5

Remaking the Demos “from Below”?

Critical Theory, Migrant Struggles,
and Epistemic Resistance

RO B I N C E L I K AT E S

M
ohammad Zatareih wakes up early on the morning of Friday, Sep-
tember 4, 2015. The twenty-five-year old refugee left his home more
than half a year earlier and has been sleeping rough at the Keleti
train station in Budapest for several nights, together with a growing number
of refugees, most of whom are fleeing the devastating war in Syria.1 More than
3,000 of them are now in makeshift camps at the train station, without proper
access to sanitation, food, or medical help, stuck without a viable perspective
after the Hungarian government suspended international train and bus travel.
Together with his friend Ahmed, Mohammad decides to leave this unbearable
situation and to mobilize people to walk toward the Austrian border (170 km
from Budapest). They realize their chances of actually crossing the border depend
on numbers and visibility. Shortly after noon, the refugees start getting orga-
nized; they assemble in rows and start walking. Their march sets off in the direc-
tion of Vienna and quickly grows to over 2,000 people. They decide to walk via
the highway, even as the police try to stop them, increasing their visibility and
securing much-needed media attention. En route, they witness spontaneous acts
of solidarity by Hungarian citizens handing out water, baby food, and blankets,
offering rides in cars or on bicycles, and often explicitly rejecting their govern-
ment’s repressive and cruel policies.
At exactly the same time the marchers set off, the European Union’s (EU’s)
twenty-eight foreign ministers meet in Luxemburg to discuss ways to curb ille-
gal migrant crossings on the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy. They are
unaware that the political constellation is about to fundamentally change due
to the collective act of the marching refugees. A few hours later, the German
 98 Social Movements

chancellor Angela Merkel, still on her routine schedule in the German province,
sees the first images of the march on her iPad and immediately gets on the phone
with her Austrian counterpart. They both realize that the march presents a
momentous challenge to the border regime that could only be stopped violently.
Shortly after midnight, the German and Austrian governments decide to open
their borders and to allow the refugees to cross.
Although the politicians frame their decision as a humanitarian exception
limited to a small number of refugees, in truth, they had already conceded that
the political force behind this historical (if momentary) shift in policy was not
the government but the #marchofhope (as it came to be called on social media)
(see Kasparek and Speer 2015). The political iconography of the march came to
symbolize the collapse of the EU’s border regime as well as the capacity of refu-
gees and migrants to collectively assert and perform their right to mobility, pro-
testing the lack of safe and legal routes across the borders of Europe.2 As Majd,
another one of the refugees on the march, put it: “When we walk, we make our
decision. We don’t wait for others to give us solutions. Stand up my people. We
all stand up, go walk” (Domokos et al. 2015).
In this chapter, I take the march as a starting point to challenge dominant
discourses on the “the refugee crisis.” These discourses understand the crisis as a
momentary breakdown of an otherwise functional system in the face of an over-
whelming influx of migrants and the only adequate response to it as the reas-
sertion of control over its borders by the nation-state (and by the EU), while
allowing for humanitarian exceptions for “those who really deserve it.”3 In this
framing, refugees and migrants only come up as passive subjects, as part of a
“wave” that caused the crisis, as victims of the crisis in need of “our” assistance,
or as tricksters trying to jump the queue, exploiting the crisis without having a
valid claim. However, also on the left there are those who reduce the refugee or
the migrant to absolute victimhood or celebrate migrants as the vanguards of a
politics-to-come without paying any attention to the perspectives, practices, and
agency of migrants themselves.4 This is surprising because it was precisely actual
migrant perspectives, practices, and agency that politicized the question of bor-
ders and led to a genuine political break, breach, or opening in 2015, an opening
that not only subverted the EU’s border regime but also fundamentally challenged
how migrants and refugees are represented.5 At least temporarily, they managed
to break down the dualistic grid of securitization and “discretionary humanitar-
ianism” (Fassin 2011, 213), manifesting the political and epistemic agency of those
usually depersonalized in the vocabulary of “floods,” “flows,” or “streams.” All too
often stripped of their agency altogether or caught in the dichotomy of victims
versus villains, refugees and migrants returned to the political scene as political
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 99 

subjects in their own right, speaking in their own name (albeit, of course, not in
the name of “all” refugees or migrants) (see Hess et al. 2017).
In what follows, I focus on migrant and refugee activism during the “summer
of migration” as an example of how political struggles can play an active role
in producing (rather than just responding to) crises as well as knowledge about
them. The epistemic and political significance of this knowledge is spelled out
with reference to a central insight from standpoint theory, namely that it is often
precisely those who are subjected to social oppression and thereby epistemically
marginalized who turn out to be epistemically privileged with regard to identify-
ing crises for what they are (see Celikates 2020).
In the case of migrants, it is literally those at the margins who run into and
push against boundaries most people in the Global North have never directly
experienced and are not aware of. They thus force the more privileged to con-
front the ways in which both the internal and external boundaries of the state
function—potentially reconfiguring what bell hooks (1989, 20, 23) calls “imposed
marginality” as “a site of deprivation” into a “space of radical openness” and a
“site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” from which “counter-hegemonic
discourse” can emerge.
Building on the case of migrant and refugee activism and the ways in which it
theorizes, denaturalizes, and politicizes borders, I will highlight the production
of knowledge about crises that takes place within social and political movements
that are ordinarily only seen as responses to preexisting crises. The preexisting
crises—primarily economic, political, and social crises in the countries of origin—
are real enough and take a prominent, indeed determining place in the public
imagination. However the crises at the border and, more generally, the border
regime itself as a permanent crisis—crisis not as moment or exception but as struc-
ture or normalcy—only rarely pierce the mental cordon sanitaire that props up the
lethal logic of the border regime around us. The opening forced by Mohammad,
Majd, and their fellow refugees points us beyond this logic to a different under-
standing of borders and migration, and ultimately of citizenship and democracy.

