City Plaza and Radical Vernacularizers T

UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
CITY PLAZA AND RADICAL SCHOOL OF GLOBAL STUDIES

2016
VERNACULARIZERS
Human Rights MA
Candidate Number: 144414
i
Candidate number: 144414
City Plaza and Radical Vernacularizers: The Radical Potentiality of Human Rights
SUMMARY
This research aspires to explore the radical potentiality of human rights in the context of City
Plaza Refugee Accommodation Space, an occupied hotel in Athens which has become a
community of resistance and pro-refugee mobilisation. Resistance and political praxis are
facilitated by a ‘radical vernacularization’ of human rights performed by the occupants.
Contrary to the limited scope of the concept of vernacularization which insinuates an ultimate
appeal to a sovereign order -be it the international law or the state- the radical vernacularizers
of City Plaza claim rights against and beyond such institutions, thereby galvanising resistance
and anticipating a sustainable radical alternative. The translation is ‘radical’ because it is based
on notions of autonomy, solidarity, freedom and equality despite and beyond state provisions,
but also ‘vernacular’ because these notions become familiar commonly lived experiences
through the practices of reclaiming the city and autogestion.
City Plaza and Radical Vernacularizers: The Radical Potentiality of Human Rights 2
CONTENTS
List of Abbreviations 3
List of Figures 3
Preface 4
INTRODUCTION 7
I: METHODOLOGY 10
II: RADICAL VERNACULARIZERS, AUTONOMY OF MIGRATION AND ACTS OF

CITIZENSHIP
A. Vernacularizers: Limits and Potentialities 12

B. Autonomy of Migration: The Political Impetus for Radical Vernacularization 19
III: CITY PLAZA AS A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE: THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

AND THE POLITICS OF AUTOGESTION
A. Right to the City: The Refusal to Be Removed 25

B. The Politics of Autogestion and City Plaza as a Radical Alternative 31
CONCLUSION 37
Endnotes 39
Bibliography 42
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
AoM Autonomy of Migration

Ibid. ibidem [in the same place]
SIEPR Solidarity Initiative for Economic and Political Refugees
LIST OF FIGURES
Figures
1. Map of the centre of Athens, 2016, Google Maps. 27
2. Congregating for the protest at the entrance of City Plaza hotel, 14 July 2016. 29
3. Language lessons programme, City Plaza lounge, July 2016. 33

PREFACE
My interest in the radical potentiality of human rights began from the emphasis the Marxist
critique puts on the quest for a true human emancipation, in which freedom is not determined
by private property, membership criteria or allegiance to the nation-state. However, it became
necessitated after the disastrous inability of the international human rights arena to halt the
monstrosities that are taking place on the borderlands of Europe. This project therefore started
as a search of the ‘irruptive and radical’ character (Wall, 2003: 2) of human rights, not for the
sake of rights as ends, but as means to mobilise subversive political action. I therefore embark
on this exploration with a dialectical presupposition: that no matter how confining, exploitative
and exclusive sovereign institutions and hierarchies are, there grows inside them their own
contradiction. ‘[T]he final word on power’, Deleuze famously writes, ‘is that resistance comes
first’ (1987: 119). The main problem addressed is the concept of the ‘vernacularization’ of
human rights which, I argue, only gives us a limited understanding of how resistance becomes
organised around human rights ideas. Instead, I analyse instances in which these ideas become
radicalised through and on the basis of a radically alternative community, where outsiders
challenge and subvert the hierarchies of hegemonic politics.
The introduction presents the occupied hotel of City Plaza as a setting which can
provide promising insights in regards to the question of the radical potentiality of human rights.
Chapter II explores the connection of the concepts of ‘radical vernacularizers’, ‘AoM’ and ‘acts
of citizenship’. The argument that connects these three foundational ideas can be succinctly
put as follows: Traditionally, the process of vernacularization is thought to occur ‘in the
middle’ of a powerful/powerless spectrum (Levitt and Merry, 2009; Merry 2009). However,
this conceptualisation presents certain limitations in the already limited nature of human rights.
Instead, radical vernacularizers as examined in the case of City Plaza aspire to provide a
ground-breaking translation of rights which transcends institutionalised power and mainly
functions as a means for mobilising and resisting. Precisely for this reason, radical
vernacularization is proposed as a complementary dimension of what Isin calls ‘acts of
citizenship’ (Isin, 2008; II, section A). Next, it is argued that AoM as a methodology and
critique provides us with a political dialectic which interprets border-crossing as productive

(Anderson et al., 2012; Bojadžijev and Karakayali, 2010 De Genova, 2016; Mezzadra and
Nielsen, 2012, Mitropoulos, 2006;) of new political subjectivities that challenge and
problematise claims of statism and territorial sovereignty. AoM’s acutely politicised
framework enables the vernacularizers to draw on the contested politics between inclusion and
exclusion and stretch their claims beyond formal authority (II, section B). Chapter III analyses
the grounds on which international human rights ideas become appropriated by City Plaza
activists so as to critique governmental and European anti-refugee policies, and mobilise
political action in response. Globally circulated mandates to decent housing and adequate living
(UN General Assembly, 1948: art. 25), liberty and security (ibid.: art. 3) or assembly and
association (ibid.: art.20) are radically vernacularized on the basis of autonomy, solidarity,
freedom and equality. The two main practices which render these ideas familiar and relatable
concepts to the refugee and non-refugee tenants of City Plaza, are the enactment of the ‘right
to the city’ and the appropriation of urban space (III, section A), and the active self-
management (autogestion) of the occupation (III, section B). Both practices are collectively
practiced by the entire City Plaza community.
I offer my sincerest thanks to my supervisor, Pamela Kea, for her guidance and kind
advice throughout my research. I also express my thanks to my course convenor, Nigel
Eltringham, for a thoughtful introduction to human rights studies which lies in this work. I am
grateful to Sofia Roupakia, for giving me the opportunity to work next to her at Migrants’
Rights Network and gather information that has largely shaped my ideas around human rights.
Many thanks to my best friend Alexandra for her critical engagement in this project and her
support throughout our many shared years. A true thank you to my comrade, Nick, for his
inexhaustible encouragement and brilliant help. I owe an enormous debt and thank you to my
parents for their unconditional support in very harsh times and for their startling love. Finally,
I am indebted to all the occupants, friends and fellow activists in met in City Plaza, for sharing
their thoughts, dreams and aspirations with me. Their magnificent struggle invigorated me both
as a human rights student and as an activist.
We were millions
An old tree
A young tree
We were seeds
The helmet of Ankara
In a bloody night came
To uproot us
They did,
They took us away long away!
On the way many old trees bent
In the cold many young trees died
They froze
Many seeds were trampled
They were lost and forgotten
Like a river in the summer we had little water
Like birds in the autumn, we became fewer
We ended up in thousands of homes
There were still seeds among us, the wind took them
The wind returned them
They reached the thirsty mountains
They hid among the rocks
The first rain
The second rain
The third rain
They grew again
We are now a forest again
We are millions
Sherko Bekas
The Secret Diary of a Rose: A Kurdish Anthology of Poems
INTRODUCTION
With this current decade being one of the most shameful accounts in the recent history of
human misery and tragedy we are called - as activists, scholars and citizens of ‘civilised’
Europe- to attend to a socio-political system that has failed its own ideas of morality,
egalitarianism and liberty. This research aspires to examine this inevitable systemic failure
dialectically and look for the radical promise for change within it. To this end, I will attempt to
explore a new framework in which the global concepts of human rights can be infused in the
radical politics of resistance and political mobilisation. This project will foreground pro-
refugee struggle in an occupied hotel in Athens as a counter-hegemonic (Aziz 1995; Cowan et
al. 2001; Gramsci 1971) alternative to Europe’s politics of exclusion and will seek to fathom
how human rights can become radically transformed weapons for movements from below
aspiring to reorganise sovereign order.
If our epoch ‘is the epoch of human rights, their triumph is something of a paradox’,
writes Douzinas (2000: 220). Indeed, as Karl Marx’s (2003) influential analysis has shown, the
paradox with rights is that the political emancipation they promise can harmonically coexist
with oppression. According to Marx, rights can give liberties but only within an existing social
order that is always structurally unjust, thus always reactionary to truly liberating ideas:
‘between equal rights force decides’ (Marx in Miéville, 2006: 8). Therefore, human rights do
not provide liberation from the system but merely liberty to freely move within its injustice
(Marx, 2003: 27). A number of radical thinkers have polemically exposed the ways in which
human rights ultimately consolidate state power and moralise rather than politicise problems
(Chambers, 2003: 151; Kouvelakis, 2005; Žižek, 2005) and have also emphasised that their
global mandates have never found place in anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist politics (Wall,
2003).
Should we then abandon human rights ideas wholesale? Or should we attend to their
radical re-making on the ground which opens up the space for a ‘human emancipation’ which
is not restricted to individualist membership or pseudo-morality, but transcends such alienating
barriers (Marx, 2003: 24)? The aim of this project is to analyse the ways in which the radical
potentiality of human rights mobilises resistance that exposes the political, thus contestable,
character of ostensibly reified hierarchies of power (Isin and Wood: 102; Kouvelakis, 2005:
712). It therefore departs from the ‘politics of human rights’ and investigates the inspiring
gestures in the ‘politics for human rights’ (Baxi, 2004: 327). Human rights are seen as the
departure point for the incitement of collective dissent and resistance, and as a collective means
‘to resist or subvert the strategies of more powerful institutions, ideologies or processes’
(Madison, 2010: 2).
The study focuses on the case of City Plaza Refugee Accommodation Space (City
Plaza), an occupied hotel in the centre of Athens which accommodates more than 400 people,
including 180 children and many families. In the morning of the 22nd of April 2016, the
Solidarity Initiative for Economic and Political Refugees (SIEPR), a coalition of left and anti-
racist groups, transformed City Plaza in
a centre of struggle against racism and exclusion, for the right to free movement, decent
living conditions and equal rights … as an answer from the social movement… to the
mass detention of refugees in the border regions and the disastrous living conditions for
homeless refugees in the cities and the huge, state-run camps.
(SIEPR, 2016b)
City Plaza is a self-managed housing project and it is collectively run by its refugee occupants,
SIEPR activists and local or international ‘solidarians’. 1 The main argument of this research is
that these actors are collectively involved in a process which we can call ‘radical
vernacularization’ of rights, namely, a translation which ruptures the logic of the state as
grantor of rights and transcends its institutions in an effort to galvanise political pro-refugee
action. It is ‘radical’ because it ignites an anticipation -and, ultimately, enactment- of a counter-
hegemonic alternative beyond state or official humanitarian solutions, but also ‘vernacular’
because it is based on the commonly lived and familiar notions of autonomy, freedom, equality
and solidarity, as experienced in the community of City Plaza. As its activists aptly put it:
We share the idea that by claiming the basic rights and providing for the needs of refugees,
we also put in practice a conception of solidarity in everyday life and of self-organization
which creates and develops spaces of freedom and of common struggles of locals and
refugees.
(ibid.)
The strategic method of radical vernacularization, I propose, can expand the existing
literature around the ‘vernacularisation’ of human rights (see ch. II, section A) which only
provides us with a limited framework according to which ideas of global rights are merely
mediated top-down or bottom-up. Radical vernacularization problematises this restrictive
spectrum by rising from below and stretching beyond national or international sovereignty. The
findings of this research, therefore, can also give us a better understanding of the potentially
‘irruptive and radical character’ (Wall, 2003: 2) of human rights by fathoming the ways in
which resistant refugees and solidarians form radical and autonomous ideas on the ground. In
other words, how these actors ‘with unpredictable inventiveness … re-work and stretch in new
directions the accumulated meanings’ of hegemonic politics (Wright, 1998:10).
The main questions which this study aspires to answer are: How does human rights’
‘irruptive and radical’ potentiality become manifest in the pro-refugee struggle of City Plaza?
What are the practices of solidarity and resistance on the ground, and where do human rights
claims stand in the rejection of statist control? And more importantly, how are displays of
resistance translated in City Plaza so as to mobilise political action, unapologetic enactment of
rights and the anticipation of a new alternative? To put it differently, how can radicalised
translations of human rights ideas open up the space for political resistance?
CHAPTER I :
METHODOLOGY
The methodology used in this research is a qualitative approach, since its primary aim is to
interpret and understand the social and political reality (Bryman, 1988: 8) of resisting refugees
and solidarians in the context of radically re-articulating their human rights. My research will
aim to investigate the constitutive relationship between pro-refugee resistance and the radical
vernacularization of rights, therefore a qualitative analysis is essential in order to fathom the
depth of such a dynamic process.
To this end I enact an ethnography of City Plaza in an effort to ‘patiently document’

