Alliances, friendships, and alternative structures: Solidarity
among radical left activists and precarious migrants in Malmö
Christina HansenMalmö University ABSTRACT
This paper examines relations between radical left activists with citi-zenship and migrants in precarious conditions. It is based on ethno-graphic fieldwork conducted in 2013–2016 in the city of Malmö, an important site of pro-migrant and anti-racist activism in Sweden. Examples discussed in the paper concern the prevalence of highly educated women among the activists, the engagement of LGBTQ activists, and the fact that many activists themselves have migrant backgrounds. The alliances, friendships, and alternative structures they forge are analyzed with regard to two groups of precarious migrants in Malmö: the so-called undocumented migrants; and the Roma migrants from southeastern Europe. The paper shows how radical activism contributes to a solidarity-based ethnic diversity in the city that opposes the growing anti-immigrant stance in Sweden on the national level.
Introduction
This paper explores the ways in which radical activism generates relations that cross divides of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality, in a particular urban context. Drawing on ethno-graphic research among radical activists in the city of Malmö, Sweden—an urban context that is affected by global patterns of (labor and refugee) migration and neoliberal restruc-turing—I analyze the relations the radical left activists build in solidarity with migrants who have crossed national borders and have lived (or live) in precarious conditions. Precarious
migrants, in this paper, refers both to those who live with precarious legal status, such as
asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, and Roma migrants1 who hold citizenship in another EU country but are caught in-between EU and state regulations and therefore live in vulnerable conditions outside the Swedish welfare system. The concept of solidarity is utilized in this paper to theorize the relationship forged between actors in unequal power relations with the aim of achieving a more equal order (Featherstone, 2012; Scholtz, 2008; Stjernø, 2004). Activism is considered a “city-making practice” (Çağlar & Glick Schiller,
2018), a practice that creates and changes social relations. The paper suggests that, despite the fundamentally different conditions met by a refugee or a Roma migrant in contrast to a Swedish citizen, they are all nevertheless co-creating the city by engaging in social relationships based on solidarity and by protesting against own and others’ dispossession. This paper thus responds to the call for “methodological de-nationalism,” which brings CONTACT Christina Hansen email@christinahansen.se Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, 205 06 Malmö, Sweden.
https://doi.org/10.1080/26884674.2020.1797600
© 2020 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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people in various legal, social, and cultural positions together into hierarchies of power in the same social field (Anderson, 2018). It shows the ability of differently positioned people to contribute to the creation of political struggles.
While earlier studies have examined how particular urban places facilitate cross-ethnic relationships (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018; Devadason, 2010; Povrzanović Frykman, 2016; Radice, 2010; Sanderock, 2009), the literature on the relations between radical left activists with citizenship and precarious migrants remains scarce (Cappiali, 2018; Steinhilper, 2018). This paper thus contributes to the understanding of how activism as a form of urban activity generates new relationships and alliances, generating a solidarity-based ethnic diversity in the city.
Social movement scholarship categorizes the extra-parliamentarian activist groups such as the ones featured in this paper as “radical,” composed of individuals who believe in revolutionary, left-libertarian solutions, inspired by a number of left-radical outlooks such as syndicalism, anarchism, communism, and autonomous Marxism, normally forming part of a broader struggle against what is perceived to be an oppressive social structure (Jämte,
2013). The activists in Malmö have little or no confidence that racism, dispossession, displacement, and the exclusion and precariousness of non-citizens can be solved within the existing system of global capitalism facilitated by liberal democratic governments. The activists thus do not hesitate to take the measures they consider necessary to come to grips with the injustices here and now, such as making it possible for “illegalized migrants” to stay in the city or for Roma migrants to have access to the same amenities as Swedish citizens; they also deploy large counter-demonstrations to deter neo-Nazi groups and far-right politicians from organizing within the city. Contentious direct action, civil disobedience, and acts of solidarity that include unlawful acts are part of these activists’ repertoire of actions (Hansen, 2019).
The next section presents the background of my study on activism in Malmö, followed by the theoretical framework of solidarity and my methodology and material. I then present and analyze my results according to three different strategies used by activists to promote solidarity: alliances, friendships, and alternative structures. The concluding section sum-marizes my findings on (i) how activism in Malmö has generated social relations that cross social, cultural, gender, sexual and ethnic divides; and (ii) how these relationships constitute an important resource for resisting the ever-present and increasing anti-immigrant rhetoric on the national level.
Activism in the urban context of Malmö
Cities are distinct environments with unique constraints and opportunities (Nicholls & Uitermark, 2016). Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden, is a “migrant city” (Nicholls & Uitermark, 2016)2 but also a city with a high density and diversity of activist groups (three groups are presented further below). It is a place where precarious migrants encounter established activist groups and, in the process of creating relations with them, create their own actions and groups to struggle for recognition and equality (Hansen, 2019). The activist scene in Malmö thus enables precarious migrants to enter the public sphere and to make themselves visible as political subjects.
Within Malmö, the neighborhood of Möllevången plays a particularly important role for the flourishing of the activist scene. Politically engaged individuals moved into this area as
the city transitioned from industrial manufacturing to financial capitalism due to its central location and affordable housing (Hansen, 2019).
Nationally, Malmö is associated with both its activist scene, and its industrial past and contemporary social problems such as crime, poverty, and segregation; problems which engage and affect the local activists. However, the manner in which the city’s crime rate is connected to “immigration” in the anti-immigration discourse in Sweden (Schclarek Mulinari, 2017) worries activists even more. They resist stories and practices that instigate hostility between “us” and “them” by engaging in solidarity activism with migrants and by creating joint actions (Hansen, 2019).
