GOVERNING THROUGH CITIZENSHIP AND CITIZENSHIP FROM BELOW: AN INTERVIEW WITH KIM RYGIEL

This interview reviews some reflections from Kim Rygiel’s work on theorizing the struggles of migrants at the borders of Europe from a politics of citizenship perspective as forms of citizenship from below. The study of border controls reveals how restrictions on migrants’ mobility generates new forms of inequality and exclusion, but also social responses, and in particular, an emerging and growing activism of politicized groups of non-citizen migrants and citizens working alongside them in solidarity for migrants’ rights. Investigating border controls thus requires investigating multiple practices and sites of bordering, but it also raises questions about the nature of the border and how to study it. The concept of bordering solidarities highlights for her that as much as border controls are restrictive and divisive, borders also paradoxically act as bridges or moments around which people on either sides of the borders, non-citizen migrants along with citizens, come together in solidarity and support for migrants’ rights.