Protestant Refugees Research Articles

The Temporalities of Refugee Activism: Mutating Meanings and Visibility While Remembering Resistance and Claiming Place at Oranienplatz

This article traces the ways in which a refugee resistance movement reclaimed space, place and time in 2021 and 2022 since it first began its’ protests in 2012 in Berlin. Much scholarship on refugee resistance has focused on episodic moments of refugee protests and membership in the polity and have not recognized the relationship between temporalities and visibility. This study demonstrates how the protests regained visibility as the activists protested using older strategies and commemorated a 10-year anniversary of the movement while aligning with current campaigns. Data is drawn through ‘intimate ethnography’ and participation in various actions at Oranienplatz, a square in the neighborhood of Kreuzburg in Berlin for 15 months.

Feeding the Community: London’s Immigrants and Their Food, 1650–1800

Abstract Early modern London was a diverse metropolis, but we know little about the social lives of its migrant communities, especially how they fed themselves. Influenced by recent anthropology and sociology of food, migration, and ethnicity, this article examines specific communal food practices of two minority communities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sephardic Jews and French Protestant refugees. Rather than studying how unusual foods marked these migrants as different, it explores how mundane food matters shaped social relations within these communities. The first section analyzes the system of shechita, the ritual slaughter of meat by Jews, by drawing on records of community leadership, account books, and printed texts on the subject. The second section examines two institutions established to feed the Huguenot poor, a soup kitchen in Spitalfields and the hospital known as “La Providence,” both of which left extensive records of administration. Though different, the case studies show how migrant groups, through specific food practices, constructed and experienced community within the capital. The article adds to our knowledge of migrant lives in the city and highlights the richness of institutional records from within these communities. It also suggests how food history can connect minority stories to British history more broadly.

Sudanese Refugees and the “Syrian Refugee Response” in Lebanon: Racialised Hierarchies, Processes of Invisibilisation, and Resistance

Abstract By focusing on Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers in Lebanon, who in 2018 constituted 4 per cent of all persons of concern to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in that country, this article explores how the UNHCR protects and assists refugees not encompassed by the mainstream humanitarian response. The article finds that in terms of refugee recognition, resettlement, and overall protection, Sudanese refugees receive differential treatment when compared with the more dominant refugee groups. More precisely, it argues that the humanitarian practices contribute to structural processes of invisibilisation of the particularities of the protection concerns and circumstances of Sudanese refugees. It spotlights how, while racism and racial discrimination remain major protection concerns for the Sudanese community in Lebanon, humanitarian vulnerability assessments are altogether blind to these categories of harm. In examining how Sudanese refugees respond to and resist such processes of invisibilisation, the article also examines two key collective action approaches through which Sudanese refugees seek to access better protection and assistance: the establishment of representative refugee committees, on the one hand, and refugee protest, on the other. It finds that refugee protest was an important means of countering humanitarian processes of invisibilisation.

Protestant Refugees, the Calvinist Ethic and the Industrial Revolution

Protestant Refugees, the Calvinist Ethic and the Industrial Revolution

Female alliances in Cromwellian Ireland: the social and political network of Elizabeth Butler, marchioness of Ormonde

AbstractElizabeth Butler, marchioness of Ormonde, came to prominence during the middle years of the seventeenth century as a result of her care of Protestant refugees in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion; her royalist exile in Caen; her successful claim to a portion of the confiscated Ormonde estate; and her subsequent retirement to Dunmore in County Kilkenny. Her letters from the 1650s and 1660 provide valuable insight on her role as an influential Irish royalist, and specifically reveal the importance of women in the social and political network that supported her through this tumultuous period. Prominent among the women in her network include the anonymous ‘JH’, a kinswoman who acted as Ormonde's intelligencer and spy in Cromwell's court in London in the early 1650s; Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, an acquaintance who wielded significant influence with the Cromwellian administration in Dublin and acted as Ormonde's intermediary in the mid 1650s; a group of pre-eminent British noblewomen from prominent royalist families with whom Ormonde maintained a relationship of mutual support from the 1650s into the 1660s; and finally Anne Hume, Ormonde's friend, confidante and long-serving waiting gentlewoman, who acted as her agent and messenger as Ormonde prepared for the Restoration in May 1660. Offering a more granular examination of Ormonde's activities during the 1650s than has been undertaken to date, this article shows that women were of primary importance to Ormonde's survival and indeed thriving through the Interregnum. More broadly, it indicates that female alliances were key to women's political agency in Cromwellian Ireland and that women were central to royalist political activity during the Interregnum.