STANDPOINT THEORY AND THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL

CONSTRUCTION OF CRISES “FROM BELOW”

The example of the march of refugees from Budapest to the Austrian border
and then on to Germany—as well as other instances of refugee activism before,
during, and after the “summer of migration”—provides a powerful illustration
for how, in Martin Luther King’s famous words, political struggles seek to
 100 Social Movements

“create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community is forced to
confront the issue” it managed to ignore for too long (King 1991, 291). The more
general theoretical claim this suggests is that different forms of “street politics”
(Bayat 1997, chap. 1; Bayat 2010, Introduction)—from mass marches via direct
action and civil disobedience to “riots” and uprisings—can not only be seen as
responses to, or symptoms of, crises, but as active “agents” in producing crises
and critical and emancipatory knowledge about them. This knowledge can also
counteract objectivist tendencies in critical theory that see crises merely, or
primarily, in terms of structural contradictions and ignore, or underestimate,
the crisis-producing and -enhancing effects of social and political movements.
These forms of “politics from below” are, then, not only to be understood as
sophisticated and theoretically informed forms of critique; their significance
goes further and involves a kind of epistemic reversal: it is often precisely those
who are subjected to social oppression and thereby epistemically marginalized
who turn out to be epistemically privileged with regard to identifying crises
for what they are.6 This is the general insight of standpoint theory, which is
also applicable to thinking about borders and migration, and which remains of
crucial importance to any critical theory that seeks to avoid the reproduction of
epistemic asymmetries.7
Two more concrete claims can spell out this general insight and help to show
that the orientation toward actual practices of critique does not stand in oppo-
sition to the critical potential of critical theories. As these two claims suggest,
the turn to actual practices of critique can indeed lead to a more complex under-
standing of how crises unfold and are (co-)produced. The first is the socio-epis-
temological claim that societies are not epistemically homogeneous, composed
of similarly situated epistemic subjects who are, to roughly the same degree,
subject (or not) to ideological distortion; rather, societies are epistemically frag-
mented, especially along the lines of class, gender, and race, and thus members
of dominant and dominated groups will be subject to group-specific cognitive,
but also affective, perceptive, and mnemonic constraints (see Sullivan and Tuana
2007). The second is the historical-sociological claim that epistemic constraints
tend to negatively affect primarily those subjects who are members of dominant
groups, while members of dominated groups can be seen as epistemically privi-
leged in that they can come to understand social relations of domination due to
their specific position (see Mills 2017). This privilege is not due to some inherent
capacity or mysterious access to “the truth” but rather to specific experiences and
practices that can be identified and reconstructed in a historical and sociologi-
cal perspective. As W. E. B. Du Bois (2007, 8) argues, the “double-consciousness”
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 101 

and “second sight” of those who are born within “the veil” are an effect of the
structural racism they are subjected to and need to navigate. It forces and thus
enables them to develop the capacity to entertain two perspectives, two ways of
thinking, and two ways of looking at and navigating the world. It is this highly
ambivalent experience that allows them to see the dominant standpoint for what
it is, a standpoint, rather than an unquestioned, universal truth. In a similar vein,
Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 1989) speaks of the knowledge and practical wisdom
that the subordinate need to survive—especially Black women who live as “out-
siders within” at the intersection of different social worlds. Again, it is the social
world they are confronted with that both forces and allows them to develop their
own practices of knowledge and theory production and validation. Members of
such dominated groups thus potentially partake in what José Medina (2013, 192)
calls “meta-lucidity”: “Meta-lucid subjects are those who are aware of the effects
of oppression in our cognitive structures and of the limitations in the epistemic
practices (of seeing, talking, hearing, reasoning, etc.) grounded in relations of
oppression: for example, the invisibilization of certain phenomena, experiences,
problems, and even entire subjectivities. Oppressed subjects are in a better posi-
tion to achieve these insights because they are the very embodiment of those cog-
nitive limitations and suffer directly the cognitive biases and vitiated cognitive
structures that support the relations of oppression.”
These two claims seem to contradict a powerful line of thought in critical
theory that locates social ignorance and ideology on the side of the oppressed
and sees such ignorance and ideology as a functional requirement for the
smooth reproduction of the status quo. If one subscribes to this line of thought,
theory has little to learn from dominated groups. Patricia Hill Collins (1989,
746–47) directly addresses this position and its assumption of asymmetry when
she writes: “Black women’s everyday acts of resistance challenge . . . claims that
subordinate groups identify with the powerful and have no valid independent
interpretation of their own oppression, . . . that oppressed groups lack the moti-
vation for political activism because of their flawed consciousness of their own
subordination.”8
Standpoint epistemology is sometimes criticized for naïvely assuming that
positionality translates into epistemic privilege and that the very idea of posi-
tionally enabled epistemic privilege opens the door to subjectivism and par-
ticularism. Both criticisms rely on a misunderstanding and simplification of
standpoint theory that a careful reading of the classical texts readily exposes.
First, most standpoint theorists explicitly emphasize that a critical standpoint is
never a given but rather the result of hard work and struggle, both epistemically
 102 Social Movements