Importantly, activism in Malmö is not a clear-cut relationship between the “privileged” (activists) and the “non-privileged” (non-activist migrants). While precarious migrants experience dispossession and displacement, activists with Swedish and EU citizenship are also affected by the gentrification of Möllevången and the ongoing weakening of the Swedish welfare state through the privatization of housing, labor, and healthcare. On the other hand, through the activist-led processes of political socialization, some people with a precarious legal status have become activists themselves. They nowadays not only engage in pro-asylum issues, but participate in and support other struggles in the city, such as those related to feminism, LGBTQ rights, anti-racism, and anti-fascism. Hence, the activist scene in Malmö is becoming more diversified in terms of class, ethnicity, and nationality. As will be shown in the analysis, the increased diversity brings about challenges in building social relationships and alliances between people of unequal power. However, by contesting not only ethnic divides but also the divides between people of differing legal status, radical activism turns the urban space of Malmö—and particularly the Möllevången neighborhood —into a solidarity-based space.
Conceptualizing solidarity
The understandings of solidarity are multiple, ranging from national solidarity based on the feeling of affinity with fellow citizens within the nation-state, to forms of solidarity based on religion, ethnicity, subculture, and economic and political groups that stretch far beyond state borders (Wennerhag & Lindgren, 2018). Solidarity is a central concept in the analysis of social movements; it was re-introduced into social debates in Europe in light of interna-tional migration and neoliberal economic restructuring (Oosterlynck et al., 2016, p. 764). The large numbers of asylum seekers in Sweden in the fall of 2015 generated a debate about the limits of solidarity in national media (Andersson & Gerin, 2018). International solidar-ity was pitted against national solidarsolidar-ity with the argument that, in order to enact solidarsolidar-ity with the people in Sweden, we cannot afford to show solidarity with an unrestricted number of people from outside Sweden. National interests were pitted against the right to asylum. Today’s asylum politics in Sweden resonate with what Will Kymlicka (2015) calls welfare chauvinism: the state favors national solidarity at the expense of migrants.
This paper takes the perspective of “political solidarity” (Scholtz, 2008), a perspective closely related to struggle as one of the four traditional sources of solidarity in sociology (Oosterlynck et al., 2016). It is not merely a passive feeling, but an action-oriented solidarity that involves the creation of relations with the people who suffer injustice. Political solidarity is thus a relation that, depending on the situation, may involve parties in unequal power relations, and is commonly built on an “us” mentality. The “us” mentality is
characteristic of solidarity and can be distinguished from practices of charity related to altruism and sympathy. While charity aims to alleviate someone’s suffering and focuses on “the other’s” well-being, the aim of (political) solidarity is equality between the giver and the receiver and, as such, implies an “us” that is mutually constitutive (Laitinen & Pessi, 2014).3 Unlike charity, solidarity implies mutual recognition or mutual aid (Kropotkin, 1902).
David Featherstone’s (2012) take on solidarity is particularly relevant here as he analyzes the extent to which activists have collaborated across differences, and to what effect. Solidarity, Featherstone writes, consists not only of support and recognition between like- minded people, but also between social groups that may have different agendas but never-theless create something new together, such as formulating new political aims. This under-standing is useful for my analysis of activism’s impact on social relations: how, through joint action, activists and migrants negotiate differences in positions, identities, and histories and create new ways of relating. Following Featherstone, I am not endorsing a reductive binary of similarity and dissimilarity (Featherstone, 2012, p. 23) of “given” attributes such as class, nationality, and ethnicity. Such an understanding would ignore the ways that solidarities are located in and forged through particular contexts and the many ways that they come to be practiced and enacted by particular actors (Featherstone, 2012, p. 19).
Strong solidarity is not a guarantee for achieving equality. Solidarity can, in fact, turn into practices of excluding “outsiders.” In Möllevången, this has been expressed by some local residents who feel excluded from the “solidarity-based space” of Möllevången because they have not adapted wholeheartedly to the activists’ norms of life (e.g., being vegetarian, engaging in protests) or subscribed to particular “-isms” (e.g., socialism, anarchism, femin-ism). Although activists actively try to fight the exclusivist norms created within the scene, they are very aware of how new exclusions emerge. The activist Daniel, 32 years old, put it as follows:
It is obvious that every group of people, no matter if it’s your friends whom you meet every day or, in the case of a political group, whom you meet quite often, there is an internal culture created, both in terms of clothes but also . . . or not clothes maybe so much, but like, how to talk or how to formulate problems and some preunderstandings and so forth. But . . . I think we’ve gotten better at counteracting it. Before, my [activist] group was a quite open organisation formally, yet difficult to get into because there were so many invisible rules, invisible ideas and invisible . . . like, a consensus on certain issues that is not pronounced.
Daniel points to the tacit norms that are created within groups, such as those expressed through language and discourses, that create boundaries and may obstruct larger alliances. Activists also expressed awareness and the experience of how informal power structures emerge internally to each activist group out of the inequality of resources and formal education.
While people living in precarious conditions are commonly included with less demands posed on them, peer-citizens have to live up to certain activist standards. This sort of boundary making impacts on how space and place are produced and thus the conditions of emplacement and the feeling of being welcomed into the activist scene and the “right to be here.” Even the most well-intended solidarity-based space, such as the one the activists intend to create in Möllevången, must tackle the challenges of boundary making.
However, boundary making is primarily found between different political clusters, not according to divisions such as class, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality. The positioning of
oneself and “the other activist” takes place on a continuum of political positionalities from “radical” to “liberal”4 (or “radical” versus “liberal”) and on a continuum of perceptions of what constitutes “the true struggle.” It can be argued, albeit in a simplified manner, that this tension is a product of the current movement’s two historical roots: the “cultural turn” (new social movements)5 and the workers’ movement (Jämte et al., 2020). Alberto Melucci (see, e.g., 1989, 1995) showed that the new movements, unlike the traditional workers’ move-ments, do not limit themselves to material gains but rather challenge the notions of politics and society themselves. This shift from traditional class politics to the new diverse sets of actors and issues (pro-asylum, anti-racism, anti-fascism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, envir-onmentalism, etc.) generated disagreements. Each activist group in Malmö leans more toward one or the other in terms of theory which creates tensions and conflicts between them but also productive moments of collaboration, alliance, and collective identity (Hansen, 2019).
