permit (Könönen 2018a; Morris 2003; Vuolajärvi 2019). Besides an individual’s nationality, class and residence also permit facilitate or complicate everyday life and guarantee migrants’ unequal access to rights.

The simplified dichotomies such as citizen/alien or legal/illegal have been challenged through the concept of differential inclusion (Könönen 2018a;

Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Vuolajärvi 2019).

An ever-growing number of scholars have discussed the insufficiency of understanding citizenship as full membership of the nation state. Instead of observing mobility as a pathology, which disturbs the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995), scholars discuss citizenship from a wider perspective

(Isin and Saward 2013). Monica Varsanyi (2006) argues that the increasing phenomenon of migration and long-term presence of migrants in the cities is a concept that takes place outside of the nation-state frame. In particular, Sassen (2005) emphasizes globalization and human rights as factors that strengthen the need to reanalyse the localization of citizenship. Scholars have discussed post-national (Soysal 1994), cosmopolitan (Kofman 2005), supranational (Kofman 2002), and transnational (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Massey, Goldring, and Durand 1994; Sassen 1996) characters of citizenship. Varsanyi (2006) also identifies post-post-national theories, which consider the contradictions between the nation-state citizenship and migration (see Benhabib 2004).

These perspectives on citizenship focus on transnational networks and the combination of existing local and global spaces, where communities arrange their existence. The importance of networking has produced a complete theory of a network as a factor for migration (see Castles, de Haas, and Miller 2014; Massey et al. 1998; Portes 1998). Urban citizenship is one of the counter-concepts to the idea of citizenship as formal membership to a nation-state with a set of obligations and rights that come with it (McNevin 2013, 198). The concept captures at the same time the administrative function of the city and the capacities of the migrant “other” to act within the city.

I analyse the actions which challenge the bordering and, consequently, exclusion of a certain group of individuals living in Marenburg from the perspective of acts of citizenship (Isin 2002, 2013). Isin understands citizenship as a position of inclusion of those who are seen as part of the political members of community and exclusion of “others” from that unity.

Acts of citizenship

Acts of citizenship comprise a concept of analysis rather than fixed criteria, which offers a possibility to analyse political subjectivities in the city beyond formal belonging. For Isin (2002, 2013), acts of citizenship are moments when groups become active in demanding rights, and so become political. This results from a process in which “certain groups [constitute] themselves as capable of being political, in the sense of being endowed with the capacity to be governed by and govern other citizens and being differentiated from

strangers and outsiders” (Isin 2002, 280). It consists of some elements, though, which produce an activist citizen, a political subject, which challenges citizenship through demands. Isin emphasizes the difference between this and active citizenship, which consists of actions that re-establish citizenship, such as voting. Activist citizenship is based on challenging given positions through demands. Lampedusa in Hamburg here exemplifies an act of citizenship.

Lampedusa in Hamburg as a collective, together with supporters, produced a series of actions which together constituted the act (see Isin 2013, 33).

The combination of actions which required different energy and skills, such as framing issues for a local audience, effective publicity work, or juridical argumentation, together constitutes a subject without prior authorization (Niess 2018, 45–47). The actions produced different sites, which opened the scope from local to transnational.

Lampedusa in Hamburg published a statement with demands similar to simultaneous protests in Berlin (The Voice 2014) when they made their first public action at the Church Assembly. I will focus next on this statement from the perspective of the action as part of the acts of citizenship that Lampedusa in Hamburg enacted:

We are the Refugees coming from Italy with international protection but no rights. We survived the NATO bombings and the civil war in Libya, to be homeless in Italy.

Thousands of us are now in Germany in the same conditions: no hou-sing, no access to social help, no access to the job market. We demand a political solution: “We are here and we don’t go back!”. We want the right to make a living here in Germany.

If we had found possible conditions in Italy we would stay there. There was no possibility to handle anymore. Italian government in the begin-ning of 2013 closed the programs of reception – the so-called Emergen-cy North Africa – throwing the people basically on the street. 400-500³³

33 An interviewee of Elena Fontanari (2017, 40) repeated the same detail of having received 500 euros when their stay at the reception facility ended.

euro were given to each refugee with the suggestion to go away. Whe-re? To northern Europe.