and politically, based in shared, but far from homogeneous, experiences and
practices. As Collins (1989, 749) puts it: “While an oppressed group’s experi-
ences may put them in a position to see things differently, their lack of control
over the apparatuses of society that sustain ideological hegemony makes the
articulation of their self-defined standpoint difficult.” There is thus no basis for
the assumption that there is some kind of automatism linking positionality (or
identity) and critical insight. Second, most standpoint theorists emphasize that
standpoints and their epistemic advantages and disadvantages cannot simply be
asserted but stand in need of sociological and historical substantiation. Neither
are all groups confronted with the same practical necessity of understanding
and navigating existing relations of domination and oppression, nor do all of
them have the same kind of emancipatory interest in overcoming the status
quo—but these are precisely the two primary sources of alternative critical epis-
temologies. In addition, Du Bois and Collins both point to subaltern cultural
practices, institutional structures, and publics that provide the concrete and
material conditions of possibility for the emergence, articulation, and valida-
tion of standpoints that cut off the alleged slippery slope into the relativism
and arbitrariness the critics of standpoint theory seem so worried about. In
Collins’s example, it is precisely factors such as these that explain why Black
women were able to develop a critical standpoint significantly earlier than their
socially atomized white counterparts. What is more, bringing marginalized
forms of knowledge, critique, and resistance to the fore precisely aims at rectify-
ing, at least partially, the glaring lack of objectivity that characterizes dominant
forms of knowledge despite their self-certification as neutral and universal. This
unmasking of the presumably universal as particular, of a perspective as a per-
spective, should be familiar enough to critical theorists because it is among the
fundamental tools in the critique of ideology.
Standpoint theory has some significant implications for critical theory that
should be evident even on the basis of this truncated summary of what is, after
all, a long and complex theoretical tradition. At least some ideologies—racism
being the most obvious case—seem to primarily (albeit certainly not exclu-
sively) impose epistemic constraints on the members of dominant groups,
blocking them from developing an adequate understanding of social relations
of domination. In my view, the same holds for ideologies connected to borders
and migration when they are conceptualized from the perspectives of citizens
whose privileges are constituted and protected by the border regime in question
and whose identities are shaped by it. The alternative standpoints and corre-
sponding counter-hegemonic practices and forms of knowledge established and
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 103 

articulated by members of dominated groups can thus provide a theoretically

informed as well as politically relevant social critique “from below”—a type of
“epistemic resistance” (Medina 2013, 3) that mobilizes epistemic resources and
capacities against domination and oppression and the cognitive-affective mech-
anisms that contribute to their reproduction. Insofar as critical theory can
be seen as “nothing but the continuation, by means of a controlled scientific
methodology, of the cognitive labor that oppressed groups have to perform in
their everyday struggles when they work to de-naturalize hegemonic patterns of
interpretation and to expose the interests by which these are motivated” (Hon-
neth 2017, 919), these forms of “epistemic resistance” have a dual significance for
critical theory: first, they can anchor critical theory within social reality, and
thus help it redeem one of its foundational claims—to be grounded in oppo-
sitional forms of consciousness and actually existing practices of critique and
resistance, and feed back into them (see Celikates 2018); second, they can serve
as a counterweight—in the sense of the “reflexive accountability” invoked by
Collins (2019, 64 and chaps. 2, 4)—to the tendency of critical theories to deny the
existence of theoretically sophisticated critique and resistance on the ground
and thereby reproduce rather than transform the obstacles to equal participa-
tion in knowledge production.
The rich literature on migrant and refugee political agency demonstrates how
decentering methodological nationalism and the hegemonic viewpoint of the
citizen can lead to a more complex understanding of migration, borders, and
citizenship as essentially political and politically contested practices and insti-
tutions (see, e.g., Balibar et al. 1999; Mezzadra 2006; McNevin 2011; Nyers and
Rygiel 2012; Caraus and Paris 2018; Stierl 2019). My focus here is on epistemic
resistance and the production of “epistemic crises,” in this particular case the
revelation that the refugee crisis was in truth much more a crisis of established
state-centered understandings of borders and of migration (and of the types of
subjects refugees are supposed to be), and a crisis that borders inflicted upon
migrants, rather than the crisis of a properly functioning border regime caused
by uninvited migrants. Like all uses of the vocabulary of crisis and critique, this
interpretation is of course contestable and limited in that it cannot and does not
claim to provide a universal framework for capturing all experiences and prac-
tices of migration. Read in this way, the crisis in question can be recognized as an
opening, an occasion for the construction and reconstruction of more adequate
narratives and conceptualizations—not only of migration but also of democracy
and its futures—that are informed by migrant epistemic resistance (see Mac-
Intyre 1977; Medina 2013).
 104 Social Movements