Although differences between activists do appear in the material, my focus here is not on tensions as such (for example, disputes over framing and strategies, see Jämte et al., 2020) but on the domains of mutuality and common practice (Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018) created through activism, in which different activist groups collaborate and involve pre-carious migrants (Hansen, 2019; Maestri, 2019; Uitermark & Nicholls, 2014). This makes the focus on political activists relevant, since they act as political subjects who continuously point to the political and socioeconomic issues that they perceive as problematic. They claim and make use of their agency, which becomes political agency facilitated by and affecting a specific urban space.
An ethnography of activists in hierarchies of power
As this paper explores the locally embedded emergence of social relations, ethnographic methods have been central. Employing ethnographic methods in the field of political activism raises questions about positionality, impact, possible overidentification with the people or groups studied, and distinctions between theory and action and epistemology. Proximity and shared experiences with the activists were of great advantage, since distance from the field would have prevented interviews with core activists; they also meant that I was relatively acquainted with the language, codes, and central problematics existing in the activist milieu that I set out to study (Wasshede, 2010). At the same time, my closeness to the field raised challenges. Many of the activists I interviewed were well read in, and sometimes referred to, the same theories and concepts that I use to analyze my empirical material (Wasshede, 2010, p. 61). This could present a risk of circular reasoning: I analyze their statements partly based on the same analytical frameworks that their statements are based on; my theories confirm their statements and vice versa. To avoid this, I uncover tensions and contradictions in their statements, for example, between ideals and practices, and in this way depart from the interviewees’ own logic and analyze their statements in line with the research questions and theoretical perspectives (Wasshede, 2010, p. 64). One example is the inconsistency I found between class struggle-oriented activists’ statements that favor larger cross ideological collaborations, but how they sometimes avoid them in practice. Or how class struggle-oriented activists in theory appreciated the plethora of activist groups and struggles existing in Malmö, but at the same time revealed judgmental attitudes and a self-understanding as being the “true radicals.” While not dismissing the
inevitable aspects of boundary making—actions of solidarity may confirm existing identities and power relations—this article primarily focuses on how their actions contribute to the creation of new ways of relating.
My methods mainly involved participant observation complemented by in-depth inter-views with a total of 35 research participants, of which 25 were activists (12 women and 13 men, including both Swedish activists and new migrant activists) and ten were non-activists but residents or workers in the neighborhood of Möllevången. An important part of my fieldwork were dozens of informal conversations with both activist and non-activist Malmö-residents of various class backgrounds, migrant statuses, ages, genders, sexualities, and professions, as well as brief interviews with passersby (non-activists) at political events such as demonstrations. I also attended the meetings of three activist groups and undertook participant observation in various collective actions (demonstrations, social gatherings, book fairs, and cultural events among others) between 2013 and 2016. In particular I studied the actions carried out by three different activist groups, selected for their prominent presence in Malmö during the time of my fieldwork: Asylgruppen (the Asylum Group), Allt åt alla (Everything for Everyone), and Kontrapunkt (Counterpoint) (for more details see Hansen, 2019, pp. 54–66). The majority of the activists connected to these groups have middle-class backgrounds and experiences of attending university. I categorize Asylgruppen as “pro-asylum” since their primary work consists of activism and solidarity in support of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants (mostly unac-companied minors). Allt åt alla I categorize as a “class struggle-oriented” group since they have a much more pronouncedly Marxist ideological position. Activists affiliated with Allt åt alla engage in struggles that aim to create equality and to generally improve the lives of the city’s inhabitants, such as their working conditions, housing conditions (through anti- gentrification and anti-segregation campaigns), and also anti-racism and anti-fascism actions. Kontrapunkt is the name of a social center and important activist venue in Malmö. The activists connected to the social center use cultural and artistic expression in their campaigns for societal equality by arranging and housing solidarity parties, concerts, festivals, educational events, and workshops. As far as political struggles are concerned, Kontrapunkt has stirred anti-gentrification campaigns and solidarity-based work with refugees and Roma migrants in the city.
Since much of activist mobilization, organization, and communication happens in and through Facebook, the social media network was also a relevant part of my research and I made observations of the activists’ communications and interactions online.
Activism in Malmö includes Swedish citizens, some of whom were born abroad or have foreign backgrounds, as well as people with experiences of forced migration living in precarious conditions in Malmö. The “activist lens” (Hansen, 2019) thus enables me to capture a broad range of their experiences and move “away from treating the migrant population as the unit of analysis and investigation and instead direct the focus on parts of the whole population, which obviously includes migrants” (Dahinden, 2016).
Closely following social relations through practices of solidarity at the local scale allowed me to examine complex relations between ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality and the emergence of domains of commonality and mutual practices. The transformative solidarities overcoming certain group divides as investigated in this paper, did so to different extent on different levels: emotional (most pronounced in the strategy of building friendships),
discursive (as in framing strategies of shared dispossession in alliance building) and organiza-tional level (as in creating alternative structures).