Radical democratic theory and migration: The Refugee Protest March as a democratic practice

In dominant discourses, migrants are mostly perceived as either victims or villains but rarely as political subjects and democratic constituents. Challenging this view, the aim of the article is to rethink democracy with respect to migration struggles. I argue that movements of migration are not only consistent with democracy but also provide a decisive impetus for actualizing democratic principles in the context of debates about the crisis of representation and post-democracy. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I develop a theory of radical democracy as practice, which, starting from the proposed notion of ‘democratic difference’, goes beyond the fixation on democratic regimes and focuses on contentious practices of enacting democratic principles. I articulate these theoretical concepts by analysing how refugees in Germany have managed to break out of a marginalized position and have challenged their denial of rights through a protest march.

Patterns of Reflective Solidarity and Migrant Resistance in Copenhagen and Berlin

Inspired by Jodi Dean’s understanding of the reflective solidarity of strangers, this contribution explores forms of migrant solidarity and resistance in Copenhagen and Berlin. It investigates how ‘hybrid’ forms of solidarity emerged out of different circumstances in Trampoline House and the Oranienplatz refugee protest camp. The two selected cases are particularly interesting for exploring how models of contentious and non-contentious civil society mobilisation and engagement cope with inequalities, disagreement and differences; how awareness of inequalities affects relations of solidarity between refugees and local activists as well as between groups of refugees. The analysis suggests that despite the substantial differences between the two cases, the groups involved in the research experienced similar challenges in overcoming inequalities and diversity. Arguably, the tensions and disagreements within groups can potentially develop into forms of reflective solidarity, aimed at reshaping the boundaries created by differences of race, class, ethnicity and gender.

Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation State ed. by Deborah Holmes and Áine McMurtry