MIGRANT STRUGGLES AS EPISTEMIC RESISTANCE

With their struggles, migrants challenge the self-understanding of those who

regard them as “strangers in our midst” (Miller 2016),9 seemingly coming from
out of nowhere and for reasons that are completely unrelated to one’s own polit-
ical community and its past and current place in the world order. They confront
our “imperial way of life” (Wissen and Brand 2018), and the public amnesia that
shields it, with historical contexts and continuities as well as persisting forms of
economic and political domination beyond the nation-state. This public amnesia
is a form of motivated ignorance that Charles Mills (2015, 219) calls global white
ignorance—the refusal to acknowledge “that a system of illicit racial empower-
ment and disablement inherited from the past may still be at work, reproducing
unfair privilege and handicap at different racial poles through a wide variety of
interlocking societal mechanisms.”
Prominent slogans of migrant movements, such as “We didn’t cross the border,
the border crossed us” and “We are here because you were/are there,” highlight
this historical connection and its political implications, against the “white igno-
rance” that seeks to shield existing relations of domination from being criticized
and challenged. They remind people in the Global North of their own agency and
involvement, both past and present, in producing the conditions under which
people are migrating and fleeing. These conditions did not just come into exis-
tence ex nihilo, nor are they the outcome of processes to which people in the
Global North have only been passive bystanders. As Phillip Cole (Wellman and
Cole 2011, 221–22) puts it, “The global migration regime of the colonial period
was a system of domination and exploitation, and the current global migration
regime operates in the same way.” Of course, this fact is not easily compatible
with the self-image and official normative commitments of those who continue
to profit from and contribute to the functioning of this regime.
Against this background, migrant activism reminds those whose passports
score high on the Global Passport Power Rank (in prepandemic times: Germany: 2,
United States: 3, France: 4, . . .) that the border regime is not a unified geopo-
litical space in which people move according to the same logic. Rather, it is a
highly fragmented and stratified space in which the effects of the colonialism
of the past and the imperialism of the present combine to establish a mobility
hierarchy that more or less mirrors global power relations (with countries like
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria that have been subject to endless wars involving
external interventions generating large refugee populations at the bottom).
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 105 

As Joseph Carens (1987, 251) famously put it: “Borders have guards and the
guards have guns. This is an obvious fact of political life but one that is easily
hidden from view—at least from the view of those of us who are citizens of afflu-
ent Western democracies. To Haitians in small, leaky boats confronted by armed
Coast Guard cutters, to Salvadorans dying from heat and lack of air after being
smuggled into the Arizona desert, to Guatemalans crawling through rat-infested
sewer pipes from Mexico to California—to these people the borders, guards and
guns are all too apparent.” While it is true that borders have shifted in funda-
mental ways, with restrictions against unwanted migrants relying on high-tech
surveillance systems and forms of remote border control increasingly detached
from the territorial border of the state (see Shachar 2020), their lethal presence in
the life of migrants has become even more ubiquitous while all but disappearing
from the life of EU citizens and Global Entry Card holders. Against this back-
ground, claiming that “we are all migrants now” (Hall 1989) or that “we are all
becoming migrants” (Nail 2015a, 1) stands in danger of disregarding the fact that
this regime is not unified precisely because it is massively stratified along the lines
of class, race, and gender and operates under the long-lasting and ongoing effects of
imperialism, colonization, and current regimes of irregularization. These effects
fracture the space of migration in ways that seem difficult to homogenize into
one regime. And they ground the imperative to see migration as a practice of
decolonization—i.e., “to supplant the extant international legal fiction and logic
of formally independent, autonomous nation-states (each with a right to exclude
nonnationals as a matter of existential priority), with the logic and ethics of
imperial interconnection (specifically, colonial and neocolonial interconnection)
that actually exists today [leading to the reconceptualization of] Third-World
migration to the First World as an entitlement of neocolonial imperial member-
ship on grounds of political equality” (Achiume 2019, 1520–21).
The march of refugees can highlight the case for recognizing epistemic agency
and resistance as essential aspects of migrant struggles (see Benli 2018).10 On their
way, migrants in the march held up signs with slogans denouncing the unjust,
dominating, and cruel nature of the international border regime and claiming
human rights, freedom of movement, and access to asylum procedures. The signs,
but also interviews conducted with those participating in the marches, provide
articulate expressions of their experience of the crisis, which for them is the con-
temporary border regime, and of their sense that they need to produce a crisis
in order to make their voices heard at all. They reflect an acute awareness of the
fact that what was supposed to be a system based on the right to asylum has been
 106 Social Movements

transformed into a barely disguised selective and discretionary procedure that

converts asylum into a rare favor to those deemed worthy by state bureaucracies,
which largely make and implement their own rules (see Fassin 2016).
Despite a frequent right-wing populist complaint, it was not Merkel’s decision
that prompted the refugees to make their way to Germany; rather, it was the
other way around: it was the looming sense of a crisis provoked by the thousands
who decided to walk to Germany that drove Merkel to take the historic decision,
late at night on September 4, to open the borders and bring the refugees by train
and bus from Hungary via Austria to Bavaria. The government was pushed to act
by a political dynamic, a movement, at odds with the humanitarian lens through
which it initially saw the situation. The march moved the question of how to deal
with the refugees from a humanitarian and securitarian dispositif onto the polit-
ical scene—which is to say that the very presence of the refugees as a collective on
the highways and at the borders caused a disruption and forced an opening, both
literally and figuratively. At the end of the weekend, two days after the march
began, 18,000 refugees had arrived in Munich. At the end of 2015, more than a
million had crossed into the EU in that year, more than 800,000 of which via the
Balkan route.
Of course, this opening also led to a variety of reactions, from the reconfigura-
tion of the border regime and the erection of new walls and razor-wire fences, via
the EU–Turkey deal and the proliferation of internment camps, to the surge of
new right-wing antimigrant movements (such as Pegida, the Patriotic Europeans
Against the Islamisation of the Occident) and parties (such as AfD, the Alterna-
tive for Germany) (see Santer and Wriedt 2017). But these reactions are them-
selves a symptom of the lasting significance of the “summer of migration” (see
Karakayali 2018). In a powerful and politically effective way, the march formu-
lated and enacted a radical critique of the border regime informed both by lived
experience and a sophisticated sense of what is wrong with the regime, often
invoking the official normative commitments of the citizens and politicians of
the countries whose borders it was crossing (see Hess et al. 2017). This critique
was at the same time immanent, anchored in an experience of this regime, and
radical, rejecting its functioning rather than seeking to modify it. The knowledge
it is tied up with should be seen as a form of epistemic resistance that challenges
the regime’s own attempts at invisibilization and whitewashing. The march can
also serve as a reminder that behind and beyond the publicly visible surface of
migrant collective agency—marches, occupations, encampments—there lies a
field of political struggles that remains invisible: “The foot marches undertaken
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 107 