Creating solidarity-based diversity
All kinds of practical solidarity work concerning aid provision involves people in unequal power relations. The ways in which these relations are negotiated, I claim, is what separates solidarity from charity. The goal can never be, as the activists I interviewed argue, merely to relieve suffering, but to eradicate the underlying reasons for the suffering which, for activists, is inequality fueled by capitalism. Activists thus adopt a stance that resembles Rancière’s (1999) radical equality, being critical toward hierarchical relationships between givers and receivers, such as in charity, arguing that these relationships neither problematize the existing inequality nor formulate an aim of equality. Rancière (1999) conceptualizes politics as the quest for equality between differently positioned social and ethnic groups. This specific form of understanding and practicing politics is crucial to achieve solidarity- based ethnic diversity in the city. Therefore, whilst this form of solidarity includes elements of aid provision, it is done by activists with an awareness that aid provision is not enough to establish lasting societal change. The activists’ aid-provision is therefore always intersected with advocacy work, mobilizations in online and public spaces, and (not uncommonly) acts of civil disobedience.
A characteristic of the activists’ work of solidarity is that, whether formed at an indivi-dual level (as in offering one’s sofa to an undocumented migrant) or at the group-action level (linking arms trying to block buses carrying deportees or blocking excavators from leveling Roma migrants’ shacks), it demands bodily proximity to the one(s) in need of support. As such we see not only the embodied character of solidarity but also the action- oriented devotedness of both “givers” and “receivers.”
In the course of creating alliances and relationships between radical activists and precar-ious migrants, despite the obvprecar-ious unequal power relations involved, activists attempt to create or at least indicate horizontalism. Activist groups in the extra-parliamentarian left in Malmö spend a great amount of time discussing how to make their structures more horizontal and inclusive, and they commonly formulate their politics in line with the theory of pre-figurative politics (Boggs, 1977; Trott, 2016) as expressed by one activist: “we struggle for a society with equality by creating, in the here and now, what we wish to see in the future.”
One way to approach horizontal relations is to involve the migrants in the process of political mobilizations, and attempt to empower the precarious and marginalized in ways that allow them to ultimately speak and fight for themselves rather than being represented by activists with citizenship.
The activist Sara, 26 years old, explained why she decided to become engaged in Asylgruppen. She described the group as different than the work conducted by state institutions. The activists do not differentiate between “us” givers and “them” receivers, but are seen as friends, as part of the same collective:
We help undocumented persons in their everyday lives. It’s not like a professional institution where we have a large distance to the people. They are not our clients, they become our friends. And we also do things together. It’s not like “we Swedish citizens doing things for others.” We do things together and we come up with . . . so it’s like a flat organization and people are able to do whatever they want to do, so the group creates what the group is doing. Which I feel is what
I can stand for . . .. It’s not like party politics in that sense that we . . . but we want a more humane asylum politics. And that is also what we are trying to create. To be a counterpart to the asylum laws that our friends face—those who are not allowed to stay, for example—so then we help them to stay.
Sara’s comment provides a clear example of the “us” created in political solidarity (Laitinen & Pessi, 2014; Scholtz, 2008): We do things together. This is also revealed by Sara’s, and many more activists’, claims that they attempt to create horizontal relationships with undocumented migrants and that they try to “share” their privileged conditions with those in precarious conditions. “We help them to stay [in the country].” The great majority of the activists I interviewed described their experiences in line with the theories of political solidarity, mutual aid, and horizontalism. Indeed, horizontalism, a sense of commonality, and “us together” were common themes in the interviews.
Furthermore, Sara’s perception of the undocumented migrants as friends and Asylgruppen’s collaborative methods, similar to a “flat organization,” make the movement unique and something Sara “can stand for.” She contrasts the movement with party politics, which connotes hierarchy and bureaucracy. She frames the activists’ practices in terms of building egalitarian relationships with the migrants with precarious legal status in the here and now (“they are not our clients, they are our friends”) and emphasizes how they do things together. Sara mentions citizenship status—“we Swedish citizens”—but does not employ the discourse of “migrants versus Swedes.” Sara’s quote thus points to the central ground of how inclusion is perceived and practiced. The activists challenge the paternalistic politics of care or protection that is associated both with the hierarchical relationship between the protector and the protected, and with the distinction between those who are worthy of protection and those who are not. In this way, activists together with the migrants create relations beyond mediated neoliberal (competitive) and state (individualizing) forms of relations.
In the following I present three principal ways that activists achieved generating new social relations that crossed divides: the creation of (1) alliances, (2) friendships, and (3) alternative structures. I do so by giving examples of activities and actions carried out by the three different activist groups presented above.
The analysis will show how radical activism, which is based on a critique of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and authority, creates experimental spaces in which new ways of living life, organizing structures, and perceiving theory are practiced (Melucci, 1989). The most notable experimental spaces are those that take on the forms of direct democracy and horizontal organization, which has long been practiced within extra-parliamentarian, left- wing groups (Leach, 2009). However, experimenting and building relationships among people in unequal power relations is not straightforward and this paper also examines the challenges involved.
Alliances
In 2014, an alliance6 was created in Malmö between activists and so-called EU migrants, mostly Roma from Romania and Bulgaria, who had created a settlement in the city (called Sorgenfri settlement, which existed 2013–2015) where around 200 Roma people stayed in self-made huts, caravans, and cars, and lacked toilets, heat, or running water. They traveled to Sweden to earn money by finding day-labor and by begging. The settlement became an
intensely contested place, referred to as the largest shantytown in Sweden’s history (Karlsson, 2015). Furthermore, the settlement was erected on a privately-owned lot, owned by the real estate billionaire Per Arwidsson who bought it in 1999 for investment purposes (Satz, 2016). The whole area in which the Roma had built their settlement was planned for redevelopment by the municipality. The local authorities concluded they were not allowed to stay there and should be evicted. Radical activists in the city decided to approach the settlement residents and offer them support in resisting the eviction and struggling for the Roma migrants’ right to claim space and decent living conditions in Sweden. The activists involved in Allt åt alla and Kontrapunkt not only saw the struggle over the Sorgenfri settlement as a way to help the Roma migrants to stay in the settlement or to be provided with alternative housing by the municipality, but also as a way to resist the gentrification of the neighborhood and to make housing claims more general affecting not only Roma migrants but also refugees and Swedish citizens. According to the activists, the eventual eviction was a consequence of the intersecting processes of gentrification, racism, and class conflict that are not specific to a certain neighborhood or to Malmö as a city but define the current state of affairs globally. Hence, the activists’ interest in fighting gentrifica-tion is here intimately connected with the Roma migrants’ specific situagentrifica-tion in the city. The Roma migrants are further dispossessed in favor of plans for accumulating capital. From that perspective, the struggle was a fight for “global justice” at the local level by attempting to expose the municipality’s political and economic neoliberal project (Mayer, 2007).