The problem is now on a European level being Germany one of the most powerful states, decision maker for the migrations and asylum policies in Europe. The Dublin System – with the rule that the Refugees

“belong” to the first country in Europe they arrive – is aimed to deny the right of the Refugees to choose where they want to live. The same ideology that’s behind the Residenzpflicht [residence requirement].

We join the struggle the Refugees in Germany are bringing forwards sin-ce almost 20 years within the german asylum system. The fight is one.

We demand our rights as recognized refugees:

- the Dublin system must be ended - housing, social and medical care

- working permit and access to education

Here in Hamburg we were accommodated in a camp for homeless people during the winter period. This camp was closed beginning of April and we were pushed to the streets again. Our actual situation is catastrophic.

We don’t want to live in the streets and forced to street prostitution, drug dealing or other criminal acts.

We unite, call for solidarity and demand our rights!

Contact:

[Three speakers with their contact information]

(Karawane 2013)

These topics and slogans were still present during my stay in Hamburg. They target certain core themes. A group of individuals suffers the consequences of NATO (and Germany, as a member) intervention in Libya in their bodies on the ground of Europe. Since Italy (or Europe) failed to grant them their rights, they are in Germany, where they have no access to their rights either, since the Dublin Regulation hinders their mobility. This argument shows the structural causes behind the individual suffering.

Isin (2013, 27–28) identifies “[r]ights (civil, political, social, sexual, cultural, ecological), sites (bodies, courts, borders, networks, media), scales (cities,

empires, nations, states, federations, leagues), subjects (citizens, subjects, abjects) and acts (voting, volunteering, blogging, protesting, resisting and organising)” as the elements that constitute a focus for investigating citizenship. The action at Church Assembly manifests these elements.

I will first focus on bodies identifying a moral wrong and taking action to challenge it – in other words, demanding their rights. In this case, the action is the protest at the Church Assembly. The reference to “us” (“We are here, and we don’t go back!”) identifies a group, a collective with a demand, which appears non-compliant from the strict administrative-juridical perspective. Their status in Italy does not provide the members the right to stay and work in other European countries. According to the logics of migration management, Hamburg is not responsible but the state, which has no responsibility either, since the migrants were registered in Italy.

The “us” has two outspoken identities: recognized refugees and workers.

The argumentation is a complex combination of being workers and being refugees. It targets several perspectives of classification. First, the statuses among the Lampedusa in Hamburg group varied from recognized refugees in terms of international protection to humanitarian protection granted for those who had to flee from Libya during a certain period. Secondly, by naming the whole group “refugees”, they politicize the concept instead of referring to the narrow understanding of the Geneva Convention. Thirdly, the combination of refugees and workers and demand for rights as refugees and workers contests the division of migrants into “economic” migrants and those who deserve protection. According to Niess (2018, 51–54), from early on the group explicitly denied the victim position, to which a local parliamentary debate was reducing it.

These argumentations defined the Lampedusa in Hamburg group: workers who had provided for themselves but had to flee at a certain moment from certain conditions, who were granted a status for this (in other words, had been recognized as individuals in need of protection, which implied some rights for those individuals). This points to a connection between the actions of “Europe” and Hamburg as part of it and the failing structures that forced people to live with the caused by this “Europe”. The group consisted of individuals that identified a moral wrong they were facing in Europe and

contested it. The possibility to work would offer an opposite to “liv[ing] in the streets … forced to street prostitution, drug dealing or other criminal acts”, which make the failing migration management responsible for the problems that migrants face and which force them into unwanted personal solutions.

The group constituted themselves as people, who have the right to claim rights (Isin 2012, 25).