by refugees this summer, from Hungary to Austria and Germany or via Denmark
to Sweden, demonstrate that the largely invisible political practices of appro-
priating mobility can become visible political acts, even dominating public dis-
courses and controversies in Europe and beyond” (Ataç et al. 2015).
The practical critique of the border regime that the refugee march enacted
produced a crisis that was different from the one EU politicians were still think-
ing they addressed on the day the marchers set off from Budapest. In recent years,
postmigration activism in the receiving state has become a relatively familiar
phenomenon: often at great risk to themselves, irregular migrants have emerged
as political subjects in the societies in which they have ended up, as they “have
marched, occupied buildings, rioted, gone on strike, petitioned, blogged, writ-
ten manifestos, and generally brought attention to their long-term presence in
states where they live with the constant threat of deportation” (McNevin 2011, 4).
However, massive forms of direct disobedience at the border and to the border
regime—crossing without authorization, scaling fences (e.g., at Ceuta and Mel-
illa), marching in large numbers along highways—have become a prominent fea-
ture of border struggles only more recently. The march of refugees has been their
most visible and effective incarnation.
In addition to articulating an emerging form of political subjectivity and
transnational solidarity that opens up new political alliances beyond simplistic
invocations of a unified people and regressive national-populist tendencies also
on the left,11 the march provides an important example of the epistemic agency of
refugees and migrants. Most people in the Global North never or rarely directly
experience the borders these migrants confront, run into, seek to cross, shift, and
circumvent, and this fundamental difference leads to a significant difference in
knowledge and awareness. The corresponding shift of perspective leads to a more
complex understanding of how the internal and external borders of the state,
or of the EU, function and shows that the so-called crisis is not the momentary
breakdown of an otherwise well-functioning system but its modus operandi. It
is precisely this modus operandi that migrant struggles and movements have the
potential to uncover, articulate, denaturalize, and politicize—thus making it into
the object of an emancipatory form of knowledge production whose relevance
has been recognized by critical migration studies but remains largely ignored by
critical theorists.
Refugee and migrant struggles and movements not only manifest a spe-
cific kind of constituent power, namely, the power to initiate a reconstitution
of borders and categories of membership by denaturalizing, politicizing, and
 108 Social Movements

democratizing them (see Celikates 2019; Stierl 2019)—but, in so doing, they also
articulate a form of emancipatory knowledge that contemporary critical theory,
at least insofar as it seeks to move beyond the confines of methodological nation-
alism, ignores at its own peril (see Sager 2018). Again, the claim is not that all
migrant struggles and movements do that, or do that in the same way. The point,
rather, is to show how in this specific case features of migration and borders
become, or are made, visible in a way that any theorizing about migration and
borders that claims to be empirically adequate, critical, and politically responsi-
ble needs to take into account.
Minimally, this shift in perspective—“seeing like a migrant” instead of “see-
ing like a state” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: 166)—requires us to move beyond
the dominant understanding of the refugee and the migrant, of borders, and of
migration from the point of view of stasis, of nonmovement, and of states who
claim the authority, and the capacity, to unilaterally control and regulate move-
ment. In contrast, what is called for—and what the practice of migration prefig-
ures and generates as knowledge—is a more complex understanding of migration
that is not primarily determined by lack, anomaly, or failure and that challenges
ahistorical rationalizations of fundamentally racist forms of exclusion and selec-
tion (see Nail 2015a). As suggested by standpoint theory more generally, refu-
gees and migrants can potentially lay claim to this specific type of knowledge
precisely because of their marginalized position; they need to understand and
navigate the social and political space of the border regime but also have a funda-
mental interest in developing the kind of knowledge needed for circumventing
or overcoming the obstacles that this regime represents for them. In fact, they
are “the very embodiment of those cognitive limitations” (Medina 2013, 192) and
expose and undermine them at the same time.
Put schematically, there are three insights about borders as complex social
institutions and three insights about migration as a complex social practice that
can serve as examples of the kinds of knowledge produced in migration that go
beyond the mere creation of counter-narratives (see Celikates 2015):

1. Borders do not simply have a derived or secondary status—as if they were

simply drawing the line between those who belong and those who don’t—but they
are essentially productive, generative, and constitutive of the difference between
citizens and migrants, and between different categories of migrants (“deserving”
refugees versus economic migrants) that are fundamental to the restrictive ways
in which most people think about the borders of political communities, citizen-
ship, and belonging today (see, e.g., Balibar 1992).
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 109 