the numerous ways in which refugees actively cross borders and socio-political margins
(Walters, 2008: 190) and how power is encountered and contested by ostensibly silenced
actors. Ethnographic lenses can better and more stoically elucidate how political subjectivities
from below challenge the abstract assumptions of political elites and display artful strategies
of everyday resistance and subversion (ibid.; Hall, 2015; Trimikliniotis et al., 2015). I employ
the concept of ‘Autonomy of Migration’ (AoM) as a framework which sees migrant and
refugee mobilities as sites of political mobilisation and organisation, an ‘immanent force…
against state-centric vision’ (Raeymaekers, 2014: 169), so as to extract valuable insights on
how right claims become radicalised in a context which sees refusals and resistance as
something active (Mitropoulos, 2006). The analysis of ethnographic data in such a framework
fundamentally problematises the rigid iconographies of ‘Fortress Europe’ (Tsianos and
Karakayalı, 2010: 375) and explores how constituent actors from the refugee solidarity
movement challenge, reject and transform current constellations of hegemonic power (De
Genova et al., 2015: 201). Concisely, AoM is used both as ‘an analytical proposition and a
political disposition’ (Mitropoulos 2006: 7).
My ethnographic research entails informal discussions and semi-structured interviews

with occupants and key activists of City Plaza. It is based on a close observation of assemblies,
and everyday action of the people involved. Also, analysis of secondary literature and of the
ideological imperatives of the actors involved, as crystallised in their communiques, remain
central. Precisely because AoM discloses the political subjectivities which emerge through the
mobility of migration, City Plaza’s ethnography inevitably finds itself embedded in radical
political theory. For resistance starts close to the ground indeed (Scott, 1985) but also carries
within it a radical potentiality that should not be dismissed due to its humble origins. Therefore,
I agree with Nicholas De Genova when he understands migrant/refugee mobilities as a
historical movement ‘going on under our very eyes’ (Marx and Engels, in De Genova, 2013:
251) which profoundly politicises the terms of the game: ‘There is no neutral ground. The
momentum of the struggle itself compels us, one way or another, to take a side’ (ibid.: 252).
Following De Genova’s call for a ‘militant research’ (ibid.), I found myself politically and
morally engaged (Scheper-Hughes, 1995: 410) in City Plaza, where I enacted my fieldwork
observation by carrying out security shifts and demonstrating along with the refugees and
solidarians. Being a ‘comrade’ (ibid.: 420) apart from a participant observer granted this study
a richer and more genuine understanding of how City Plaza tenants come to theorize, envision
and pursue radical alternatives while claiming their human rights.
In terms of structure, in order to reflect the primacy of ethnography, I chose not to

separate my literature review from my ethnographic analysis, but to blend the two and test
theoretical positions against my findings as the latter unfold and inevitably challenge or buttress
existing theoretical frameworks.
CHAPTER II:
RADICAL VERNACULARIZERS, AUTONOMY OF MIGRATION AND ACTS OF

CITIZENSHIP
A. Vernacularizers: Limits and Potentialities
Translation … is charged with the special mission of

watching over the maturing process of the original language
and the birth pangs of its own.
-Walter Benjamin, 1970.
Sally Merry’s (2006) influential suggestions on the application of transnational human rights
ideas on local levels reveals a dynamic exchange between cosmopolitan notions and local
sociocultural understandings, which results in a translation of ideas ‘from the global arena
down and from local arenas up’ (ibid.: 38). This process of adapting global rights agendas in
familiar language for local settings and reframing local grievances in terms that can resonate
with these global agendas, has been generally described as the ‘vernacularization’ of human
rights (Bob, 2009; Cheng, 2011; Ledgerwood and Un, 2003; Levitt and Merry, 2009; Merry,
2006; Murray 2006; Orr, 2012; Tagliarina, 2015). In other words, vernacularization is ‘the
process of appropriation and local adaptation of globally generated ideas and strategies (Levitt
and Merry, 2009: 441); the conveyance of a message from one level in frequencies that can be
grasped by another level.
However, what this research aspires to show is that existing influential observations
(Merry 2006; Merry and Levitt, 2009) around vernacularization present some limitations which
constrain our understanding of active resistance. The limitations of vernacularization in the
question of the radical potentiality of human rights are threefold. Firstly, since translators are
seen as ‘in the middle’, thus committed to some extent to the international arena and to its
social and economic hierarchies (Merry, 2006: 40), it remains dubious whether the adaptation
of meaning always has an emancipatory aim. Contrary to the emancipatory quality of ‘local,
lived and counter-hegemonic’ human rights (Santos in Nash, 2012: 799), their translation risks
becoming conditioned to abstract and hegemonic ideas, or more generally, to political power,
funding and social hierarchies. One only needs to ponder how vernacularization has been used
to preserve the status quo and cement reactionary ‘power over’ against dynamic ‘power to’ in
the case of the American Christian Right in the U.S., as Tagliarina (2015) critically observes.2
Secondly and similarly, Cheng’s (2011) excellent critique of Merry highlights that
vernacularization of institutionalised transnational ideas sometimes comes with the paradox of
buttressing nationalist imagery or homogenising stereotypes (González, 2012) by reproducing
hierarchies hegemonically presented as intrinsic to local culture.3 Thirdly, as the
aforementioned literature seems to suggest, vernacularization always has a reference point or
a source text to refer to which resides within state power. Merry (2006: 42, my emphasis)
describes vernacularizers as ‘human rights translators [who] take local grievances and translate
them up into the more powerful language of transnational human rights’. The problem,
therefore, lies precisely in Merry’s assertion that translators/vernacularizers act within ‘fields
of unequal power’ (ibid., 40). Such an assertion partially insinuates a game where the rules are
set and the powerless are left deprived of chances to subvert or resist defeat, but merely able to
describe their grievances in familiar language. This process, for Englund (2012: 71), tends to
obfuscate the need to effectively ‘translate back’ what local cries actually have to say and
might worse yet overlook the ‘birth pangs’ of entirely new emerging meanings (Benjamin in
Englund, 2012: 90).
What I wish to argue instead, is that translation is not merely ‘an act of power’ (Merry,
2006: 42), but an act of contested power. Although Merry and Levitt see the promising power
of human rights language residing both on legal instruments and activist grounds,
vernacularization will be examined under the prism of pro-refugee mobilisation in Athens, for
it is this activist framework, I contend, that is more likely to expand human rights ideas into
new horizons. Even ‘when people turn towards legal norms to express their hopes and strive
for their future, they interpret norms in the light of these aspirations rather than simply in terms
of existing normative orders’ (Eckert et al., 2012:11).
To this end, I propose that a ‘militant research’ can introduce us to actors whom we can
call ‘radical vernacularizers’, namely translators who surmount the international state arena as
a reference point and challenge the ideas of rights being associated with state sponsorship.
Radical vernacularizers can be figures who circulate ‘emancipation politics’ (Bojadžijev and
Karakayalı, 2010) not by translating fixed ideas but rather by drawing on the relations of
autonomy that emerge out of human mobility, thus creating new sites of resistance and social
change. Therefore, although Merry suggests that an autonomy in the ideas embedded in human
rights law somehow survives translation (Cheng, 2011), I argue that an autonomy of human
mobility -and thereby, an autonomy of human mobilisation and organising- which resists and
criticizes capitalist and neoliberal politics is what most stupendously survives prescriptions of
who gets to have access to power and rights and who does not.
In this light, human rights can finally be disentangled from state provision and
membership criteria, and instead serve human emancipation and liberation. Put differently, we
can begin to boldly imagine a foundational change in the quality and power of human rights
that will not be sacrificed on the altar of state interest (Benhabib, 2004: 177) but become the
enabling platform for a human-species struggle (Douzinas, 2000; Marx, 2003; The Frassanito
Network, 2005). Radical vernacularization echoes Seyla Benhabib’s idea of ‘democratic
iterations’ (2004: 179, 221): ‘the complex processes of public argument, deliberation and
exchange through which universalist claims and principles are contested, contextualised,
invoked and revoked, posited and positioned’ so as to reach new reconfigurations and
understandings ‘based on public autonomy, namely that those subject to the laws also be their
authors’. To be sure, the potential and effect of such resistance from below has already been
met with scepticism. For instance, Kate Nash (2012) acknowledges that such mobilisations
may indeed create bold new understandings of human rights that depart from rigid legal
prescriptions and potentially lead to radical political agendas4 but remains critical of how
locally created definitions can foster sustainable alternatives. Since human rights law is
primarily state-centric, she argues, the state should be brought back in the equation, in order
for a more accurate understanding of the contradictory and complex procedure of the
institutionalisation of human rights to take place. If activists of City Plaza ‘bring the state back
in’ (Nash 2012: 805), however, it is mainly to ‘talk back’ (Benhabib, 2004: 209) to it by
counter-developing radical and autonomous ideas on the ground. Problematizing Nash’s
critique, the example of City Plaza shows that when state-sponsored human rights are rejected,
locally created solutions provide ostensibly vulnerable figures with a hospitable space for
mobilising and (re)claiming rights.
While, traditionally, vernacularizers have to oscillate between dominant and less