The individuals who identified themselves as the Lampedusa in Hamburg remained unclear to me during the whole research process. Niess (2018, 82) count “360” and Matthew Sparke and Katharyne Mitchell (2018, 218)

“roughly 300 refugees”. Abimbola Odugbesan, one of the later speakers of the group, and Helge Schwiertz (2018, 194) estimate the group as consisting of “around 300–350 refugees mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa”, and Kari Anne Drangsland (2020, 318–19) suggests the group to consist of “350 illegalized West-African migrants” or “around 350 men”. The estimations of the group members and speakers during my stay varied from around 300 to 400. The speakers I interviewed used sentences such as “we have an exact number”, but this exact number differed in different discussions. Sometimes this number included – and sometimes did not – people who by spring 2014 had entered the process of seeking a personal administrative solution in Germany. Considering the difference in times between the field research of Niess (2013–2014), myself (2014–2016), and Drangsland (2017),³⁴ as well as the personal status and geographical mobility of the group members, it is reasonable to argue that the group is an entity in progress rather than a fixed group of members. In operationalizing the concept of acts of citizenship, it is not important who the individuals behind Lampedusa in Hamburg are.

Physical or virtual bodies, such as individuals, people, courts, states, and organizations, take the actions. The actions, the movement of bodies make (political) subjects (Isin 2013, 27). Bodies may take different subject positions in different moments, but here they acted as the Lampedusa in Hamburg.

The group had carried out an impressive number of actions before I arrived in Hamburg (Borgstede 2018; Niess 2018). In these actions, these individuals

34 The difference in the timeline might also explain Drangsland’s specification of

“men”; during my field research, I was aware of female members of the group

positioned themselves as refugees, particularly victims of the Libya conflict, who wanted to stay and work. In another moment, the group members might have participated in previous acts of citizenship in other contexts, or they might be activist citizens as part of an exile community. The acts of citizenship in Hamburg do not exclude the possibility of the individuals simultaneously taking actions also in other cultural and geographical contexts.

Negotiations of citizenship

Within this research, I discuss professionalism as a form of being political and association with citizenship through different strategies of implemented professionalism. The characteristics of professionalism and the association of the professionals as being part of a group of citizens through one’s skills have undergone changes while the society around and its ideals have changed (Isin 2002). Isin (2002, 246–48) argues that the differences between disciplinary and entrepreneurial professionalism manifest in the relation between knowledge and being political. The virtue of disciplinary professionalization emphasized the role to knowledge by virtue of raising claims to truth and validity, and technologies and strategies of citizenship were validity, reliability, and verity.

Entrepreneurial professionalization has switched the focus to strategies of enumeration, calculation, monitoring, and evaluation. The professional communities have reformed and reinvented their professionalism, when the ideas of citizenship have developed.

Citizens who associate as professionals through their gained knowledge and expertise create the outsider (for instance, through protecting the formalities of recognition of skills). Those who lack the outspoken virtues are reconstructed as the strangers and outsiders. The professions have different strategies and technologies to realize themselves, as Isin (2002, 249–52) argues. The municipal and national jurisdictional regulation, networks, credentials, and training, as well as authorization of practising these professions, are organized nationally, although the professionalization is being reorganized globally. Formal, preferably local education is a formal criterion for the members of the group, and this formal criterion may be employed as an alienating strategy towards the outsiders.

The groups associated with each other with different strategies: solidaristic, agonistic, or alienating. These included establishing the positions of the citizens and others: strangers, who are members of the group and at the same time distant from it; outsiders, a necessary category for the citizens but not wanted; and aliens, who constitute a category entirely outside the realm of the situation and association (Isin 2002, 30–31). I have presented the experiences of walking with Robin through Marenburg’s public services and framed it as an experience of administrative bordering. Following Isin (2002, 2005), a public institution (for instance, an employment office) uses a strategy of exclusion through a professional, whose task is to administrate, towards an outsider (uncompliant migrant). The institutions in the city target the people through understanding the citizenship through arrangements: as legal and constitutional. They face the “illegal” through alienating strategies, such as ignoring their presence and at the same time practising bordering within institutions. These tactics defend in the first place the arrangement through rules and regulations. For example, alienating strategies, which define the

“other” as an opposite to “us”, may materialize through different technologies, such as detention or deportation (although the enacting institution may not be municipal, but a state institution within the city). Agonistic strategies accept the necessity of a group being present in the city but seek to keep it at distance. This may materialize in governance, such as categorizing people and their rights. The solidaristic strategies target those who are seen as equal.