This alliance entailed a process of everyone involved exploring both their shared and differing interests, and collaborating across differences and deep inequalities. Initially, the Roma migrants were passive receivers of the activists’ will to help, but in the course of building a solidarity-based alliance, some of the settlement residents became political agents by claiming rights and recognition in Malmö through organizing and participat-ing in demonstrations, sit-ins, and co-writparticipat-ing an opinion piece with the activists which was published in a local newspaper (Alexandro et al., 2015). In the course of the struggle, crucial attempts were made by activists to achieve in-depth knowledge of the Roma migrants’ situation, which was done through recurrent meetings in a nearby venue with the settlement residents for discussions and the sharing of experiences and knowledge. Some of the activists met some of the Roma migrants one evening every week for nearly one and a half years. Activists also arranged large meetings at the settlement in which they talked about strategies for counteracting the Roma’s precarious situation. Activists thus enabled and opened up spaces of dialogue where these two fundamentally differently situated groups—Malmö activists and Roma migrants under the threat of eviction—could meet. This process was complex, particularly due to linguistic divides. Dozens of settlement residents were involved in the activism, many of whom had little or no schooling and did not speak much English or Swedish. Of the 10–20 Swedish activists involved throughout the entire process and the (approximately) 100 activists participating in the blockade on the day of the eviction, very few spoke Romanian or Romani.
With the help of a few Romanian-speaking Swedish activists, the Roma migrants and the activists were able to discuss how the residents defined their own problems and what changes they wanted to see, and explored the possibilities of creating a joint struggle that also incorporated the activists’ stance against the gentrification of the neighborhood and the displacement of the neighborhood’s predominantly low-income population.
The collaboration between activists and Roma migrants faced a number of challenges. Confusion and problems regarding implementation and decision-making often occurred, and the activists noticed that their efforts caused conflicts among the settlement residents. Firstly, the political mobilizations reduced the income of some settlement residents as they took time out of begging to participate in meetings and protests. Secondly, some of the Roma migrants experienced an increase in racially motivated harassment and public hostility after the activism began and argued that this was caused by their increased visibility in the media. Finally, introducing positions with certain responsibilities led to internal power struggles in the settlement. In one case, the activists provided spades for the settlement residents to dig latrines, which caused internal quarrels around whom should be responsible for the spades and for the digging. A further challenge, from the perspective of the local activists, was the Roma’s patriarchal structure of internal organization. To tackle this, female activists invited female residents of the settlement to separate meetings. Some activists likewise experienced the Roma migrants’ internal hierarchies and legal and cultural systems as challenges to the collaboration, considering the activists’ horizontal and direct- democracy-based organizational structure. It was also difficult to manage the educational differences between the activists and the Roma migrants. As one of the Malmö activists put it:
There are people . . . well, some understand more, some understand less. The majority of them have attended school for only a short period, if at all. Some are illiterate [and] cannot write in their own language, and even if you interpret, either into Romanian or Romani, they might not understand the meaning of what was said because of the lack of education. So, I mean, there are many who understand the situation based on their prior knowledge.
As pointed out, even when interpretation occurred it was difficult to assess the cultural and contextual meaning of what was said due to the lack of formal education. One can assume that the educational differences within the group of Roma migrants also created a hierarchy, and that those with the most schooling and knowledge in languages acquired prominent positions in their negotiation with the activists. The examples so far illustrate how practices of solidarity in relations of unequal power are indeed complex. It requires of activists to be aware of power relations with regard to precarious migrants and to take a critical stance with regard to how their actions are carried out. Most importantly, they have to be aware of the potential negative consequences of these actions, as they may cause conflicts among the precarious migrants and thereby threaten the solidarity. An increased local knowledge of the specific organizational and cultural patterns among the settlement residents could have ameliorated their collaboration.
The activist Daniel, involved in Allt åt alla, admitted that in terms of life experiences and social position, the activists had very little in common with the Roma residents of the Sorgenfri settlement. This, however, did not prevent them from working together in the movement, getting to know each other, building friendly relationships, sharing experiences of political solidarity, and formulating common interests around living conditions and access to housing in the city. Daniel was surprised that it was possible to, in his own words, “overcome the gigantic abyss that exists between me and a poor begging Roma from Romania.”
Friendships
A majority of the migrants who receive support from Asylgruppen in Malmö are undocu-mented young male migrants, aged 15–25, mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia. In the pro-asylum circles of the activist scene in the city, the majority of the activists are women between the ages of 25 and 40, and a large proportion of them identify with the LGBTQ community. Ruth Milkman’s (2014) study of the Dreamers in the U.S. shows a similar pattern; and in Malmö, more lesbian and queer individuals were involved in pro- asylum groups than in the class struggle-oriented groups like Allt åt alla. Some activists explained this through gender roles, arguing that men are generally attracted to short-term action-oriented activities whereas women are drawn more to the long-term, care-oriented activities characteristic of Asylgruppen’s work. Research suggests some women are socia-lized to be more caring (Macrae, 1995).