dominant discourses (Brouwer et al. 2005), radical vernacularizers not only trouble this
hierarchy by challenging notions of authority but by moving entirely beyond a debate in which
knowledge oscillates between powerfulness and powerlessness.5 They seem to surpass the
paradox of translating ‘humanness’ to other humans and instead open up the liberal
humanitarian to the radically political. Seen in this light, surpassing the state is not so much an
‘over-simplification’ (Nash 2012: 808) of how human rights come in effect but rather a
sharpening of politics. The work of radical vernacularizers, we could claim, does not merely
go bottom-up, but springs from below and beyond. It is not a claim which needs to be specially
tuned so as to resonate with the top,6 but a polemic transcendence of it; an autonomous gaze
on border institutions, policies and regimes, where migrant and refugee mobilities always come
first, with the border not strictly impeding, but frequently following this unconfined movement
(Balibar 2004; Nyers, 2012)
In this light, I propose to see the act of radical vernacularization as a complementary

element of what Isin calls ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008). Isin breaks away with notions of
citizenship that entail passive enactment of written scenaria based on formal prescriptions and
suggests to investigate citizenship7 -thereby active political participation- through instances
of being political (Isin, 2002). Genuine encounters, he maintains, confront actors with the
limitations of state-sponsored legal status and expose the need for new and creative responses.
As refugees and activists mobilise around rights, they partake of an encounter which discloses
the limitations and conditionality of the formal entitlement to rights and, by doing so, creates
visions of possible new modes of participation to come (Isin, 2008: 4-5). Therefore, radical
vernacularizers do not need to bridge the gap between international and local cultural
perceptions of human rights; they rather strategically use difference as an indicator of the
encounter which opens up the space for the political. The local, in City Plaza, is not static and
isolated as Nash seems to fear, but always changing because it is always transcending
institutional, territorial and sovereign borders. In this sense, City Plaza is both ‘local and
without borders’ (Wekerle, 2000: 214)
In other words, difference is more of a strategic cornerstone rather than a dimension

which needs to be mitigated. City Plaza’s tenants are not accommodated on the basis of
vulnerability or relocation guidelines but with focus on an equal mixing of ethnicities, ages,
gender and religious beliefs (Squire, 2016). It is a shelter and ‘center of struggle’ (SIEPR,
2016a) for approximately 400 refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Kurdistan, Iraq,
Palestine and Pakistan. The vernacularization of rights, consequently, cannot easily gear
around culturally resonant perceptions for each group but instead draws on the convergence of
different cultures to common lived experiences which orbit around ideas of autonomy, equality,
solidarity and freedom. Malik,8 a highly-respected Afghani activist and central coordinator of
SIEPR, tells a team of journalists: ‘We want to create an example of how it should be… All
people from different countries, living together in peace and solidarity to struggle together and
to build our future together’ (fieldwork at City Plaza, July 2016). It seems, then, that City
Plaza’s radical vernacularizers shape their political agenda and demands not but familiarising
cultural differences (Levitt and Merry, 2009) but by politically celebrating their ‘right to
difference’, so to speak: the act of bringing marginalised groups to the centre as actors who
reclaim and appropriate spatial and political visibility (Lefebvre, 1991; Kipfer, 2008). This
process ‘implies an unrelenting effort to understand and translate different languages and
concepts expressed in the struggle for rights’ (Bojadžijev and Karakayalı, 2010).
Radical vernacularizers strive to escalate claims against ‘discriminatory and

segregative organization’ into powerful demands to spatial centrality (meeting places,
gatherings, etc.) and decision-making (Lefebvre, in Kipfer, 2008: 204). Europe’s newest anti-
refugee/anti-migration strategies of externalisation of borders, illegal push-backs, detention
camps and efforts to institutionalise racism and xenophobia in general (Betts and Milner, 2006;
De Genova, 2016; Düvell, 2006; Collyer, 2007; Hamood, 2006) render the strategic use of the
right to difference9 in City Plaza more resonant to refugee struggles than ever before (Gilbert
and Dikeç, 2008: 261). Far from commodifying neoliberal celebrations of diversity
(Mavrommatis, 2010; Nagel, 2008), City Plaza’s daily life asserts that the tension between
unity and difference dialectically necessitates the conceptualisation of power as always

reconstituted, rather than simply ‘unequal’ (Merry, 2006: 40). This is why I maintain that
radical vernacularization is an act of contested power. The right to difference is both a struggle
to voice difference vis-à-vis hegemonic homogenisation and the right to be free from
systematic hierarchies and classifications (Butler, 2012: 152; Savarsy and Siim, 1994:254). By
resisting cultural assimilation and victimization of refugees, City Plaza’s radical
vernacularizers strive to expand traditional human rights beyond the hypocritical confines of
liberal humanism by embedding them in the realm of the political. For SIEPR activists, the
needs and rights of the refugees must ultimately be translated into a massive movement which
can claim practical changes. Rights are thus seen as vigilantly conquered through political
struggle (Chambers, 2003) with the capacity to alter everyday life. Therefore, the right to and
assertion of difference departs from the celebrated ideas of diversity and suggests that
‘produced difference presupposes the shattering of a system; it is born of an explosion; it
emerges from the chasm opened up when a closed universe ruptures’ (Butler, 2012: 154).
Difference as a political demand for equality and dignity is not only present in such
‘explosive’ instances, but also in more anonymous and clandestine ways of resistance (Scott,
1985: 29-39). One of the most frequent methods of ideological subversion in City Plaza is the
ridiculing of the racialized stereotype, a process which abolishes reified notions of cultural and
racial difference. When migrant activists or refugee tenants whose origin is particularly tied to
a stereotypically racialized image ‘perform’ the stereotype while carrying out daily tasks for
the sake of the principle of ‘living together’, the enactment of the stereotype comes with
mockery and humour. Characteristically, when an Albanian activist was asked to deliver
supplies from the warehouse, he burst in ‘anger’: ‘Who do you think I am! Your Albanian
worker?’.10 By circulating such subversive and humorous ‘performances’ which function as a
friendly excuse for tenants to come together, network and participate in the community, the
radical vernacularizers of City Plaza try to promote human dignity, respect and equality for all
by rupturing racialized and racist stereotypes, and by providing every tenant with the ability to
actively participate in this diverse and vibrant community.11 As Malik tells me smiling: ‘We
will destroy their stereotypes’ (interview with Malik, 20 July 2016).
Radical vernacularization thus ruptures given orders of linearity, formal obligation and
legality, but most importantly produces actors who anticipate, write and enact their own scripts.
Consequently, these actors transcend the fixed habitus of law which assumes already defined
subjects and act against it and beyond it, thus ‘bringing into being new actors as activist citizens
(claimants of rights and responsibilities) through creating new sites and scales of struggle’
(Isin, 2008: 39) These ‘activist’ (Isin, 2009) or ‘insurgent’ (Holston, 2011: 342) figures, as I
hope the ethnography of City Plaza will show, are in effect radical vernacularizers who
disentangle claims to rights from the sterile humanitarian law context and instead situate them
in a political setting which anticipates and enacts alternatives by forming ‘new idioms of the
political’ (Tyler, 2013: 13). The radical vernacularizers in City Plaza can be SIEPR activists,
local or international solidarians and of course active refugee tenants. These numerous actors
produce a co-operative of counter-hegemonic knowledge, which can be better understood
during the weekly assemblies and meetings. I will return to these meetings in the second
chapter, where I will more elaborately analyse the ideas on which radical vernacularization is
grounded.
All in all, the occupation of City Plaza can be better understood as an ‘act of citizenship’
in itself: The act produced activist refugees and solidarians who broke the law to address
injustice12 and claimed the right to decent housing and security by enacting it. The statement
following the occupation emphatically reads:
[F]ollowing our given demand for the immediate need to cover the housing needs of the
refugees not in makeshift or military camps but in spaces with fully developed
infrastructure which they can enter and exit freely, we proceeded to the occupation of the
abandoned hotel CITY PLAZA with the aim to respond to [the denial of decent housing
for refugees and full rights to social services] and simultaneously, to create a centre of
struggle and information for refugee issues.
(SIEPR, 2016b)
As it follows from the statement, the right to housing (UN General Assembly, 1948: art. 25)
and the right to have rights in general, were radically vernacularized in a way which rejected
the already written script of the institutional solution of hotspots and internment camps, and
instead mobilised ‘activist citizens’ (Isin, 2008: 38) to take matters in their hands by enacting
rights which the state was unwilling to enact. It is true then, that City Plaza occupants do not
simply struggle to be heard by the top (Bob, 2007), namely, to acquire citizenship status and
the rights which liberal democracies grant with it, but instead act as citizens (Bojadžijev and
Karakayalı, 2010) with power to influence their social setting (Odysseos and Selmeczi, 2015:
1034-1035). What I wish to argue next, is that radical vernacularizers as activist citizens who
disrupt the fixed habitus emerge out of AoM’s political context. The following section,
therefore, tries to explore the politics of AoM as enabling the formation of radical
vernacularizers.
B. Autonomy of Migration: The Political Impetus for Radical Vernacularization
‘To speak of an autonomy of migration, doesn't mean to remove from the center
of the political debate the mechanisms of domination and exploitation … Rather,
it suggests a shift in perspective that allows us to analyze (and to criticize, both
theoretically and practically) those mechanisms and to continuously confront
them with a set of social practices that contain the possibility for their
overcoming’
-The Frassanito Network, 2014.
It is crucial to distil the theoretical framework of AoM13 into the anthropology and sociology
of human rights in order to better understand how migrants and refugees, humans who have
been obscenely deprived of their rights, reconfigure political claims to power. The gaze of
autonomy, Mezzadra (2010) suggests, allows for an understanding of migration as a
constructive force. AoM sees flight as a political act that is symptomatic of the irreducible
subjectivities that escape the confinement of intermediate zones of regulation (Bojadžijev and
Karakayalı, 2010). 14
The political nature of the autonomy of migrant and refugee movements creates the
conditions in which resistance and rights-claiming become the points of departure for a more
radical envisioning of equal participation which transcends the limited nature of institutional
liberal democracies. The AoM critique, Bojadžijev and Karakayalı (2010) write, ‘does not call
for a renunciation of rights but rather distinguishes between the demand for rights and the
process of ‘translating’ demands through the logic of the state: the “police”’. In this light, the
language of rights becomes disentangled from ideas of nationality, citizenship or official