Next, I focus on the settings of contestation or struggles, which Isin (2013, 23) calls sites. These are not merely places or locations, but social relations to particular settings. For example, a city hall is a temporal setting for contestation when actions take place in (front of) it (Isin 2013). In the exemplary first protest action, the appearance in the context of Church Assembly targeted the city of Hamburg as a setting, the physical space where the migrants demanded to be included as members. The Evangelical Lutheran Church as an institution was the context for the first performative action. The migrants’ visible presence on a ship in a political art installation, which presented migrants and their ways over the Mediterranean Sea, contextualized their presence.

Related to sites, actions have their scopes, which Isin (2013, 24) names scales, which define the reach, the applicability of the acts. The scope of

a single action, in this case the performative demonstration at the Church Assembly, did take place in Hamburg and included the church as an institution, but it reached beyond the city. The group constructed networks beyond the city and participated in different migrants’ rights events, networks, and manifestations. The chosen sites of media reached people outside of Hamburg.

From very early on, the group demanded possibilities to talk for themselves in front of the mayor, Olaf Scholz. Niess (2018) lists several alienating strategies the city was ready to implement. Individuals who participated in the Lampedusa in Hamburg were labelled in the administrative-political discourse as tourists, and the solution for their overstaying the allowed three months could be deportation. The administrative answer set the problem outside the territory of Hamburg—namely, to Italy—and consequently there should be no issue in the city. In addition, the mayor used a strategy of ignorance and not reacting; he categorically denied the contact and possibility to present a case. The ignorance manifested the argued unnecessity of the city to handle a problem, since there was no problem.

The group was quickly able to counter the technocratic, administrative argumentation with a concrete demand: a residence permit based on Residence Act, § 23 (Ger.), a permit that the state could grant for specific groups of migrants to guarantee their rights based on (humanitarian) international law. This was only possible due to the engagement of lawyers, who supported the group in claiming their rights. The local parliament had the decision-making power, which takes us to actions that are related to the site of the juridical, administrative, and parliamentary politics. The political and legal sites of action expanded the scope to the federal level, when the suggested use of Residence Act § 23 (Ger.), a residence permit for a group based on humanitarian protection, was discussed. There was a pending and uncomfortable question of the Dublin Regulation and the consequences of it for the people, which escalated in 2015 during the long summer of migration.

The visibility was not only on the streets but also in the media, which throughout the protest had been an important site for contestation: a newspaper offers a platform where the group, in the best case, could provide an argument for themselves and participate in a discussion from which they

had been excluded. The group may not have had direct access to the mayor, but they used media to bring their arguments to political representatives.

The Lampedusa in Hamburg had chosen to protest in three arenas to reach their goal of gaining rights: (parliamentary) political, legal, and public, mainly through a presence in mass and social media. Reaching the public had been so successful that several supporters challenged my participation as “one more researcher”. These overlapping sites of the actions where the contestation took place were possible only with the strong social relations the group was able to originally construct in the city. The juridical site was on one hand a solidaristic strategy to encounter the alienation. On the other hand, it was an act of professionals to use their power as citizens to show the possibilities of Hamburg to use agonistic strategies instead of alienating people as “Dublin

The Lampedusa in Hamburg had chosen to protest in three arenas to reach their goal of gaining rights: (parliamentary) political, legal, and public, mainly through a presence in mass and social media. Reaching the public had been so successful that several supporters challenged my participation as “one more researcher”. These overlapping sites of the actions where the contestation took place were possible only with the strong social relations the group was able to originally construct in the city. The juridical site was on one hand a solidaristic strategy to encounter the alienation. On the other hand, it was an act of professionals to use their power as citizens to show the possibilities of Hamburg to use agonistic strategies instead of alienating people as “Dublin