‘I finally found my place’: a political ethnography of the Maximiliaan refugee camp in Brussels

Abstract

In the face of an increasing influx of refugees in Europe and the inability of public authorities to respond in an adequate and timely way, an informal refugee camp was built in September 2015 in front of the Foreign Office in Brussels, Belgium. This article examines this camp, the Maximiliaan camp, as a contested space for citizenship. We analyse the acts of CollectActif, a collective consisting mostly of undocumented migrants, who set up a fixed kitchen and hence staged themselves as de facto citizens and as part and parcel of a broader citizens’ movement. Based on ethnographic research within this kitchen, we focus on several ‘polemical scenes’ in which a divisive police logic is confronted with a logic of universal equality. We conclude with a reflection on how presupposing radical equality has come to function as an important part of CollectActif’s activist citizenship.