membership, and instead becomes a vehicle for the articulation of demands based on autonomy,
freedom and equality.
The problem with the humanitarian language of protection and human rights in general
is that its binary focus on either the control of threats or the rescue of victims (Nyers and Rygiel,
2012: 8) leaves too little room for the numerous transformative subjectivities within the pro-
refugee movements.15 Crucially, human rights’ notions of refugees being reified victims16 in
need of protection, prove to problematically coexist with a ‘militarised humanitarianism’, in
which every ostensible rescue is always-already haunted by the threat of interdiction, indefinite
detention and deportation (De Genova, 2016: 35). Such institutionalised, bureaucratic and co-
opting (Zetter, 2007) perceptions only end up reinforcing state sovereignty and territorial
demands to protect and secure national boundaries. In contrast, the very struggle and power
relations that are ‘obfuscated by the language of human rights’ are more understandable and
visible through calls to collective action and organising (Anderson et al., 2012: 79). In such
moments of visible participation in the form of claiming politics and going beyond the law
radical vernacularizers refuse to settle with official humanitarian solutions and instead confront
nationalism, capitalist exploitation and racist exclusion by adding sharp political meaning in
the ostensibly universally humanitarian language of human rights.
Following his visit to City Plaza, Mezzadra (2016) highlighted that the unprecedented
politicisation of borders -and, in response, the unprecedented politicisation of migrant and
refugee flows crossing borders- raises fundamental questions about the kind of society we want
to live in, the subjects of social participation and the very meaning of democracy. City Plaza,
he suggests, comes as an answer to these questions by providing a glimpse of an alternative
society of equality, solidarity and self-management vis-à-vis horrific ‘state-run’ detention
camps17 and hypocritical triumphs of democracy. Why? Firstly, because its tenants have moved
and struggled through supposedly impenetrable divisive lines and, in doing so, have blurred
the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion, thus rupturing legal constructs which
authorise monopoly of power. And secondly, because they are demonstrating ‘in mundane and
“vernacular” ways, that no integration is worth struggling for if it is not understood as a
profound renewal of the very conditions of a communal “living together”’ (ibid., my emphasis).
In City Plaza, this invention of a new commonality is being manifested in every space of the
hotel, in every meeting and in every conversation among the occupants; the central slogan and
the commonly held principle to live by is ‘We live together, we struggle together. Solidarity
will win’. This space, according to Mezzadra (ibid.), becomes thus politicised and transformed
into a promising ground for a new democratic invention.
Retracing the concept of autonomy from Mario Tronti’s writings on the indeterminacy
of working class struggles over those of capital18 in the more recent debates around migration,
Mitropoulos (2006) asserts that despite restrictive and repressive policies such as borders, there
has been a historic precedence of movements of people over such institutions. Indeed, AoM
echoes Tronti’s theory of operaismo (workerism) developed in the early 1960s in Italy, which
focused on the ways in which working class resistance instigated transformation and,
ultimately, necessitated capitalist restructuring as a response to that very transformation
(Mitropoulos, 2006). Similarly, we could understand the refugee detention centres on the Greek
islands and the periphery of Athens as ‘reaction formations’ towards the unpredictable
autonomy of migration (De Genova 2016: 40; see also Nyers and Rygiel, 2012: 5). The lens of
autonomy explores how refugee and migrant mobilities respond to, drift away from, and
ultimately re-formulate practices and institutions related to control and restriction. It politicises
the dialectics of
the crossing of borders, the traversing of territories, the enmeshing of cultures, the
unsettling of institutions (first among them nation-states, but also citizenship), the
connecting of languages, and the flight from exploitation and oppression … investigating
what migration teaches us about the conditions of contemporary forms of sociality, and that
which goes beyond them […]
(Bojadžijev and Karakayali, cited in Casas-Cortes et al. 2015: 896)
The lens of autonomy thus challenges the state’s ‘monopoly of legitimate force’ (Hoffman,
2004: 2). This explains indeed why every instigated transformation brings about a reactionary
restructuring.19 Consequently, every act of border-crossing is a passage into the political.
Which, in turn, implies that politics is not property of the state and, consequently, that the
assumption according to which sovereign state recognition is a condition for being a political
subject comes crumbling down.
These ‘irreconcilable contradictions’ (De Genova, 2016: 42) which disclose the
contingency of power and anticipate the emergence of a new alternative, can be seen as the
mobilising impetus for the unprecedented ‘Refugees Welcome’ solidarity action sweeping
Europe, and more specifically, as the political impetus behind instances of radical
vernacularization. Radical vernacularizers, in effect, disclose the arbitrariness of domination
(Isin, 2002: 276) by acting and demanding while they are not allowed to. This unpredictable
and ambivalent ‘turbulence’ (Papastergiadis, 2000) with which refugee/migrant flows
challenge the sovereignty of the state and rupture hegemonic ideas of homogeneity ultimately
creates a site of exhilarated socio-political mobilisation. It is precisely this utterly political
excess rippling between control and resistance, inclusion and exclusion (Philippopoulos-
Mihalopoulos, 2010), which pushes the vernacularizers emerging out of this dialectic to take
ideals of human rights to more radical grounds.
What makes the ‘excess’ which AoM brings to the centre of its analysis utterly
political can be traced in Rancière’s (2004) definition of politics as the ability to contest
power.20 Politics as the gesture of ‘those with no part’ (Rancière, 2004: 305) to reclaim the
part form which they have been abjected enables the practice of radical vernacularization in
the sense that it resets the subject of the ‘rights of man’ (ibid.). When refugees act as citizens,
they manifest dissensus by enacting the rights denied to them (Wall, 2003: 3). They act ‘as
subjects that [do] not have the rights that they [have] and [have] the rights that they [have]
not’ (Rancière, 2004: 304). Drawing on Wall’s (2003) reading of Rancière, I want to argue
that the ‘irruptive and radical’ potentiality of human rights lies precisely in displays of
dissensus from below which challenges the institutional and individualist limitations that
define human rights writ large. From Rancière’s perspective, politics begins at the threshold
between inclusion and exclusion. It becomes, then, the bold questioning of fixed hierarchies
and of the border between who is entitled to rights and who classifies as a political
subjectivity21. As migrant and refugee activism across Europe shows, possibilities of re-
invention and resistance prove greater when not restricted by rigid categorisation
(Oelgemöller, 2011)
In our case, politics ‘begins’22 when the refugee tenants of City Plaza crossed the
borders of Europe and the Greek state, when they left the detention centres of the Greek islands
and when, again, they crossed the port gates of Piraeus to move to Athens. Most crucially,
politics in our case study ‘begins’ when SIEPR activists broke the locks of a bankrupt hotel
in the centre of Athens and welcomed refugees who acted as citizens and claimed the rights
they did not have. As one Syrian tenant tells me, City Plaza makes the socialities of solidarity
starker than institutional restrictions: ‘I keep continuing. I like living in Athens, it’s like
Damascus... Athens is a gate’ (fieldwork at City Plaza, July 2016). City Plaza, then, opens up
the space for resistance by putting the emphasis on the emergence of new subjectivities which
reclaim their ‘part’ and becomes a gate to the political. Ethnographic research on migrant and
refugee activism in Athens (Trimikliniotis et al., 2015) eloquently attests to mobile
collectivities using right claims throughout the city as subversive political praxis while
moving across borders. Overlapping significantly with the ‘emancipatory’ aim of AoM
(Bojadžijev, 2009), the articulation of human rights as political praxis from below
redistributes the political and transcends the fixation of liberal democracies according to
which only official nation-state members are worthy of political action.
Thus, the struggle to have rights in the political context of AoM brings us to a promising
conclusion: it completely discerns neoliberal illusions around the impenetrable and
unnegotiable institutions of the state. Even the most rigid apparatuses of control ultimately
prove to be contested spaces where the state struggles (and fails) to secure its ostensible
commitments to sovereignty, rights distribution and its monopoly over legitimate movement
(Casas-Cortes et al. 2015: 898). Essentially, it opens up the political and social realm to
construct and negotiate our political subjectivities, hence our political power. The claim for
rights thus animates political struggle and coalesces around it a galvanised pro-refugee
movement. As No Border activists argue:
[The claim for rights] becomes relevant and gains not only political strength but also the
potential for a general change of the basic mechanisms of capitalist societies organized in nation-
states. By transcending national borders migration challenges conventional notions of
citizenship as well as national legal frameworks and opens up a new space for a practice of
rights which reach far beyond the historically known constitutional settings. The claim for rights
translates the notion of autonomy of migration into a concrete political agenda. It reformulates
the abstract demand for open borders by connecting it to the everyday life of migratory struggles
of survival.
(The Frassanito Network, 2004: 6, my emphasis)
And, conversely, the notion of AoM translates and incorporates the claims for rights into a
concrete political agenda by reformulating demands in reference to concrete everyday
resistance against and beyond state-run humanitarianism. Here lies, I wish to suggest, the
ground-breaking momentum of radical vernacularizers.
Paradoxically, however, although Casas-Cortes et al. (2015) recognise the importance

of stops as opportunities for networking, information exchanging and the co-operative creation
of knowledge around tactics of resilience (see also Trimikliniotis et al., 2015), little attention
is given to what actually happens at those stops. Crucially, the triumph of migrant mobility at
the expense of systemic efforts and failures to stop the movement (Hess, 2008) should not
distract us from what happens when the movement actually stops. For this reason, chapter II
will focus more closely to how the ‘right to escape’ (Mezzadra, 2004) becomes a radical claim
to the city, an opportunity to network, build connections and, ultimately, to act politically.
While AoM focuses on the axis of flight and mobility (Papadopoulos et. al, 2008), I also follow
Tyler’s (2003) contention that persistence and resistance can equally be seen in moments of
temporal halting. The radical promise lies in the active recuperation of abjection into alternative
possibilities, counter-political gestures and counter-political vocabularies (Tyler, 2003: 74).
After all, Athens feels much like the home left back in Damascus; it is not solely a border to
be crossed but rather a gate -as the Syrian tenant tells me- that opens up the space for the
political.
CHAPTER III:
CITY PLAZA AS A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE: THE RIGHT TO THE CITY AND

