Without “right to have rights” ?: Reading refugee protests as political autonomy

Abstract

Over the past few years, refugees, asylum seekers and sans papier have become increasingly involved in a large number of protests across Europe. Predominantly, these protests were framed by the media and politicians as disturbances of national public order, while the subjects involved in the applications - refugees, asylum seekers, sans papiers - and their supporters were built as “dangerous” agents, launched as object of fears and anxieties that are produced by discursive processes of securitization and criminalization. We will use the concept of politics as dissent, as defined by Jacque Rancière, as a way of framing political subjectivity as the action of “taking agency” instead of “having agency”. We also use the concept of precariousness, proposed by Judith Butler, as the basis for a social ontology of political action. We find Arendt’s re-reading, made by Krause (2008) in the context of sans papiers, especially useful. Krause develops his point on Arendt’s notion of “lack of rights,” while showing how the sanspapiers succeeded in subverting their situation and calling on a broader audience to support their cause. However, in our analysis we came to the conclusion that Arendt’s work remains limited, since in his thinking it is simply a conceptual impossibility for the unclaimed to claim the “right to have rights” and thus conceive them as political agents.