2. Borders are no longer exclusively or primarily “at the border,” at the “limits”
of the state’s territory, but they have proliferated toward the interior as well as
the exterior of the political community and been diffused into “borderscapes,”
following those not deemed to belong around as they move (see, e.g., Mezzadra
and Neilson 2013). This is especially true for the transformation of the EU’s bor-
der regime.
3. Borders do not simply enable the exclusion of noncitizens and migrants
and the inclusion of citizens and guests. Their porosity and imperfection are part
of their functionality and design, enabling a form of differential inclusion and
selection that does not just block irregular migration but filters it. This filtering
function also operates in accordance with the demands of contemporary labor
markets, and due to its necessarily imperfect realization opens up some space
for migrant agency at the border (see, e.g., the contributions by Mezzadra and de
Genova in Jansen, Celikates, and de Bloois 2015).
4. Beyond the determinism of presumably objective push and pull factors,
migrants always exercise a relative and constrained freedom in deciding whether,
where, and in which ways to migrate, thus claiming and enacting a right to inter-
national freedom of movement or a “right to escape” that challenges the interna-
tional border regime as a whole and its ideological underpinnings, whether this is
intended or not (see, e.g., Mezzadra 2006; Cabrera 2010, chap. 5).
5. Against the objectification of migrants and migration in dominant modes
of knowledge production, the singularity and individuality of each act of migra-
tion have methodological and symbolic implications in terms of taking into
account the specific experiences—remember Du Bois’s exhortation to ask, “How
does it feel to be a problem?” (Du Bois 2007, 7)—hopes, and aims of the agents and
how these inform and shape their practice as well as the kind of knowledge they
produce (see, e.g., Casas-Cortes et al. 2015, 29–31).
6. Although migration is never completely independent from objective social,
economic, and political structures and conditions, it is also not determined by
them and exceeds any attempt to regulate, govern, or control it by state and
transnational actors, thus exemplifying a practice, or an “art,” of moving across
borders, as well as constituting a movement in the thick sense of the term that is
irreducibly social and political (see, e.g., Bojadžijev and Karakayali 2010).

Against framing migration in terms of flows—flows across borders taken

to be leaky, flows into societies considered to be homogeneous and clearly
delineated12—a more complex understanding based in the knowledge migrants
themselves (co-)produce about their practice stresses the agency of those who
 110 Social Movements

are, after all, not only going with the flow. Rather, migrants are actively decid-
ing—albeit under certain constraints and often taking considerable risks—if,
where, and in what ways to migrate. In their constitutive as well as disruptive
political actuality and potentiality, they escape the categorizations imposed on
them. This again resonates well with bell hooks’s claim, regarding Black women
in the United States, that “our very presence is a disruption,” albeit a fragile one,
as “mostly of course we are not there. We never ‘arrive’ or ‘can’t stay’ ” (hooks
1989, 19). Insofar as epistemic resistance can be understood as “the use of our
epistemic resources and abilities to undermine and change oppressive normative
structures and the complacent cognitive-affective functioning that sustains those
structures” (Medina 2013, 3), the emancipatory knowledge created in practices of
migration qualifies as resistant. Migrants, just like other oppressed groups, are
in a privileged position to produce such knowledge because as a practical neces-
sity they need to navigate social space by taking a multiplicity of perspectives
into account, and they have an interest in developing such knowledge. In both of
these respects, standpoint-theoretical arguments developed in the work of think-
ers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Patricia Hill Collins provide fruitful reference
points in thinking about migrant epistemic agency without falling into the trap
of idealizing and homogenizing the experiences that inform such a standpoint.
While forms of resistance play a prominent role in actualizing migrant
agency, so do migrant forms of sociality and practice that go beyond resis-
tance. They create subjectivities and communities that provide—at least in part
self-standing—alternatives beyond reactive or confrontational encounters, forms
of sociality and practice, that is, that would also manifest the “socially constitu-
tive power . . . that allows society to move and change” (Nail 2015a, 13; see also
Nail 2015b). Correspondingly, the practice of migration politicizes borders and
territories as zones of conflict and negotiation but also of cooperation and soli-
darity (see Forman and Cruz 2017). To point out that borders are always subject
to border struggles and that migrants are involved in these struggles as agents,
and thus should not be regarded as merely passive victims in need of help or as
parts of objective flows and waves, is not to romanticize the structural violence
of the border regime that indeed functions as a set of deadly obstructions of the
freedom of movement enacted in migration, nor is it to romanticize the vari-
ous conditions from and under which people migrate and flee. Rather, the fact
of migration and the border struggles that result from it urge us to ask: What
would it mean to reorient political practice and theory around the alternatives
and potentialities that migration and border struggles open up?
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 111 

REMAKING THE DEMOS “FROM BELOW”?

In order to start responding to this challenge, in this final section, I will briefly
outline how democracy and struggles for democratization—the practice of
remaking the demos “from below”—could be reinterpreted in light of migrant
struggles. The knowledge produced in and through migrant epistemic resistance
does not uniquely determine one type of critique or of politics, but it opens up a
space in which existing political options appear in a different light and new ones
might emerge.
In the current constellation, one immediate implication concerns ideas of
left populism or left nationalism. What should caution against an embrace of
the idea of a left populism is the readily observable tendency of officially anti-
essentialist invocations of the “true people” (and presumably that means: ones
that are attentive to the exclusions and marginalizations produced by these
invocations) to succumb to, and indeed contribute to the escalation of, an essen-
tializing and exclusionary dynamic (see Fassin 2019). Actually existing “left pop-
ulism” offers plenty of examples, from the flag-waving La France Insoumise via
the Salvini-enabling Italian Cinque Stelle to the German movement Aufstehen,
whose proponents—presumably leftist politicians such as Sarah Wagenknecht
and Oskar Lafontaine, but also their intellectual sympathizers such as Wolfgang
Streeck—do not shy away from mimicking and thereby endorsing and normaliz-
ing right-wing anti-immigrant rhetoric. In all these cases, the populist recoding
of presumably leftist political orientations drives out whatever emancipatory
potential these movements might have been able to claim in the past. The
deeper reason for this dynamic can be seen in what Nicholas de Genova (2018,
368) characterizes as the deep nationalist logic of populist appeals to the “real
people” in an “us versus them” register: “all manifestations of populism serve to
recapture the insurgent energies of emancipatory struggles and entrap the ‘com-
mon folk’ within the borders of the Nation, reinscribing a democratic political
enclosure whereby human life is subordinated to and subjected by the national-
ist metaphysics of state power.”
Against such a logic, democracy requires us to acknowledge and institution-
alize as far as possible “the open and contestable signification of democracy” and
find ways to “release democracy from containment by any particular form while
insisting on its value in connoting political self-rule by the people, whoever the
people are” (Brown 2015, 20). What does this requirement imply for the forms
of organization and self-understanding of democratic struggles and movements?
 112 Social Movements