THE POLITICS OF AUTOGESTION
A. Right to the City: The Refusal to Be Removed
‘When you move from your country, you move to

build your life again’
-Qasim, City Plaza tenant, 2016
In her report to the UN General Assembly (A/70/270), the Special Rapporteur on adequate
housing called for the adoption of a new ‘Urban Rights Agenda’ with the right to housing at its
core (UN Human Rights Council, 2015: 20). According to the report, the priority and centrality
of the right to housing should be informed and co-determined by the five critical aspects of
social exclusion, migration and displacement, vulnerability, land and inequality, and informal
settlements. Prioritising the elimination of these social realities, the proposed ‘Urban Rights
Agenda’ promoted the re-inscription of cities’ most vulnerable and marginalized persons as
‘legitimate participants in building urban spaces and drivers of their own well-being’ (ibid.:15).
Falling into almost all of these five crucial aspects, refugees thus became central figures in this
recent reappearance of the right to the city amidst human rights discourse. More attention to
the dehumanising exclusion of stranded refugees in Greece was given through the ‘UN Special
Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants’ report (forthcoming) after a visit to the ‘chaotic’
detention camp in Elliniko and the hotspots on the islands of Samos and Lesvos. The report
urged the Greek government and the European Union to renounce of the ‘unfortunate’
conditions of detention which infringe on the fundamental human rights of migrants and
refugees. However, despite this official framework, approximately 55.000 stranded refugees
in Greece (International Rescue Committee, 2016) are far from any legitimation in urban
production; they remain segregated from the social fabric in either militarised and secluded
hotspots or abandoned and decaying detention camps.
In response to institutional inertia, David Harvey re-energises Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right

to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996: 147) in order to present it as a ‘new human right’ which can
mobilise a massive political collision and thus surmount human rights’ inability to challenge
the ‘dominant modes of legality and state action’ (Harvey 2008:23). In this sense, Harvey
connects Lefebvre’s vision of the right to the city as its appropriation and democratisation from
below with notions of resistance and commoning, and thereby with contemporary solidarity
movements that aspire to open the city for migrants and refugees. One of the first reception
cities on Europe’s borderline, Athens has become a ‘temporary hub’ (Lafazani, 2013: 1) where
migrant and refugee movements halt so as to network and plan the journey ahead. It is a city
which refugees chose to explore through networks of trustful knowledge, communally
circulated strategies around evasion of control23 and by occupying squares, pavements or even
buildings so as to stage ‘performances’ of resistance and subversion (Madison, 2010;
Trimikliniotis et al., 2015: 6-11) These politics of everyday resistance in Athens are met with
widespread solidarity from civil society which ranges from numerous autonomist refugee
accommodation squats, to solidarity initiatives by anti-racist movements of the Left such as
KEERFA24 under the slogan ‘Athens Open City- Solidarity to Refugees [‘Αθήνα Πόλη Ανοιχτή-
Αλληλεγγύη στους Πρόσφυγες’]
City Plaza activists emphatically enact the right to the city so as to radicalise international
imperatives to accommodate the vulnerable and marginalized as ‘legitimate participants in the
production of urban space’ and establish themselves as de facto bearers of rights to housing
(UN General Assembly, 1948: art.25), liberty and security (ibid.: art.3) and association and
assembly (ibid.: art.20). In resonance with Lefebvre’s perception of the urban space as an open
totality that needs to be reconquered so as to stage and initiate social change (Lefebvre, 2003),
SIEPR activists decided to ‘occupy and re-open [City Plaza] in order to return it to the society:
to reuse it for the urgent social need for refugee accommodation’ (SIEPR, 2016b). In this
sense, the movement radically vernacularized a group of rights by drawing legitimacy out of
its own demands and out of its own ideas of freedom and autonomy25 vis-à-vis state-sponsored
legitimacy. City Plaza occupants practiced the rights they did not have as ‘acts of citizenship’:
they unlawfully enacted their right to housing by occupying City Plaza and the right to become
legitimate participants of the city by visibly protesting and claiming other rights in the urban
tissue or by simply moving and socialising in the wider city centre. The radical difference lies
in that they do not translate these rights so as to merely win them from the Greek state, but so
as to mobilise action for solidarity and equality which anticipates an alternative and enacts
these rights in its name, often against the law. Radical translation comes with a fundamental
challenging of the limitations of these rights and a bold critique of the boundaries of the
political.
The right to the city ultimately translates into the production of politics in the urban space
(Lefebvre, 2003). Therefore, the exclusion of groups and individuals from fully participating
in the creative and collective act of managing the city, is a denial of the right. Or conversely,
the right to the city is a right not to be removed:
The right to the city legitimises the refusal to allow oneself to be removed from urban
reality by a discriminatory and segregative organisation. This right … proclaims the
inevitable crisis of the city centres based on segregation… which reject towards peripheral
spaces all those who do not participate in political privileges.
(Lefebvre, 1996: 195)
Our contemporary moment mandates a rereading of that passage by focusing on the detention
camps and hotspots across the Greek periphery. The majority26 of the tenants of City Plaza are
refugees refusing to be marginalised in overcrowded, unsanitary and inhuman detention
centres. By moving on to the centre of the capital, City
Plaza tenants refuse to be removed, but instead
struggle to step in the city so as to use its political
space in order to enact their rights. Exclusion thus is
countered by the physical occupation of the hotel
which instead mandates elements of ‘centrality’,
‘gathering’ and convergence’ (Lefebvre, in Butler,
2012:144). City Plaza is not detached from the city,
Figure 1: Centre of Athens (Photo: Google Maps) but vibrantly and centrally inside it (see, Figure 1). It
is visible, loud and palpable. It runs a cinema for
children and throws feasts and parties in public spaces (‘We live together; we celebrate
together’). It is an open space for knowledge around the anticipation of rights and radical
alternatives which remains accessible across the rooted pro-refugee networks of Athens.
An example of how the international ideas for inclusive participation against social
exclusion, displacement, vulnerability and informal settlement became radically
vernacularized against and beyond the state can be traced in the following event. During one
of the weekly planning meetings, the security team assembled to discuss the protection of the
refugee tenants in one of the most racist neighbourhoods of Athens. The group discussed the
use of special cards given to refugee tenants in an effort to protect the occupation from hostile
infiltrations and to prevent potential conflicts due to overcrowded space. While newly arrived
volunteers were suggesting a strict rule according to which every person entering the
occupation should carry a special card so as to avoid the discrimination between ‘familiar’
faces and ‘strangers’, SIEPR activists and local solidarians reacted: ‘we are not cops to ask for
everyone’s card’. A Greek activist added that card-showing should be carefully practiced so as
not to restrict the open character of the occupation. ‘Our solidarity is open to anyone who needs
it’, she argued, and concluded that giving out special cards to virtually everyone arriving to
City Plaza would reflect statist institutions of exclusion, documentation checking and
surveillance. Ultimately, the team unanimously agreed on the need for openness, but with
safety precautions. The decision that was implemented on the following day was that everyone
residing in the hotel, regardless of nationality, status, affiliation to political groups or
‘familiarity’ should carry and show the card in order to enter the building. Nevertheless, the
occupation remains a space of respect and care, and most importantly of inclusion, participation
and safety. Every crossing of the entrance comes with a smile, a joke and a friendly greeting.
Two things are of interest in this example: firstly, the decision came to blur the
distinction between the ‘protectors’ and ‘protected’ – a trope traditionally used to buttress
statist and pastoral logic (Squire and Bagelman, 2012: 146)- and made the sanctuary of City
Plaza a responsibility and a haven for all. Secondly, statist institutions were presented as
controlling and suppressive, thus rejectable. Consequently, the decision opened up the potential
for those taking sanctuary ‘to challenge the closures and hierarchical distinctions associated
with the exclusionary politics’ of border regimes (ibid.: 156). In response, the right to housing
and legitimate participation, and thereby rights to security and liberty were translated through
an experienced commonality of respect, autonomy from the state and equal rules for all.
Most of the tenants I spoke with argued that City Plaza means a safe space and a meaningful
community; most importantly, a reclaimed space where they do not merely feel safe, but
impelled to actively participate in society. Minutes before we gathered outside of the hotel for
a protest of ‘resistance and solidarity’ called by Athens’s antiracist and pro-migrant/refugee
organisations, Qasim, a young Syrian who lives and helps as a translator in City Plaza, rushes
to finish his coffee. He complains that translating for other refugees and facilitating the daily
operation of City Plaza takes up most of his day. ‘You see’, he tells me
I can’t have a moment alone to finish my coffee and cigarette. I have to work 18 hours per
day. But I want to help, I choose to do it because it’s something more than important. But now
we need to go out there and start creating jobs. We must recreate the lives and the pasts we’ve
lost. We have to show that we are active people and that we didn’t come here just to rest. When
you move from your country, you move to build your life again.
(Interview with Qasim, 2016)
As Qasim suggested, the ‘more than important’ aspect of City Plaza, is that apart from a refugee
accommodation space, it is a chance to form demands, claim rights and anticipate the fulfilment
of the rights through collective praxis; a chance to take and ‘not wait for political life to begin’
(Squire and Bagelman, 2012: 154). The request for converging political praxis is essential in
that it sparks the formation of an irruptive moment where ‘collective action [comes] to create
something radically different’ (Harvey, 2012:
xvii). These elusive moments, reveal the
potentiality for a more profound realisation of
the creative (see section B), constitutive and
unrestricted ways in which migrants and
refugees reconceptualise established power
hierarchies (Johnson 2012; Nyers and Rygiel,
2012). Figure 2: Congregating for the protest (Photo: Author)
In the protest which followed, City Plaza tenants marched to the city centre and
assembled in front of the Greek parliament and the premises of the European Union under a
banner which demanded decent housing, education and health. The march’s slogans were
exclusively articulated by refugees with the central chant being ‘open the borders-open the
cities’. In the already ‘deeply political’ act of marching which questions the limits of political
inclusion and exclusion (Nyers, 2008: 175) the protesters of City Plaza enacted their right to
the city by claiming rights and being visible as political actors pressuring for social change.
Being already political when they refused the exclusion of their country of origin by fleeing
away from it, they also refused to be removed from the urban tissue of Athens by drastically
appropriating its centre and loading the right to the city with counter-hegemonic and irruptive
meaning, aiming to radicalise the right and, consequently, radically re-create the city. (Harvey,
2012: 136). The hundreds that marched on the protest, followed the banner of City Plaza, which
-at the head of the march- was ‘not begging anyone for… putative civil or human “rights,” [it
was] not asking any authorities for permission or pardon, and did not seek anyone’s approval
or acceptance’ (De Genova, 2010:105). The protesters defiantly asserted their political
presence and stroke a blow to sovereign power hierarchies, thus reconfiguring the urban space
(Hall 2015) through collective solidarity and empowerment.
The biggest victory of the movement came with the pre-registration of refugee students
in the primary schools of Athens. Despite efforts to block registrations by the school boards
resistance from the movement lead to the children’s access not only to public education but
also in the city, as opposed to thousands of other minors who remain stranded in detention
centres in the periphery.27 To be sure, the movement does strive for concessions so as to
ameliorate everyday living conditions, but does not merely aim to win rights as goals. It uses
right-claims as means to organise action which demands and enacts. What is of vital importance
here, nevertheless, is this power-reconfiguring process through which hitherto excluded figures
won access to the urban setting.
Of course, not everything smoothly marches towards a radical change in City Plaza:
there are tensions, and disagreements on a daily basis. And, crucially, there are critical
limitations on how we escalate the example of City Plaza so as to be able to talk about a large-
scale change.28 However, City Plaza is an ethical and practical example of a successful
incubator of radical alternatives which does not settle with humanitarian semi-provisions but
collectively envisions and enacts humanity, freedom and equality. ‘We can’t solve the
problem’, an occupant explains, ‘but we can be ready [to act in solidarity with refugees] when
we are needed’ (in Squire, 2016). City Plaza thus becomes a space of the city where the
production of space, services, meanings and relationships becomes redefined by its activist
inhabitants, and by an excessive autonomy of movement which materialises new subjectivities
and thus unprecedentedly expands the body politic. Therefore, we can only talk about the right
to the city inasfar as participation is managed by the inhabitants themselves. Which leads us to
another crucial aspect of the radical vernacularization that takes place in City Plaza, namely
the politics of autogestion. The right to the city demands self-management through
appropriation of the space and active participation that opens up the space for full engagement
in decision-making by political and moral equals (Benhabib, 1996: 68).
B. The Politics of Autogestion and City Plaza as a Radical Alternative
‘Demander l’impossible pour avoir tout le possible’