Another particularly noticeable trait of Asylgruppen, as well as other pro-asylum groups in Malmö, is that there are a significant number of activists with migrant backgrounds, i.e. born to immigrant parents, many of whom came to Sweden from Iran, Argentina, and Chile in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as political refugees. These activists were motivated by their identification with the struggles of the newcomers, who were facing similar challenges to those they or their parents had experienced. Although these activists have full residency rights or legal citizenship and may have even been born in Sweden, they are still subject to anti-immigrant discourses and have experienced racialization and marginalization in Swedish society. Therefore, the “migrant” (or “immigrant”) label is often rejected by this portion of the Swedish population because it casts them as foreigners despite their legal citizenship (Glick Schiller & Çağlar, 2011, p. 2). As Swedish citizens, the so-called “second generation migrants” among the Swedish activists possess a far greater level of cultural capital within Sweden than the recently arrived migrants, many of whom have little or no education and have lived in very precarious conditions in their countries of national citizenship. Whereas both are racialized in Swedish society, and thus may suffer from everyday and structural racism, the oppressive effects are far stronger for the newly arrived migrants.
A central divide between the Swedish activists and the precarious migrants thus lies in their social backgrounds and life experiences. As many of the Swedish activists have middle- class backgrounds and often have a university education, their engagement involves experi-encing, sometimes for the first time in their lives, the structural violence that people of foreign background with low levels of schooling experience in the Swedish welfare state (conditions similar to those shown by Hamann & Karakayali, 2016, in Germany). This violence entails poverty, persecution, racial profiling, detention, and deportation.
The friendships created through pro-asylum solidarity activism between activists and undocumented migrants are commonly a result of the considerable time spent together and from the embodied character of this kind of activism. Examples are: Swedish activists’ sheltering undocumented migrants in their own homes, which implies cooking and eating together and sharing daily household tasks; recurrent meetings at detention centers; organizing and participating in demonstrations together; and arranging social gatherings and parties.
While difference in age was pronounced within these relationships, it was only men-tioned rarely as a problem. Divides in sexual orientation were, however, menmen-tioned.
According to the activist Stella, 30 years old, social gatherings and parties arranged by Asylgruppen are important, but at the same time strange or somehow sad. She said:
All these young Afghan men who would like to, more than anything else, meet a Swedish girl, and the material security such a relationship would give them. And who does not want to love and be loved? Then there are all these Swedish female activists—and they are all gay!
The migrants who arrived in Sweden and eventually received support from the Swedish activists were surprised to understand that many of them were lesbians. Hakim, 20 years old, arrived in Sweden as an undocumented minor. His asylum application was rejected due to the Dublin regulation but stayed in Malmö as undocumented until he got a renewed chance to apply (18 months). Hakim, who became an activist in Asylgruppen while being undocumented, describes his meeting with the Swedish activists as follows:
It was a few months after I had been at some meetings with Asylgruppen and I thought, oh, how come there are so many girls and how come many of them are lesbians, and how come many were really odd to me? Why do they have hair here [points to his armpits], and why are they vegans and why do they not want to eat meat? . . . Because when I was in Iran, where I guess I was a bit religious, they always said that lesbians or gays are not good people. . . . And I thought, oh, but right now, those who help me, and who help many others, are such people, they are lesbians. But why is it so?
Becoming acquainted and even friends with Swedish activists constituted a process of confronting his own previous attitudes and preconceptions regarding women and lesbians. Hakim’s personal change of attitudes implied a process of political socialization where he realized that many of the activists are also fighting against dispossessive processes, in this case the female and lesbian activists’ struggles against sexism and homophobia. Hakim thus eventually related his own dispossessive conditions with others’ dispossessive conditions, recognizing and problematizing the broader structures in which he and the Swedish activists find themselves. This process illustrates the development of an “us” as a mutually constitutive characteristic of solidarity (Laitinen & Pessi, 2014).
Hakim’s quote confirms what Miller and Nicholls (2013) claim, namely that the exchanges of ideas, arguments, and narratives between different groups as well as between different individuals within a group allow different people to empathize with the concerns, suffering and struggles of other people, such as when precarious migrants come to feel commonalities of suffering and aspiration with the LGBTQ community. The friendships created through activism contribute in this way to creating solidarity-based ethnic diversity that is mutual, where migrants as well as Swedish activists come to show solidarity with one another’s positionalities and experiences of oppression and dispossession.
A challenge in creating friendships in relations of unequal power is that these may not feel “real” for those involved. One migrant who received support from Swedish activists expressed it as follows: “When I receive permanent residency, I want to move somewhere else, so I can have friends who are not my friends on the basis that they had to help me.” The quote suggests that socioeconomic and legal inequality are premises upon which it is very difficult to create, as one activist called, “real friendships.” However, despite the fact that aid-oriented solidarity can be an awkward basis for friendship for those involved, I have observed many examples of close and enduring friendships and romantic relationships (usually established between people of similar age) between asylum seekers and Swedish
activists. One example is Abed and his Swedish girlfriend mentioned in the next section. Another example is expressed by the activist Ingrid, 28 years old:
[T]he asylum movement feels like a family, which I also think is nice . . . because it blurs the division of “now we help and now we don’t help” because so many people in the group are my . . . some of my best friends too. The first person for whom I became the contact person is one of my best friends today. So, I don’t see that clear differences.
One risk involved in creating friendships through activism, is that the arrangement of collective actions may increasingly depend on informal networks of friends, which turns activism into an exclusionary and discriminatory practice: if you are not friends with the activists it can be difficult to enter (Freeman, 1972). The attempt at creating alternative structures (analyzed in the next section), can be interpreted as a strategy for avoiding “the tyranny of structurelessness” (Freeman, 1972) and for moving away from depending on networks of connected friends.
Alternative structures
Alternative structures make activism more accessible to people who have no prior relations to activists and thus make activism more durable and long-term. As explained below, alternative structures have also played a crucial role for many migrants in precarious legal conditions to access social wealth outside neoliberal and state-based institutions in Malmö and to ultimately become emplaced in the city.