What are its consequences for thinking about emancipatory politics in the reg-
ister of hegemony, populism, and hegemonic populism? In other words: Do
struggles for emancipation and democratization from the left have the same
form and follow the same logic as struggles for hegemony from the right, which
are evidently not concerned with, and indeed embrace the task of, constructing
an exclusionary and homogeneous collective subject that can serve as the firm
ground of affective identification and mobilization?
Turning to migrant struggles allows us to find cues for an alternative way of
undoing the demos and remaking demoi from forms of political struggle that ques-
tion established notions of the people and its boundaries but might not end up
embracing a positive vision of “We the people” in the singular. Migrant struggles
highlight the fact that it is often precisely those who do not count as citizens,
or even as political agents (women, workers, colonized subjects, migrants and
refugees), who develop new forms of citizenship and of democracy that prom-
ise to be more adequate to our current political constellation of disaggregated
sovereignty, traversed as it is by transnational challenges, power relations, actors
and struggles, leading to complex processes of de-bordering and re-bordering that
undermine the idea of territorially bounded political spaces with borders that are
clearly defined and unilaterally controlled by the state. At least those futures of
democracy that go beyond statist imaginaries and regressive nationalist-populist
tendencies (and thus manage to qualify as futures at all) will only come into view
once the challenge migration and migrant political agency pose to dominant ways
of thinking and practicing citizenship and democracy is taken seriously.
Indeed, both migrant and indigenous struggles question rather than instan-
tiate the logic of hegemonic claim-making that is still so often associated with
revolutionary and radically transformative political projects. In a settler-colonial
context, struggles for self-determination by indigenous and occupied people
and peoples clash with the state’s claim to exclusive territorial sovereignty and
the underlying imaginary of popular sovereignty (see, e.g., Simpson 2014; Estes
and Dhillon 2019). The radically democratic potential of indigenous struggles
today can be seen precisely in the dual displacement of hegemony, which can no
longer serve as the privileged logic of political articulation, and of the modern
nation-state, which can no longer serve as the unquestioned terrain for demo-
cratic struggle (see Conway and Singh 2011). As a result, indigenous struggles for
self-determination and against the colonial and imperial project of the modern
nation-state to impose homogeneity and (territorial, cultural, political, legal)
uniformity potentially escape both the framework of protest and that of dom-
inant notions of civility, even if they might appear as “constituent powers” and
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 113 

“civic powers” in the plural (see Tully 2009: 195-221, 243-309). Similarly, in a world
in which nation-states claim a unilateral right to control their borders—both
the borders of their territory and the borders of membership and belonging—
migrant and refugee movements can challenge a whole way of life and a politi-
cal imaginary that entirely abstracts from its own structural implication in the
production of the conditions that violate migrants’ “right to stay” as well as their
“right to escape” (see, e.g., Celikates 2019; Mezzadra 2006).
These struggles—which are, of course, also struggles for and over politiciza-
tion and the boundaries of the political and which do not engage in the abstract
celebration of plural subject positions for its own sake—seem to be misidentified
both in their content and in their form when they are interpreted as contes-
tatory responses to the question of “who the people really are.” The “We” in
“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” and “We are here because
you were/are there” is not, and does not necessarily aspire to be, the same as
the “We” in “We, the People.” Not all political and social struggles of our age
can be equally well articulated, or articulated at all, in the language of popular
sovereignty, of sovereignty and of the people in the singular. Such a national-
populist articulation would also miss the prefigurative potential that resides in
the ways in which these struggles challenge and transcend the dominant logic of
the nation-state and its border regime by developing alternative forms of politi-
cal agency, belonging, and solidarity in the here and now (see, e.g., Mensink 2020).
The point is not to find a new vanguard in indigenous and migrant struggles
onto which frustrated revolutionary desires can be projected. Many refugees
and migrants of course (and with exceedingly good reasons) simply want their
claims for asylum to be successful and might therefore make claims that reinforce
rather than subvert the existing border regime and its underlying imaginary.
Nevertheless, the “march of hope” and other practices of migration and border
crossing open up a sense of political and theoretical possibility, a different way
of thinking about migration and its political implications that holds on to what
might seem like an ephemeral moment—the opening that resulted from the events
of September 4–5, 2015.
Migrant as well as indigenous struggles thus enable us to see the collective
enactment of denied freedoms, the temporary realization of utopian possibil-
ities in the here and now, and the practical decentering of the state for what
they are: openings of the political space that reveal a revolutionary potential (see
Stierl 2018: chap. 7). Radical democracy in a non-hegemonic key would thus start
from the margins of the demos, from the refugees, the migrants, the exiles and
those who come after them, from “the discounted, the ineligible,” “the stateless,
 114 Social Movements

the occupied, and the disenfranchised,” “confounding the distinction between

inside and outside” (Butler 2015: 51, 80, 78) and questioning established notions
of the people and its boundaries without ending up embracing a positive vision
of “We the people.”
Against this background, the march can be seen as pointing beyond claims
to access existing legal statuses (such as citizen, refugee, etc.) to a different
political logic that questions the foundations of how political belonging is
imagined in terms of borders and citizenship. At the very least, refugee and
migrant struggles—such as the “march of hope”—challenge unquestioned notions
of migration and borders and as a consequence seem to require a radical
revision, pluralization, and deterritorialization of the demos, of peoplehood
and of its internal and external borders—all in ways that deeply unsettle the
existing terms of the struggle for hegemony rather than making a move within
its narrowly national-populist confines. They can thus be seen as steps toward
overcoming a politics of citizenship as membership in a bordered and homoge-
neous community. As Anne McNevin (2020, 7) puts it with regard to citizen-
ship as a horizon of contemporary struggles:

The point is not that those engaged in struggles for border justice are likely
to eschew the acquisition of citizenship. The point is rather that becoming
citizens does not mark the endpoint of struggle or the point at which the
contested nature of political belonging is settled. Struggles for border
justice, including those of migrants who demand recognition as citizens in
advance of being formally credentialised, interrupt the thrust of citizenship
in its prevailing form, appropriating, reworking and transforming it. These
struggles politicise citizenship and its threshold steps as sites of critique and
fields of struggle in themselves.

The question is: which practices and forms of organization can accommo-
date rather than repress and conceal this logic of the political, which seems to
push beyond hegemony as much as it moves beyond and against the borders of
a world divided along state lines? The political logic of migrant activism points
us to forms of the civil bond that go beyond the bounded political community
of statist imaginaries both temporally and spatially. Migrants, activists, and
migrant-activists appeal to a bond that goes beyond the narrowly civil, legally
institutionalized, and ideologically dominant bond that exists between citi-
zens of the same polity. The bond their struggles appeal to is civil in a broader
and counter-hegemonic sense because it ties the fate of migrants and refugees
 Remaking the Demos “from Below”? 115 

together with that of the citizens of the wealthier states in ways that are his-
torically deep and politically expansive (especially in the cases in which they are
economically and politically entwined) (see, e.g., Naples and Mendez 2014). What
would a political theory look like—and what would a democracy look like—that
started with the social and political practice of migration in all its complexity,
one that would be based in migrants’ experiences and practices and their own
capacities to reveal and establish civil bonds as expressed in their own struggles?
Maybe a good starting point is to return to Majd’s words cited in the introduc-
tion: “Stand up my people. We all stand up, go walk.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my fellow members of the School of Social Science at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton whose company was as intellectually
stimulating as it was personally rewarding. Thanks are also due to Didier Fassin
and Axel Honneth for their guidance and to all those whose comments at the
two project workshops in Princeton urged me to sharpen the argument. Finally,
I would like to thank audiences in Tampere, Helsinki, Frankfurt am Main, Paris,
Edinburgh, and Jena for their questions and feedback.

NOTES

1. The following account is primarily based on the detailed reconstruction in Blume et al. 2016
and the documentary film We Walk Together (Domokos et al. 2015); see also Jeffery et al. 2015
and the interview with Zatareih in Von Randow 2016.
2. Around the same time in Turkey, hundreds of refugees gathered close to the Turkish-Greek
border to claim their right to cross it safely because they were no longer willing to take the
risky boat journey from the Turkish coast to one of the Greek islands, that had already cost
so many lives (almost 4,000 migrants were reported to have died trying to cross the Mediter-
ranean in 2015) (see Fiedler 2015).
3. The clearest example, in political theory, of this type of discourse is David Miller’s Strangers
in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Miller 2016, Postscript: The European
Migration Crisis of 2015). Miller also reproduces the myth of irregular migrants “jumping the
queue” (Miller 2016, 117).
4. For a critique of the denial of agency such a framing involves in the work of Giorgio
Agamben, see McNevin 2013.
5. I speak of a break, breach, or opening here in the sense in which it was theorized by Morin,
Lefort, and Castoriadis (1968) for the events of May 1968. Not only did this event shatter
the illusion of order, social peace, and political stability, but it also resisted all attempts to
 116 Social Movements

objectify it in an analysis exclusively focused on socioeconomic factors. Albeit at a seemingly

smaller scale, it is my contention that the same holds for the march.
6. The consequences of this reversal for the field of migration studies are spelled out and exem-
plified in Casas-Cortes et al. 2015.
7. What follows builds on Celikates 2020.
8. See also, with reference to a different sociohistorical context, Scott 1990.
9. The same mindset is behind the reframing of racism as xenophobia, which not only psychol-
ogizes a social and political problem (by comparing it to phobias) but also reproduces the
racist frame by characterizing the victims of racist violence as strangers (xenoi, in ancient
Greek).
10. A similar argument could be made about the so-called migrant caravan that led thousands
from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexican border; see “Border Crossing Us” 2018 and Burrell and
Moodie 2019.
11. Examples would include groups like Pueblo Sin Fronteras and Black Alliance for Just Immi-
gration (BAJI) in the United States, the French farmer Cédric Herrou and the local grass-
roots movement Roya Citoyenne, who are helping “illegal” (that is, irregularized) migrants
cross the Italian–French border and sheltering them (for which he was given a suspended
jail sentence), and the many citizens, mayors, and migrants themselves in the Italian context
who mobilize against the anti-immigration laws and policies pushed by the former far-right
deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini.
12. On the cultural frames and metaphors for thinking about migration, and how they enable
and make tolerable death, such as by drowning in the Mediterranean, see Jansen, Celikates,
and de Bloois 2015.

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