[Demand the impossible in order to get all that is possible]
-Henri Lefebvre, 1996.
Much like autonomy (AoM), autogestion has its root in the Greek ‘εαυτός/aυτός’ which means
‘self’. Therefore, they both happen in and by themselves despite exterior authority or control.
If social space is indeed ‘an edifice of hierarchically ordered institutions, of laws and
conventions upheld by values that are communicated through the national language’ (Lefebvre
in Butler, 2012: 84), then the radical vernacularization of rights in City Plaza -which draws on
ideas of autonomy, lived equality and solidarity despite the established language of
international humanitarianism and statist border regimes- presents us with a counter-
hegemonic potential. The contestation of power over appropriation of space seems to epitomise
the significance of the practice of autogestion, which writ large means self-constitution:
Each time a social group refuses to accept passively its conditions of existence, of life or of
survival, each time such a group forces itself not only to understand but to master its own
conditions of existence, autogestion is occurring.
(Lefebvre, in Butler, 2012: 100)
The politics of autogestion in City Plaza is what orients the radical vernacularization of rights
against and beyond the state. The radicalised mediation of rights stretches beyond a reformist
critique of the failures of the liberal state as a regulator of social space and moves on to direct
the appropriation of space according to its own interests (Butler, 2012: 42-43); it dialectically
determines the spatial reorganisation by providing its own ‘counter-example’, as its activists
consistently say.29 During the annual antiracist festival of Athens, where City Plaza celebrated
its presence with stalls and discussions around refugee accommodation alternatives, one
solidarian explained to the audience: ‘we can either expect the state to find solutions or we can
begin to meet the practical needs ourselves and then put pressure on it’ (fieldwork notes,
antiracist festival of Athens, 1 July 2016). Ideas around autogestion seem to constantly re-
emerge and inform the trope of rights claiming in City Plaza, with radical vernacularizers using
self-management30 (autogestion) as a guiding principle for writing and enacting their own
scripts (Isin, 2008). The sign at the entrance of City Plaza emphatically reads:
CITY PLAZA IS A SELF-MANAGED OCCUPATION. (sic)

DOES NOT BELONG TO THE STATE OR THE NGOS.
The occupation is organised on three main levels. Starting close to the ground, daily meetings
of refugees and solidarians take place in the rooms of the hotel, in the café, in the dining hall,
on the streets of the city. These daily encounters are inevitable instances for networking but
also orbit around the needs for the smooth autogestion of the building. All tenants collectively
abide with a rota for cleaning and cooking. The ‘hotel’ runs a fully operational kitchen31 which
serves more than a thousand meals per day. Other services include a café, a medical room,
educational activities for children, destination-country language classes, a women’s space and
occasionally a barber shop. ‘In effect, it is a fully operational collective site and community,
which meets all the immediate daily needs of those living there’ (Squire 2016).
The daily ‘committees’ report to

the weekly coordinative meetings, with
one strict provision: coordinators are not
representatives. The weekly meetings are
held and attended by solidarians and
volunteers, and primarily concern
practical issues such as the renewal of
supplies, the rota of the shifts, and
security issues. Finally, open house
Figure 3: Language classes (Photo: Author) assemblies take place every few weeks
with large participation across all teams
and groups in order to discuss practical needs but also the organization of the solidarity
movement and the crystallisation of the occupation’s political demands against the Greek
state’s and E.U.’s anti-refugee policies. However, the distinction between these three levels is
anything but fixed; excess of mobility characterizes this micro-level as well. Ultimately,
participation is the only parameter which matters. The inevitable tensions and complaints that
might emerge during assemblies or everyday shifts are predominantly based on one’s active
participation in the community. Highly engaged tenants tend to be more respected, whereas
less enthusiasm to participate and carry out daily tasks is seen negatively. Even gossip is almost
exclusively directed against ‘laziness’ or unwillingness to help.
Autogestion is collectively practiced and ultimately embedded in City Plaza’s language

