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Unruly Subjects takes readers to the epicentre of Europe’s intensifying border struggles—the Aegean islands in Greece, where thousands of ‘undesirable’ migrants have been warehoused and violently abandoned in EU-funded refugee camps.
Drawing on nearly a decade of research, Ludek Stavinoha reveals the subterranean corners in which resistance brews and solidarity takes hold, tracing migrants’ everyday struggles for dignity and their rights, alongside grassroots volunteers who have built vital infrastructures of support. At the heart of the book are the creative, if precarious and ambivalent, solidarities forged between volunteers and refugees, citizens and non-citizens, as they unsettle racialised boundaries and logics of control, in defiance of state-sanctioned violence, criminalisation, and neglect.
Urgent and compelling, Unruly Subjects illuminates how people navigate and subvert Europe’s increasingly hostile border regime, and the alternative imaginaries of more just futures their struggles embody.
‘Unruly subjects offers a rigorous and nuanced ethnographic account of grassroots humanitarianism. Through attention to everyday practices of care, solidarity, and resistance, the book exposes the tensions, limits, and possibilities of bottom-up humanitarian action to challenge dominant narratives of depoliticized and paternalistic intervention and to disrupt the operation of supposedly orderly border regimes. This work is an important contribution to contemporary debates on migration, humanitarianism, and the politics of solidarity.’
– Katerina Rozakou, Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
‘We are witnessing an intensifying global war on migration: border fortifications are expanding, migration routes are increasingly deadly, and acts of solidarity face growing criminalization. Yet such measures have not prevented people from crossing borders or contesting exclusionary legal regimes. Unruly subjects provides a richly grounded account of how migrants and non-migrants forge practices of solidarity, resistance, and hope in the Greek archipelago. This book makes an important and timely contribution to scholarship on migration, borders, and humanitarianism.’
– Shahram Khosravi, Professor of Anthropology, Stockholm University
Introduction
1 Violence, abandonment, solidarity
2 Between complicity and solidarity: The politics of grassroots humanitarianism.
3 Arts of resistance in the carceral archipelago
4 Unruly incursions: Reclaiming speech in the public sphere
5 Precarious solidarities
Conclusion
References