Notes from a refugee protest: ambivalences of resisting and desiring citizenship

Abstract

In 2014, Afghan asylum-seekers and refugees in Turkey staged the longest refugee demonstration thus far in the country’s history. They protested the UNHCR’s office in Turkey and its decision to suspend new registrations, an action that they perceived to be discriminatory, and demanded the right to mobility. In the process, multiple forms of citizenship were enacted, illustrating refugees’ ‘ambivalent’ relation with citizenship. Instead of dismissing this multiplicity as merely contradictory, this paper attempts to focus on it as a lens into reflecting on the relationship between citizenship and political subjectivity. I argue that citizenship reveals various embodiments of political subjectivity and that neither regressive nor progressive qualities can be read into citizenship independent of the particular spaces that activate these varying embodiments.