of rights-claiming through the positive self-affirmation32 of the tenants as responsible authors
of their own laws, respectful neighbours and active participants. On the eve of a protest
regarding refugees’ rights to decent housing and security, City Plaza held an open house
assembly for the preparation and discussion of the immanent protest: ‘Tomorrow we meet for
a protest’, says Malik. ‘We demonstrate against the inhumane conditions of the refugee camps
and the violation of our rights. We demand housing for all and equal rights’. Throughout his
talk, Malik insisted on correlating the right to housing and equal rights with City Plaza’s
principles of autonomy and responsible self-management. He concluded: ‘This is not a hotel.
It is an occupation—the State, the police, the fascists are against us’. And later, referring to the
rules for the responsible self-management of the squat, he concluded: ‘If the kids damage the
cars on the street [while playing], the neighbours will get mad and they will tell the police. We
don’t want them here’. Following the assembly, signs declaring City Plaza’s respect to the
neighbourhood were put on the entrance in an effort to eliminate incidents of tension and
thereby police intervention. Most essentially, Malik drew on autogestion’s notions of self-
reliant and self-determining governance as a means of mobilising the next day’s action, where
refugees, migrants, solidarians and international activists demanded and enacted their rights to
housing, adequate living, liberty and security. Not because the Greek government or the
European Union had granted them in compliance to international calls and treaties, but because
the movement appropriated their materialisation beyond the law, drawing legitimacy from
commonly experienced ideas of solidarity, freedom, autonomy, and equality.
As this example suggests, the collective struggle and political resistance of the pro-
refugee movement – in danger of being co-opted by the language of human rights (Wall, 2003)-
became sharpened and more easily understood once related to the familiar lived experiences of
autonomy, responsible self-management, equality and solidarity; in other words, when it
became radically vernacularized against and beyond the state. ‘What human rights? They are
liars’, Qasim rejoins when I approach him. His resentment, as the interview continued however,
was clearly directed against institutional human rights law: ‘human rights are inside the people;
you, me, anyone who wants to help. If we didn’t have human rights inside us, we wouldn’t
have City Plaza’ (interview with Qasim, 2016). For Qasim, the international human rights arena
is a farce, but he still believes in a spontaneous resistance galvanised around ideas of shared
humanity and mutual aid as opposed to ‘transcendental authorities whose structures presuppose
alienation’ (Mitropoulos, 2003). Confidently, then, we can begin to think of human rights as
signifiers waiting to be filled with radical and unconventional meaning (Harvey, 2012: xv;
Rancière 2004: 307) so as to mobilise a mass collision of the globally dispossessed and
delegitimised. Such a perspective exposes the radical potentiality of human rights, namely a
holistic appropriation of their ideas by ‘historical movements’ from below which share visions
of solidarity, anticipate and enact the rights they do not have so as to create sustainable radical
alternatives. We could see this process as part of a revolutionary change which is ‘in fact
eminently practical and is being carried out daily’ (Anderson et al., 2012: 84). In this light,
autogestion undermines bureaucratic and centralised authority both as a means of struggle and
as a means for organising a reimagined society (Wall, 2003: 13) In response to state-run
solutions City Plaza is based on the core principles of autonomy, solidarity and equality as a
means for actively appropriating space and managing it according to the movement’s best
interests. The occupation’s most recent communique gives a better understanding of how
autogestion functions both as a commonly shared imperative for the radical vernacularization
of rights and as a practice which anticipates and materialises a generalisable (Wall, 2003: 13)
radical alternative:
Refugee housing squats are even more of a nuisance [to the state apparatus and to
networks of power] because they are the successful implementation of a different
approach. It is clear that the state plan for providing housing to refugees in camps outside
the urban grid has completely and utterly failed. Wretchedness and violence is constantly
being created... At the same time, the squats prove that refugees can be housed inside the
urban grid, under dignified conditions. Where the state failed, self-organization has
succeeded! The most unequivocal proof of that is the fact that refugees leave the camps
and come to live in the squats… We have proven that we can live with refugees in our
cities.
(Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City, 2016)
The polemic was mediated to City Plaza’s occupants as the two notions entailed here – ‘the
struggle for freedom in the self-governing society, and prefiguring the desired reality – [met]
in the lived experiences’ (Vieta, 2014:785) of City Plaza. In this sense, autogestion as political
resistance to established forms of power formulates moments of anticipatory consciousness
and presents a radical alternative. To put it differently, for drastic political praxis to occur,
instances of a counter-example in contrast to the system should provide a glimpse of how that
alternative would look like. For Lefebvre, after all, it is clear that the anticipatory striving for
the impossible is what begins to construct the new possible to come. He advices (1996):
‘demand the impossible in order to get all that is possible’.33
As I hope the case of City Plaza has shown, we can better understand its community as
a radical alternative or better as a ‘differential space’ (Butler, 2012: 156-159) in which a
collectivity actively anticipates a new future and directs its collective action towards it. City
Plaza is a differential space in that it actively contests and reconfigures power by dialectically
exploring the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. Its utopian glimpse
‘promotes social relations … free from necessity’, exclusion and dispossession (Douzinas,
2000: 239). Inside the hotel of City Plaza but also on the streets of Athens, new political
subjectivities unapologetically assert empowerment against abstract homogenisation. City
Plaza as a differential space offers a promising ‘alternative to the architecture of coercion that
Europe in collaboration with international agencies is currently constructing’ (Squire, 2016).
At the core of radical vernacularizers’ ground-breaking -rather than mediating- language lies
the quest for a realisable radical alternative driven by the historic human demand to
emancipation from exploitation (Vieta, 2014: 794). It is primarily premised on the values of
autonomy, justice, solidarity and equality which become ‘locally’ resonant ideas once
experienced through a shared politics of autogestion and a dynamic claim of the right to the
city, thus establishing a new site of struggle, both spatially and politically.
CONCLUSION
‘We live together; we struggle together- Solidarity will win!’