Reviewed by: Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation State ed. by Deborah Holmes and Áine McMurtry Katya Krylova Deborah Holmes and Áine McMurtry, eds., Austria in Transit: Displacement and the Nation State. Austrian Studies, vol. 26, 2018. 304 pp. Volume 26 of the British journal Austrian Studies, guest-edited by Áine McMurtry, brings together articles arising from papers originally presented at a three-day workshop held at King's College London in 2017. The seventeen contributions of the volume explore how writers and artists in Austria—which shares its borders wiTheight countries and has always been a key European transit point—thematize issues such as migration, flight, displacement, and persecution in their works. The volume is set against the background of the ongoing European refugee crisis, which intensified in 2015 when Austria found itself on two major refugee routes, as McMurtry traces in the volume's introduction. The desperate situation of vast numbers of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East trying to flee to safety in Europe was tragically highlighted by the abandoned truck discovered on a motorway in Burgenland on August 27, 2015, containing the bodies of seventy-one refugees who were Attempting to flee from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Lindsey Hilsum's photograph of the abandoned truck forms the volume cover image and the starting point for McMurtry's introduction. The wake of the 2015 refugee crisis saw an escalation of anti-migrant and anti-refugee rhetoric, both on the part of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and by the centerright Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), which under the leadership of Sebastian Kurz saw the party adopt a hard-line approach toward border control, more commonly associated with the FPÖ, and ultimately form a coalition government with the far-right party (lasting until May 2019) following the 2017 legislative election. Additionally, as McMurtry highlights, Austria's tenureship of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of 2018 (2) has allowed the country to influence international policy on immigration and asylum on a broader European level. For this reason, in this domain, as in so many others, Austria constitutes an important case study, both in geopolitical terms and in the cultural responses from the country's writers, filmmakers, and artists to one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time. Following the introduction, the seventeen contributions to the volume encompass articles on literary texts, film, music, and photography. This diversity of the volume's contributions is one of the strengths of Austria in Transit. Beyond traditional articles, the anthology also includes an "in [End Page 109] conversation" piece between Austrian composer Thomas Larcher and musicologist Michael Haas—which is prefaced by Martin Brady's article on images and commemoration in Larcher's Symphonie Nr. 2 "Kenotaph" (2015–2016)—as well as an interview with writer Alma Hadžibeganović conducted by Iga Nowicz. The collection predominantly focuses on literary texts, with Wiebke Sievers's article providing an overview of multilingualism in the Austrian literary field, from the period following World War I to the present day. She highlights the role of institutions in affording writers of immigrant origin recognition, with Austrian multilingual writers gaining visibility only in the 1990s. Three articles on dramatic texts responding to migration and refugee movements follow. These include Monika Mokre's analysis of Homohalal (2013–2018), a theater project that grew out of the Refugee Protest Camp Vienna and that, according to Mokre, suffered from a variety of structural problems while, nevertheless, facilitating inclusion. In her discussion of Kathrin Röggla's works, Áine McMurtry positions these as "texts in transit" (72) thematizing precarious subjectivity, which is especially evident in die unvermeidlichen's intertextuality with Ingeborg Bachmann's figure of the interpreter in Simultan (1972). Concluding the section on dramatic texts, Jane Wilkinson highlights how Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek thematizes "a crisis of hospitality" (105) in her treatment of Austrian and European responses to refugees in Die Schutzbefohlenen (2013). As well as treating responses to acute refugee crises, several of the volume's contributions focus on works that thematize migrants' experiences over the longer term, particularly with regard to language. Christine Ivanovic's...

Beyond asylum claims: refugee protest, responsibility, and Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

ABSTRACTProtests by refugees and asylum seekers have become of increasing interest to scholars of forced migration, citizenship and political theory in recent years for the critical potential inherent in such acts of protest to reconfigure conceptions of ‘the political’, ‘the citizen’, and refugees as voiceless, a-political victims. This article turns to refugee and asylum seeker protest for a different reason. Rather than focusing on the act of protest, this article turns to the substantive content of such protests. Exploring the claims and demands of refugees and asylum seekers in two long-running protest movements, in Austria and Germany, the article argues that the protestors’ demands encompass more than the claim to asylum, and can fruitfully be understood as Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 28 rights claims – claims to a social and international order for the realisation of human rights. The article argues that these claims are not easily addressed by existing approaches to responsibility for forced migration, and turns instead to Iris Marion Young’s conception of political responsibility for structural injustice as a potentially promising framework.

Contestation and Constitution: Civil Disobedience in the 2012-2014 Refugee Protests in Germany

Contestation and Constitution: Civil Disobedience in the 2012-2014 Refugee Protests in Germany

Performing (in) Solidarity: The Refugee Protest Camp Vienna and <em>Homohalal</em> (2013–18)

The article analyses the theatre project Homohalal and its performances in various forms from 2013 to 2018. Based on experiences during the Refugee Protest Camp Vienna 2012–13, the play was written by the Syrian author Ibrahim Amir and its first version was developed together with activists from the refugee camp. On the basis of this case study, crucial questions for artistic projects with and about refugees are articulated: Who represents whom? Whose voice can be heard? Who gains cultural capital? And, finally: What role do arts projects with and about refugees play in politics and society, and what impact do they have?