Parallel to the struggle over the Sorgenfri Roma settlement, another major political event was taking place in Malmö in 2015. Malmö Central Station became, for many refugees, their first arrival point in Sweden during the large reception of refugees to Sweden in the fall of 2015. Malmö, compared to the larger cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm, received the most asylum seekers per capita (Malmö stad, 2018b). At its peak in September 2015, it was estimated that around 2,000 refugees were arriving in Sweden each day, of which half applied for asylum in Sweden while the rest continued to the neighboring Nordic countries (Larsson & Sundahl Djerf, 2015). Overnight, the social center Kontrapunkt was transformed into a refugee transit center. Since its inception in 2009, Kontrapunkt housed raves, electronic parties, and reggae and punk festivals, most of them to contribute to certain political causes and charity fundraising. It also offered daily workshops on different subjects like bike servicing, computing, arts and crafts, and organized a community kitchen for the homeless. In September 2015, Kontrapunkt turned into a complex system of social services involving hundreds of volunteers, activists, and many more newcomers (Rescala, 2016). While the state and the municipality failed to set up an acute temporary refugee reception, Kontrapunkt in collaboration with the Muslim Assembly offered shelter to 17,000 refugees during the autumn of 2015.7 During three months (September, October, and November), 1,000 meals were handed out daily (Kontrapunkt, 2017, p. 146). Kontrapunkt collected money to buy train tickets and arranged buses for those who wanted to travel further to Norway and Finland. Parallel with their aid provision to refugees, Kontrapunkt also worked politically by creating campaigns, putting out statements in the mainstream media, and co- organizing demonstrations in solidarity with the refugees (Kontrapunkt, 2015; Snöbohm,
2015). This reflected the activists’ ideal of not only engaging in relieving the suffering of others, but combining this with political work.
A key observation I made was that Kontrapunkt involved many refugees in the social center’s daily tasks and activities, and the refugees happily engaged as volunteers. In this way, rather than Kontrapunkt being an organization of (in the words of one activist) “Swedes who engage in helping others,” the center became a place where refugees seeking assistance were able to assist others in turn.
One of them was Abed, an Iraqi man who spoke a little English, who had traveled to Sweden from France where his asylum application had been rejected. The (volunteering) legal councilors at Kontrapunkt explained that he was unable to apply in Sweden as his fingerprints had been taken in France. As he did not want to go back to France, much less return to Iraq, he stayed in Kontrapunkt and continued to commit himself to volunteering and learning Swedish. As of 2018, he was still involved in the work of the social center, having obtained documents of legal residency through his partnership with his Swedish girlfriend.
Kontrapunkt is an example of an alternative extra-parliamentarian structure that shel-tered and involved people regardless of their legal status, many of whom were considered undesirable by mainstream society and by the Swedish state: refugees in transit; and rejected asylum seekers who stayed as undocumented immigrants to volunteer.
Conclusions
Looking at alliances, friendships, and alternative structures as interconnected forms of creating new social relations in the city reveals a complex set of processes in which activists simultaneously try to create durable support structures, organize themselves as political actors, and materially resist various inequalities to directly improve their own lives and those of others. The examples from Malmö resonate with what Chatterton and Pickerill (2010) identified as “autonomous geographies” in the UK, in which activists promote collective and democratic forms of social relations.
By analyzing social relations emerging from radical activists’ solidarity work with pre-carious migrants, this paper illustrated the extent to which these relations cross divides of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. It has shown that the alliance between Swedish activists and Roma migrants, as well as the new social relations made between activists and refugees and undocumented migrants, implied mutuality and collaboration and involved elements of awareness-raising and politicization. Solidarity thus strengthens the cohesion between differently positioned people who jointly act against injustice, which commonly accentuates the importance of each individual’s conscience and commitment (Scholtz, 2008, p. 33).
The paper has further shown that the new relationships and alliances forged through activism have a transformative potential and take the form of transgressive social ties that partly challenge norms of affiliation and contact. The struggle over the Sorgenfri settle-ment is a clear example of a cross-social and cross-ethnic alliance in which solidarity came out as a relation forged through political struggle that sought to challenge forms of oppression (Featherstone, 2012). Despite major socioeconomic, cultural, and legal differ-ences between the Roma migrants and the Swedish activists, an alliance was created. Regarding the social relations and friendships created between undocumented migrants and activists enabled direct access to forms of social welfare for a group of migrants that are normally neglected by the state. The alternative social relations the activists create in
the present through solidarity-based activities and horizontality show their “commitment to democratization through local, collective structures that anticipate the future liberated society” (Boggs, 1977, p. 5). Finally, the example of alternative structures, Kontrapunkt offered a place for undocumented refugees and asylum seekers to engage in meaningful activities in an otherwise inhospitable country.
All three strategies above implied, to different extents, to opening a space of dialogue between people in unequal power relations, and a place for common production of political ideas and practices of solidarity. Most importantly, the activists’ creation of networks of friends, allies and alternative structures constitute instances of resistance against the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen and the number of different legal statuses found in-between these categories. They did so by forging horizontal social relations beyond legal statuses and enabling the politicization and subjectification of precarious migrants (access to shelter, legal aid, political participation in public spaces, etc.) and making it possible for them to stay in the city and in the country. Activists enact this resistance against state-defined categories by recognizing the migrants as political agents and allies and continuously involving them as friends, co-activists, or simply as co-human beings in horizontal ways. Therefore, the activists featured in this paper are engaged in solidarity rather than charity due to their attempts to create horizontal relations of empathy, mutual aid, and recognition.