-City Plaza’s emblematic slogan
According to Merry and Levitt’s (2009) anthropological findings, a very important parameter
in the process of vernacularization is the social relations on the ground, especially activist
networks that facilitate the circulation of global notions and smoothen the inevitable frictions
entailed in the process of negotiating meanings. What this study has hopefully shown, however,
is that such a framework de facto limits any attempt to radicalise human rights, since the end-
goal simply remains to make the local resonate with abstract and homogenising global
institutions. There is always, in other words, ‘a veritable desire for the law’ trapped within the
logic of sovereign state power (De Genova, 2010: 117-118). This hegemonic logic of human
rights refuses to consider radically alterative conceptions, simply because such conceptions
expose the fundamental inequalities and contradictions which their abstract universalism
attempts to conceal (Aziz, 1995; see also Kouvelakis, 2005).
On the contrary, what is suggested here in an effort to move beyond these limitations
and instead grasp the radical potentiality of human rights, is that the practice of radical
vernacularization can provide us with new insights about how politicised ‘local’ repertoires
from below defiantly transcend and destabilise ideas around nation-states, sovereign territories
and rights ascribed within them. They do not smoothen frictions but enhance them so as to
challenge dominant hierarchies. The practice of radical vernacularization as the case of City
Plaza shows, departs from the threefold limitations which were traced at the outset of this paper
(see II, A: 7): its actors are not confined in the middle but rise from below and stretch beyond
institutionalised knowledge, they do not buttress nationalist stereotypes but ridicule them, and
they reject the repressive state as a reference point. Radical vernacularization, as studied within
the theoretical framework of AoM, comes as an effort to take the Marxist critique of human
rights seriously (Kouvelakis, 2005) and to better understand the ways in which ‘the struggles
of dominated peoples, even when they are expressed in terms of right … exceed right; they
speak, in the final analysis, of something else’ (ibid.:717, my emphasis).
The City Plaza activist community speaks indeed of something else; it speaks of a truly
human emancipation, based on notions of freedom, equality, solidarity and autonomy,
fundamentally disentangled from state provision and the official human rights system. Human
rights, as Qasim tells me after all, are inside these political subjectivities that cooperate in order
to subvert oppression and exploitation. Consequently, the globally ‘magic’ ideas of ‘autonomy,
choice, bodily integrity, and equality’ (Merry, 2006: 49) become radically vernacularized
inasfar as they acquire meaning through the commonly lived experiences and principles of City
Plaza outside and beyond the sovereign order. As the research suggests, the practices which
make these ideas relatable and commonly lived notions that ignite mobilisation are the
unapologetic appropriation of the city and the collectively exercised politics of autogestion.
Although City Plaza cannot constitute a structural solution on its own, it provides us
with a radical alternative where claims to rights break away from their institutional limitations
and instead serve the organisation and mobilisation of the unconfined, autonomous and ever-
growing refugee and migrant solidarity movements sweeping Europe. Following his visit to
City Plaza, Alain Badiou suggested that every struggle for rights presupposes a collective
struggle that carries within itself the potential for new conditions, hence new relations: ‘the
sovereign order considers segregation normal’ he said. ‘Here, there is an alternative world’
(City Plaza Squat, 2016). If we indeed dare to explore such a possibility, then the occupants of
City Plaza bestow upon us a material example of this alternative world. In this light, the radical
potentiality of human rights only begins to show us the radical potentiality of global human
mobilities which live together and struggle together.
Endnotes
1 I will be using the term ‘solidarians’ to refer to activists who do not abstractly fight for refugee’s and
migrants’ rights, but rather stand in solidarity with already existing movements of resisting migrants and
refugees in Greece. The word is a translation of the Greek word ‘allileggyoi’ [αλληλέγγυοι] which literally
means ‘those who show solidarity’ and it is widely used in City Plaza to describe local and international
activists who support the proliferating ‘refugees welcome’ movement in Greece. For Papataxiarchis
(2016:8), what distinguishes ‘solidarians’ from ‘volunteers’, is that the former do not merely aim to help
‘those in need’, but partake of a ‘utopian project’, namely ‘a self-organized collectivity built on
“solidarity” and “horizontality” – bringing together people from all different quarters in order to stand
by the refugees with dignity’.
2 On a par, ‘right to culture’ claims as vernacularized among indigenous communities were also used by
ethnoreligious Ulster Protestant Orangemen marching through Catholic neighbourhoods in Northern
Ireland and by the repressive nation-state of Malaysia which used the ‘Asian values’ of collective good
as a legitimisation for attacks on civil liberties. See, Cowan, 2006: 10.
3 According to Cheng, anti-trafficking international norms in South Korea were vernacularized into anti-
prostitution polices through national ideas around femininity, which not only sustained a nationalist
discourse of pure imagined communities (for more, see Anderson, 1983) but also legitimised the
exclusion and social purge of sex-workers demanding their rights. Paradoxically, the advent of locally
resonant human rights ideas coincided with crackdowns, arrests and a widespread victimization of
‘whorish’ sex workers, with many migrant women workers being entirely removed from the societal
fabric through rushed deportations.
4 Nash refers to the Zapatistas. According to the framework proposed here, the Zapatistas are not far
from being regarded as another instance of radical vernacularization, where international ideas of rights
were translated through an insurgent fight for land, democracy and indigenous autonomy (Harvey, 1998)
-- notions that ran as deep in Mexican history as the ubiquitous figure of Emiliano Zapata. For a more
detailed discussion, also see Barmeyer, 2009.
5 Even in the very noble effort to empower the powerless so as to be heard by the powerful. For more on
how bottom-up vernacularization is primarily -but successfully- directed to legal reforms in official texts,
see Bob, 2007. Of course, this is not to suggest that City Plaza’s activists do not struggle to win
concessions according to their best interest. Two very central demands are access to health and education.
However, at the very same moment official rights are claimed, the activists envision, anticipate and
practice ‘rights’ beyond legal frameworks and beyond the gift of the state. As various examples in the
text show, they claim the right to housing by occupying, the right to the city by appropriating the urban
space and reshaping the daily life according to ideas of commonality, solidarity and equality, and the
right to assembly and association by protesting.
6 For Merry and Levitt (2009:457), vernacularization of rights entails the ‘resonance/advocacy dilemma’:
To have impact, or ‘teeth’, human rights ideas and practices need to resonate with the international arena
on the top; however, this means ideas that have political power in the West, might be rejected from local,
non-Western communities. Conversely, vernacularizers find that when human rights notions join readily
existing ideas, they might be more easily accepted, yet not induce dramatic change, although what is
frequently needed is something entirely drastic. See also, Merry, 2006: 41.
7 Due to limitations of space, the scope of my research does not focus on the insightful and seminal
literature around ‘citizenship’. Therefore, I use the term here not in order to explore how migrants and
refugees claim citizenship as such but mainly to explore how radical vernacularization instigates ‘deeds
that rupture social-historical patterns’ (Isin, 2008:2).
8 All participants have been anonymised for security reasons, as explained in the author’s Ethics Review.
Furthermore, given the latest police raids on refugee squats in Thessaloniki, Greece, the participants and
the author decided not to record the interviews. For more on police raids on migrant/refugee squats in
Greece as efforts to criminalise refugees and privatise welfare, see Dalakoglou and Alexandridis, 2016.
9 For Lefebvre, the right to difference provides a chance to disentangle traditional human rights from the
narrow confines of liberal humanism, since it brings forth those residing in the margins and ruptures the
homogenising abstractions of systematic classifications. Therefore, the right to difference will be implied
as the necessary accompaniment of the right to the city in the struggle to produce a radical alternative
liberated from exclusion and exploitation. For economy of space, the reader is asked not to forget the
inextricable connection between the two when the right to the city is analysed later on (III, A.) For more
on this interchangeable connection, see Butler, 2012: 152-159 and Kipfer, 2008: 204.
10 One of the most frequently circulated racist stereotypes in Greece, has been that of the Albanian
worker. Even after thousands of Albanian workers became an integral part of Greece’s labour market
and societal fabric, the stereotype of the Albanian handyman providing services to upper-middle class
households has been a constant motif of racist discourses.
11 For more on how such theatrical performances serve as social mechanisms for the vernacularization
of the right to equal treatment, see Murray (2006) and his exploration of ‘popular egalitarianism’ in
Barbados.
12 The act fully corresponded to Isin’s three principles of theorising acts of citizenship: The actors wrote
their own script and created the scene for further struggle (first principle: Isin, 2008: 38), they became
answerable to justice against the unjust detention policies of the Greek state (second principle: ibid.: 39)
and ultimately broke the law by occupying private property (third principle: ibid.)
13 The political character of AoM and the very coinage of the term is traced back to Moulier-Boutang,
whose Marxist reading of slave struggles as the vehicle for free waged labour attends to the dialects of
historical struggle. According to Moulier-Boutang, mobility tends to exceed capitalist development; it
has a primacy over capitalism and manages to permeate it (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015: 857). Seen in this
light, migrant and refugee flight are indeed productive, and consequently quintessential to both resistance
and power configuration.
14 The affiliation of City Plaza to AoM is not only theoretical, but also practical. AoM scholars have
actively participated in collective action with SIEPR activists, producing knowledge around migrant and
refugee mobilisation as sites of political resistance. In a short text signed by ‘comrade’ Mezzadra
(discussion with Malik, 2016) among other scholars, City Plaza is presented as a concrete manifestation
of the autonomy of migrant and refugee movement. It is ‘a political example: The City Plaza Hotel is a
place of equality and solidarity, the lived antithesis to Fortress Europe and its borders of shame’. See,
http://www.best-hotel-in-europe.eu/.
15 As Brace has said in a different context, it ‘[buys] into a politics that cannot be transformative because
it cannot explore capacities, contingency and multiplicity’ (cited in Anderson et al., 2012:78)
16 For a detailed analysis of the bureaucratisation and ‘convenient’ homogenisation of the refugee
label, see Zetter (2007). He writes: ‘[A] discourse framed around human rights abuse—a currently
favoured discourse—rather than explicit persecution, is a far less powerful instrument with which
marginalized people such as these may claim the refugee label’ (ibid.:178).
17 For more on the unsafe and disastrous conditions and practices of detention in Greece, see Human
Rights Watch report (2011).
18 Tronti argues that while capitalists must necessarily synchronise with the state so as to enter the class
struggle, working class struggles can occur independently of any given form of representation. For a
more detailed discussion, see Mitropoulos, 2006.
19 De Genova illustrates his point with the example of a few thousands of migrants and refugees who,
following the militant strike by French port workers in Calais, charged the Eurotunnel barriers in an effort
to board vehicles to Britain. In response, David Cameron reacted by calling for more aggressive bordering
and more deportations so as to halt the migrant ‘swarm’. For more, see ch. ‘The Proliferation of Crisis’
(in De Genova, 2016: 37)
20 Rancière (2004:302) writes: ‘The will to preserve the realm of pure politics ultimately makes it vanish
in the sheer relation of state power and individual life. Politics thus is equated with power, a power that
is increasingly taken as an overwhelming historico-ontological destiny from which only a God is likely
to save us’.
21 . In a brilliant example, Rancière writes of Olympe de Gourges, a French revolutionary woman who
was sentenced to death, yet at that least for that moment of her execution she crossed over to the political:
‘if women were entitled to go to the scaffold, then they were also entitled to go to the assembly’, she
famously stated, thus earning her denied right to equal participation. Rancière (2004: 303-304) writes:
‘There was at least one point where ‘‘bare life’’ proved to be ‘‘political’’: there were women sentenced
to death, as enemies of the revolution. If they could lose their ‘‘bare life’’ out of a public judgment based
on political reasons, this meant that even their bare life—their life doomed to death—was political. If,
under the guillotine, they were as equal, so to speak, ‘‘as men,’’ they had the right to the whole of
equality, including equal participation to political life.’ A similar point is explored by Spivak (1988) in
Can the Subaltern Speak in reference to the practice of the self-immolating widows (sati). For a different
context yet similar content, see Erdem Evren’s (2012) case of anarchist conscientious objectors in Turkey
who solidified their political subjectivities once contemned by the Turkish State into ‘bare life’ thus
raising political mobilisation and awareness.
22 By the use of ‘begins’ here, by no means do I insinuate a void of politics before that moment. I use the
term rather figuratively, to resonate with Rancière’s perception of the politics as crossing the threshold.
In other words, ‘begins’ entails an emphasis on the moment of crossing, without nevertheless
undermining the utterly political movement before that moment.
23 This is what Trimikliniotis et al. (2015) call ‘mobile commons’.
24 Movement United Against Racism and the Fascist Threat.
25 Autonomy, of course, is not understood as individualistic autonomy, but as a collective practice which
negates statist institutions and morality. Its use here resonates with Englund’s observations, according to
which autonomy is invoked as freedom and as collective aspirations to empowerment. See Englund,
2012: 88
26 I am only referring to a ‘majority’ and not entirety because a specific number of rooms has been
reserved for activists from SIEPR, other affiliated groups of the Left, or in general local and international
solidarians.
27 For children outside of the urban centre, the relevant ministerial decision stipulated the creation of
educational infrastructure within the camps.
28 Unfortunately, the hotel cannot permanently rely on donations for food and hygiene supplies.
Similarly, the pharmacy and the medical centre cannot cover all the needs due to limited resources. Most
importantly, the people living there do not desire to build their new lives in a hotel, nor can City Plaza,
or the rest of the squatting projects, accommodate the ongoing mobilities of people reaching Greece. In
other words, the demand and the struggle need to stretch beyond the current agenda and pivot towards a
structural change of the system.
29 For more on migrants’ squats as a counter-site of resistance in a social, political and spatial context,
see Lafazani, 2013.
30 The re-appropriation of space, for Lefebvre, must incite and ultimately lead to a contestation of
hegemonic neoliberal politics and its concomitant restrictions on everyday life. To this end, he
foregrounds space as a means for the reassertion of use value and creativity over consumerist exchange
and domination, and therefore concludes that emancipatory politics must aim towards self-management.
For more, see Lefebvre, 1991.
31 The committee of City Plaza’s fired staff issued a statement where all former employees stood in
solidarity with the project and passed on the fully equipped kitchen utilities to the needs of the occupation.
32 The strategy of self-affirmation has historically stricken an indelible chord with ‘illegal’ migrants in
their struggle for recognition and rights. Having its roots in the resistance of Mexicans during mass
displacement in the 19th century, self-affirmation has been most empathically successful in the 2006
immigration reform marches (‘Mega Marchas’) in the United States. For a more detailed historical
analysis of the migrants’ rights movement, see Ponce, 2012.
33 In complete accordance, Douzinas asserts that ‘all realism has utopia at its core’ (2000: 224).
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Interviews
Malik, 19 July 2016 (interview with author at City Plaza, Athens)

Qasim, 14 July 2016 (Interview with author at City Plaza, Athens)

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UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

CITY PLAZA AND RADICAL SCHOOL OF GLOBAL STUDIES

II: RADICAL VERNACULARIZERS, AUTONOMY OF MIGRATION AND ACTS OF

A. Vernacularizers: Limits and Potentialities 12

III: CITY PLAZA AS A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE: THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

A. Right to the City: The Refusal to Be Removed 25

AoM Autonomy of Migration

1. Map of the centre of Athens, 2016, Google Maps. 27

3. Language lessons programme, City Plaza lounge, July 2016. 33

critique provides us with a political dialectic which interprets border-crossing as productive

To this end I enact an ethnography of City Plaza in an effort to ‘patiently document’

My ethnographic research entails informal discussions and semi-structured interviews

In terms of structure, in order to reflect the primacy of ethnography, I chose not to

RADICAL VERNACULARIZERS, AUTONOMY OF MIGRATION AND ACTS OF

A. Vernacularizers: Limits and Potentialities

Translation … is charged with the special mission of

-Walter Benjamin, 1970.

While, traditionally, vernacularizers have to oscillate between dominant and less

In this light, I propose to see the act of radical vernacularization as a complementary

In other words, difference is more of a strategic cornerstone rather than a dimension

Radical vernacularizers strive to escalate claims against ‘discriminatory and

unity and difference dialectically necessitates the conceptualisation of power as always

B. Autonomy of Migration: The Political Impetus for Radical Vernacularization

language of rights becomes disentangled from ideas of nationality, citizenship or official

(Bojadžijev and Karakayali, cited in Casas-Cortes et al. 2015: 896)

Paradoxically, however, although Casas-Cortes et al. (2015) recognise the importance

CITY PLAZA AS A RADICAL ALTERNATIVE: THE RIGHT TO THE CITY AND

A. Right to the City: The Refusal to Be Removed

‘When you move from your country, you move to

-Qasim, City Plaza tenant, 2016

In response to institutional inertia, David Harvey re-energises Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right

B. The Politics of Autogestion and City Plaza as a Radical Alternative

‘Demander l’impossible pour avoir tout le possible’

-Henri Lefebvre, 1996.

CITY PLAZA IS A SELF-MANAGED OCCUPATION. (sic)

The daily ‘committees’ report to

Autogestion is collectively practiced and ultimately embedded in City Plaza’s language

‘We live together; we struggle together- Solidarity will win!’

Oelgemöller, C. (2011) ‘‘Transit’ and ‘Suspension’: Migration Management or the Metamorphosis

Malik, 19 July 2016 (interview with author at City Plaza, Athens)

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