I take care and the state sabotages from the beginning to the end

Tracing ‘volunteering’ in European provision arrangements for refugees and asylum seekers

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7724883
AutoresKatrin Kremmel (0000-0002-0206-3537, University of Vienna, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume27
Fascículo4
Páginas465-480
Data de publicação2023-05-19
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCitizenship Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1362-1025 • E-ISSN: 1469-3593
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13621025.2022.2151570
OpenAlexW4310726098
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas42

In the spring of 2015, the citizens’ initiative ‘We Welcome’ in a small municipality in Western Austria published a manifesto to announce that it had invented and granted ‘municipal asylum’ to two asylum seekers, to protect them from deportation by national authorities. In this article, I follow the logics of the extended case method as I discuss the initiative We Welcome as an extraordinary example of volunteering in the asylum regime. Recent literature on the role of volunteers in refugee reception fails to historically situate volunteering as part and parcel of provision arrangements for asylum seekers and refugees. I address this gap by looking into the emergence of ‘volunteering’ as an object of knowledge production and policy-making since the 1980s. I further show that the experiences of the initiative’s participants run counter to hegemonic discourses, which picture ‘volunteering’ as a means to produce trust and social cohesion. Instead of eliciting their trust, their experiences as volunteers deeply alienated them from the nation-state, and their citizenship was unsettled

Asylum seeker · Citizenship · Criminology · Democracy · Deportation · Hegemony · Immigration · Manifesto · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Sex work and related issues