Performing (in) Solidarity: The Refugee Protest Camp Vienna and Homohalal (2013–18)

The article analyses the theatre project Homohalal and its performances in various forms from 2013 to 2018. Based on experiences during the Refugee Protest Camp Vienna 2012–13, the play was written by the Syrian author Ibrahim Amir and its first version was developed together with activists from the refugee camp. On the basis of this case study, crucial questions for artistic projects with and about refugees are articulated: Who represents whom? Whose voice can be heard? Who gains cultural capital? And, finally: What role do arts projects with and about refugees play in politics and society, and what impact do they have?

Trauma, Postmemory, and Empathy: The Migrant Crisis and the German Past in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen [Go, Went, Gone

The novel Gehen, ging, gegangen [Go, Went, Gone] by the celebrated German writer Jenny Erpenbeck was published at the height of the European refugee crisis. The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired Berlin classics professor, who becomes intrigued by the Oranienplatz refugee protest camp. He initially approaches the refugee crisis as a new research project, methodically searching for secondary literature, composing questionnaires and conducting interviews with asylum seekers, but eventually he begins to develop friendships with some of them. Throughout the novel, Richard, who fled from the approaching Red Army with his mother as a baby and then lived in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) until reunification, notices similarities between the traumatic experiences of the Oranienplatz protesters and the trauma in his personal history, German collective history, and ancient and medieval literature. This article focuses on trauma and empathy in Gehen, ging, gegangen, exploring how the parallels drawn between the varied fates of the asylum seekers and the stories of exile and displacement in the literary canon, and German historical experiences of displacement and loss of home, establish points of empathic connection between Richard and the refugees, and attempt to establish the same between the reader and the refugees.

The Noborder Movement: Interpersonal Struggle with Political Ideals

Over the last decade, self-organized refugee protests in Europe have increased. One strand of activism in Europe, noborder, involves a transnational network of people who are heterogeneous with regards to legal status, race, or individual history of migration, but who share decolonial, anti-capitalist ideals that criticize the nation-state. Noborder activists embrace prefigurative strategies, which means enacting political ideals in their everyday life. This is why this article asks: How do noborder activists try to meet their political ideals in their everyday practices, and what effects do these intentions entail? Noborder practices take place at the intersection of self-organization as a reference to migrants’ legal status or identity, on the one hand, and self-organization as anti-hierarchical forms of anarchist-autonomous organization, on the other. On the basis of empirical findings of a multi-sited ethnography in Germany and Greece, this article conceptualizes that noborder creates a unique space for activists to meet in which people try to work productively through conflicts they see as being produced by a global system of inequalities. This demanding endeavor involves social pressure to self-reflect and to transform interpersonal relationships. Broader society could learn from such experiences to build more inclusive, heterogeneous communities.

To Make Live : Representing and Protesting Refugee Agency

Dominant representations of refugees emphasize either refugees as victims or as threats. In the shifts since the outset of the refugee regime, the political agency of refugees has stopped being something to celebrate and is now read as threatening – particularly when that agency is expressed in the choice to move and to cross borders. This control of political agency represents a particular form of governmentality, which maintains a biopolitical order that is framed around the structures of citizenship. The resulting exclusion of refugees as non-citizens has created what is called here a necropolitical outside, where the power over death remains the crucial moment of decision and which can be seen most clearly in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, in developing patterns of refugee protest and occupation throughout Europe this exclusion is being contested as refugees establish themselves as political subjects in their own right, challenging the order with new forms of conduct and ‘making themselves live’ by making themselves visible.

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

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.

‘Refugee Protest Camp Vienna’: making citizens through locations of the protest movement

The Refugee Protest Camp Vienna started in 2012 as a protest against the living conditions found within the biggest reception centre in Austria, and turned into a highly visible protest movement organized by asylum seekers and activists. In this paper, I investigate how and to what extent this protest movement, through a form of contentious politics, succeeded in challenging exclusionary policies and improving asylum seekers’ rights and living conditions. By moving from socially and spatially isolated locations into the centre of the city, setting up a protest camp in a park, and by seeking shelter in a church, the protest movement generated different modes of resistance, forms of mobilization and collective action. In exploring the connection between spatial strategies of the protest movement and relational ties within the movement, I contribute to debates within Critical Citizenship Studies. Specifically, I emphasize the relevance of place for creating alliances and networks and for making citizens.

