Dr Abigail Taylor

We seek to answer a deceptively simple question: why do private citizens in liberal democracies offer hospitality to undocumented migrants? Through qualitative interviews with French citizens, we propose three reasons. The first is widely recognized in the scholarly literature: hospitality is offered out of a care and concern for vulnerable and precarious migrants. However, we uncover two additional reasons that are not acknowledged in studies on hospitality. One is the desire by citizens to uphold the basic principles and ideals of their own society (what we call “care for the world”). Another is the desire on the part of citizens themselves to become a different and better kind of person by practicing hospitality (what we call “care of the self”). We provide a multifaceted account of what motivates citizens to offer hospitality even in situations where it is outlawed by their own governments.

Against the backdrop of interminable war on terror, militarised borderzones and neoliberal and securitarian depoliticisation, migrants, refugees, and other undocumented persons are politicising themselves and conceptions of citizenship in their struggles for rights, recognition and the freedom to move. Although much less a focus of migration and refugee literature, citizens too, and in solidarity with vulnerable migrants, are waging battles and claims-making against the state over competing conceptions of what citizenship can and does mean at certain times and places. This themed special issue offers a collection of articles that explore these emerging, disappearing and reimagined figures of citizenship. It brings into dialogue empirical work on the political struggles and mobilisations underway in several countries, including France, Indonesia, Belgium, Australia and Brazil with theoretical accounts of enacted citizenship, disobedience and dissent; violence and the place of riots; and questions of temporality, indeterminacy, crisis and opportunity when it comes to citizenship and the shared ground on which they come into effect and are enacted. Rather than navigate the struggles of those aspiring to be recognised as citizens, and those wanting to protect their agency as citizens as separate terrains, this collection of articles aims to make a rigorous contribution to contemporary scholarship by situating them together, as part of a common dynamic that is reshaping citizenship, politics and the political.

Increasingly, French citizens are prosecuted for the ‘crime of solidarity’: hosting undocumented migrants in defiance of state laws forbidding it (and subsequently named ‘solidarity delinquents’). This paper explores contemporary ‘crimes of solidarity’ by investigating why indignant subjects defy the state and, in so doing, constitute themselves as citizens. Drawing on the concepts of hospitality and governmentality, the paper examines France’s vexed relation with hospitality alongside a particular mode of governing the state as a home (‘domopolitics’) in relation to citizenship and migrancy. Hospitality as a governmentality rationalises processes of classification and identification that determine which mobile presences in the home are least disruptive to its social and moral order. Yet French ‘solidarity delinquents’ are savvy to the instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. I show they too have a use for politicising hospitality and themselves. Mobilising these ideas through Isin’s (2008) ‘acts of citizenship’ framework, I capture a citizenly response to domopolitical rule: hospitality becomes the terrain upon which republican citizens demonstrate liberté, égalité and especially fraternité, will not be suspended in the home. More broadly, the hospitality and citizen identity that is at present claimed must be seen in one crucial respect: state and dissident see in hospitality a tactic for realising a conception of Frenchness and citizenship, albeit in two competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, ways.

The current refugee crisis that continues to unfold across Europe has been met, with few exceptions, by a state-led politics of securitarian fear that runs counter to struggles for human rights and inclusion.  Such a politics can be located along a continuum of increasingly restrictive and militarised immigration and asylum policy. In France, a nation founded upon liberté, égalité, fraternité and having long-sacralised human rights and the right to asylum in political and ideological self-representations; the current situation coincides with increased numbers of citizens incriminated for assisting asylum seekers. Its active criminalisation of citizens for acts of solidarity towards vulnerable exiles is at best, puzzling. It becomes even more so when citizens refer to their action as re-staking a claim on these very same republican values. This paper elucidates the French commitment to a less-than-hospitable politics by examining its republican doctrine of universalism and secularism, and posits the French state’s “need” to incriminate solidarity as a consequence of the co-mingling of republican ideals and securitarian rationalities.

Honours Thesis - 2014.
For the first time in the post-World War 2 era, the number of refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has exceeded 50 million people. The Australian government’s harsh immigration laws which regulate asylum seeker boat arrivals result in their indefinite detention beyond the territorial and legal boundaries of the state. A situation arises in which fundamental human rights are suspended and human dignity is threatened. Drawing upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, this thesis examines different modes of power and the relationship between sovereignty, rights, and outsiders. These developments are applied to the present situation of the Australian asylum detention regime. It will be shown how and why human rights are afforded only when aligned with the national interests of a sovereign state. Detainees in Australian immigration respond to the plight of being cast beyond the pale of the law in resisting state power through violent acts of self-harm. The emancipatory possibilities from power through embodied resistance are analysed through the underexplored first person, experiential perspective. Self-harm-as-resistance for politically and legally excluded detainees is revealed to be severely circumscribed by the lack of a truly public realm. Consequently, their reinstatement as rights-bearing individuals is left hanging in the balance.

This project interrogates how hospitality operates as a concept and a political practice. Since the concept’s first sustained appearance as an object of social and political thought some thirty years ago, scholarship has centred almost entirely on the figure of the migrant and a critique of sovereign states and their often inhospitable attitudes and practices. This dissertation breaks with this tradition in two crucial respects. First, I attend to the governmental aspect of hospitality. I show how hospitality is being (re)conceptualised, indeed problematised, as a concern for security in our era of global flows and mobility. This dissertation thus contributes to current debates on governmentality through an extended analysis into the power relations of hospitality. Second, I focus on hosts rather than migrants, and in particular, on French citizens who host migrants today in defiance of laws forbidding it (and named “solidarity delinquents” as a result). Drawing on in-depth interviews, I show that France’s “solidarity delinquents” are savvy to the state’s instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. Yet they too have a use for politicising both hospitality and themselves. My central claim is that defiant acts of hospitality constitute ways of “becoming political”. Specifically, the citizen-hosts are trying to reimagine what it means to be a French citizen and to recuperate and revive the French republican legacy of fraternity and equality. The crimes that they commit hold the state to account; yet at the same time, these help the citizens to care for themselves by reclaiming their own national and political identity. The historical and empirical analysis in this thesis captures the crucial yet undertheorised role that hospitality plays—as sometimes ally of the state and at other times of dissenting citizens—in shaping competing conceptions of what citizenship and identity can and does mean at certain times and places.