However, political solidarity is a process marked by a number of challenges, such as increased visibility in public space through demonstrations or attention in mainstream media can lead to an increased risk of deportation (for undocumented migrants) or increased risk of racially motivated harassment (for Roma migrants). Other challenges are the asymmetrical relationship between migrants and activists, differences in organizational structures and cultural traditions (as in the case of the Roma migrants), as well as differences in sexuality, age, and gender. Speaking on behalf of migrants without legal status brings about issues of paternalism and unequal power relations (Cappiali, 2017). Most of these challenges, however, did not prevent the establishment of relationships, in some cases even close and lasting relationships.
My fieldwork revealed that people of different socio-cultural backgrounds, legal status, ethnicities, ages, genders, sexualities, and political ideologies, who would otherwise not meet at all, met due to activism. The solidarity work initiated by activists in Malmö thus constitutes a form of counter-power to the “culturist discourses of othering” (Ghorashi,
2018; see also Çağlar & Glick Schiller, 2018), as the relationships built transcended the lines of legal status, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.
However, even if the activists and the migrants forge new relations of solidarity, how does that challenge municipal governments? The equality promoted and practiced within the solidarity-based space of Möllevången is still confronting an inequality (and even hostility) externally. The ultimate challenge for activists who act in solidarity with migrants (asylum seekers, the undocumented, and Roma migrants included), is that rights are primarily state-based. That is why it is worth paying further attention to the cases in which activists have successfully pressured local governments to introduce certain social rights for undocumented migrants (Nordling et al., 2017).
The activists’ political quest for equality and their ideal of horizontalism appears to be at the core of the process of generating a solidarity-based diversity in the city. Their practices problematize the ontological divide between different legal categories (Nyers &
Rygiel, 2012, p. 9). As such, solidarity activism also challenges the nation-state’s sovereign right to control people’s mobility, which is done through the supporting, befriending, marrying, sheltering, and political mobilizing of precarious migrants. Albeit on a small scale within urban socio-spatial relations, this form of solidarity is a form of city-making that materializes through new social relations developed through the spaces and actions opened up by the activists. They both promote and practice a vision in which all the people making up the social fabric of a place should be given equal access to the city and its resources regardless of their ethnicity, socio-cultural backgrounds, age, gender, sexu-ality, and legal status. They thereby oppose the ever-growing anti-immigrant stance on the national level and open up a space in the city, “that brings us together to talk and to argue about the kind of future world we want” (Massey, 2013). Despite the challenges of working together in hierarchies of gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, and differences in ideological backgrounds, activists motivated by the theory of political solidarity unite in domains of mutuality, thus challenging hegemonic power structures and, as this paper has argued, contribute to a bottom-up process of remaking the city through new social relationships.
Notes
1. Roma people in Europe have long been the target of racialization, marginalization, and criminalization (De Genova, 2019), even in their “own” countries of formal citizenship. Therefore, many of their experiences resemble those of refugees as they flee regimes of discrimination and marginalization.
2. As of 2017, Malmö had the fourth-highest proportion of foreign-born residents (33.1%) among municipalities in Sweden. By including people who were born in Sweden to foreign-born parents, the figure increases to 45.1% in 2017 (Salonen, 2015, p. 90; SCB, 2018a, 2018b). The largest immigrant groups in Malmö are from Iraq (11,655), the former Yugoslavia (7,831), Denmark (7,444), Poland (6,989), Syria (6,440), Bosnia (6,360), Lebanon (4,301), Iran (3,863), Afghanistan (3,649), and Romania (2,429) (Malmö stad, 2018a).
3. However, recent literature shows how even volunteerism has become politicized in a novel way (Fleischmann & Steinhilper, 2017). While traditionally associated with charity or understood as an “apolitical” practice, humanitarian volunteering in connection with refugees has trans-formed into a new kind of political “dispositif of helping” (Fleischmann & Steinhilper, 2017). 4. In leftist circles, the term “liberal” has taken on a negative connotation and refers to the liberal
political ideology with an individual’s freedom at its core. It can describe a person or an idea that supports free market and limited government intervention concerning redistribution of wealth through taxes. A “liberal,” in leftist circles, thus usually refers to a person who upholds the current hegemonic relations of power, implicitly or explicitly.
5. In an attempt to understand the plethora of alternative movements appearing in the 1960s and onward in many Western countries, the term and theory of new social movements appeared (Della Porta & Diani, 2006, p. 6). Examples of movements that introduced new political conflicts in Sweden were the women’s movement, the environmentalist movement, and the anti-imperialist and anti-apartheid movements (for an overview of the major trends in con-tentious politics in Sweden 1950–2015, see Peterson et al., 2017). Examples of recent “new” movements in Sweden are the upsurge of migrants’ and asylum seekers’ struggles for rights and recognition, some of which are referred to in this paper.
6. I use the notion of alliance as a unified effort involving two or more organizations, groups, or individuals to achieve common goals with respect to a particular issue (Gudergan, 2007). An alliance is “a close association for a common objective” or “for mutual benefit,” synonymous with the idea of a league, a coalition, or a union (Bowser, 2007).
7. It took 6 weeks for the City of Malmö, the Traffic Department (Gatukontoret), and the Migration Office to come to terms with the situation and set up a temporary refugee reception area at Posthusplatsen, located beside the Central Station.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Jacob Lind, Maja Povrzanović Frykman, the two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the journal for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
About the author
Christina Hansen received her PhD in International Migration and Ethnic Relations (IMER) from Malmö University in 2019. Her doctoral dissertation connects and bridges urban and migration studies, investigating migration, urbanization, and societal change in Malmö. In particular, Hansen’s work examines how migration and neoliberal transformation of urban space are perceived and negotiated, using ethnographic methods and her own experiences of activism, with the focus on radical left activists’ collective actions and everyday interactions in public space. She focuses on the practices of radical activism that may resist processes of displacement and dispossession by con-structing alternative socioeconomic structures and practices of commoning.
ORCID
Christina Hansen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1029-4132 References
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