Human Rights and Refugee Protest against Immigration Detention: Refugees’ Struggles for Recognition as Human

When detainees go on hunger strike or riot or occupy the roofs of detention centres, their actions are usually narrated by governments keen to discredit them and their actions as criminal and manipulative and evidence of their barbarity and difference. A secondary, counter-narration is provided by detainee supporters who explain the actions as evidence of detainees’ distress and deteriorating mental health. The voices of the actors themselves, people held in detention and taking protest action, are rarely heard in depth. Drawing on in-depth interviews with refugees formerly held in Australian immigration detention centres, and the works of Hannah Arendt, this article argues that the experience of immigration detention is fundamentally dehumanizing and that while detainee protest was aimed at attaining certain material outcomes, it also served important existential functions. The fact of protest was a rejection of a powerless state, a way for detained refugees to experience their own agency and, with it, restoration of some of the “essential characteristics of human life” and a means to use their reduction to “bare humanity” as a basis for insisting upon a place in the polis.

The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe by Geert H. Janssen

The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Europe. By Geert H. Janssen. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 218. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-1-07-05503-2.)Although, in the past decades, several books have been devoted to Protestant refugees from the Low Countries and their churches in England and the Holy Roman Empire, the history of their Catholic counterparts has gone by largely unnoticed. For sure, Catholic exiles were far less numerous (Janssen estimates a total of 10,000 to 15,000), and, also in contrast with Protestant exiles, they were often able to return to their homes after only a few years. Thus, in comparison to a total of between 80,000 and 100,000 people that left the Southern Netherlands after 1585, the number of Catholic exiles seems almost negligible. Yet, in his concise but well thought-out book, Janssen argues that, during their rather brief period of exile, a new form of Catholic militancy took shape, which consequently became one of the pillars of the process of in the Habsburg Netherlands and sealed the cleavage between North and South after 1585.In fact, with regard to Catholic exiles in the Dutch Revolt, Janssen distinguishes three periods. First, in the early 1570s clergy and royal officials fled their home towns in Holland and Zealand to escape the attacks of the so-called beggars. They found refuge in nearby Catholic strongholds such as Amsterdam and Utrecht. Second, from the mid-1570s Calvinist town governments took power in major Flemish and Brabant towns such as Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, and Brussels. Some Catholic inhabitants of these towns, clergy as well as lay, were put to flight or exiled. They found refuge in the more peaceful southern towns of Douai and Saint-Omer or, outside the borders of the Low Countries, in Liege and Cologne. Most could return after only a few years, thanks to Alexander Farnese's successful military campaigns. Immediately many of them obtained important positions within the Church and the town governments. Finally, between 1585 and 1609 a group of some hundreds of Catholics from the Northern provinces migrated to the Catholic south, which remained under Habsburg control.Janssen has deliberately adopted a cross-confessional perspective. As such, he contends that not only Protestant but also Catholic refugee movements effectively sealed the cultural cleavage of the two Netherlands at the end of the sixteenth century (p. 6). In line with Heiko Oberman's concept of the Reformation of the Refugee, Janssen points to the existence of a Counter-Reformation of the Refugee as well. …

These fine lines: locating noncitizenship in political protest in Europe

Since 2012, refugee protest camps and occupations have been established throughout Europe that contest the exclusion of refugees and asylum seekers, but that also make concrete demands for better living conditions and basic rights. It is a movement that is led by migrants as noncitizens, and so reveals new ways of thinking of the political agency and status of noncitizenship not as simply reactive to an absence of citizenship, but as a powerful and transgressive subjectivity in its own right. This paper argues that we should resist collapsing analysis back into the frameworks of citizenship, and instead be attentive to the politics of presence and solidarity manifest in these protest camps as a way of understanding, and engaging, noncitizen activism.