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This article was downloaded by: [93.104.104.21] On: 05 December 2013, At: 11:30 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Postcolonial Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20 At the nexus of academia and activism: bordermonitoring.eu Bernd Kasparek & Marc Speer Published online: 27 Nov 2013. To cite this article: Bernd Kasparek & Marc Speer (2013) At the nexus of academia and activism: bordermonitoring.eu, Postcolonial Studies, 16:3, 259-268, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2013.850044 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2013.850044 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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This article was downloaded by: [93.104.104.21]On: 05 December 2013, At: 11:30Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Postcolonial StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20

At the nexus of academia and activism:bordermonitoring.euBernd Kasparek & Marc SpeerPublished online: 27 Nov 2013.

To cite this article: Bernd Kasparek & Marc Speer (2013) At the nexus of academia and activism:bordermonitoring.eu, Postcolonial Studies, 16:3, 259-268, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2013.850044

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2013.850044

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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At the nexus of academia and activism:bordermonitoring.eu1

BERND KASPAREK AND MARC SPEER

In this article we will discuss our experiences with militant research, i.e. a partisanknowledge production at the nexus of academia and activism. There already isample theoretical discussion, hence, with this article, we will present and discussour research association bordermonitoring.eu and the work of the last years. We willthen continue to discuss the pitfalls we have faced and the questions we would liketo put forward in the context of a larger discussion about militant research inmigration and border regimes. The article will be divided into a section where wedescribe our initial motivation to establish the association; two sections detailingour recent work with reference to the struggles it was embedded in, the firstreferring to Greece and the second referring to Hungary; a section where we discussthe topos of asylum within the context of the contemporary European border andmigration regime; and a conclusion where we will point out strategic issues and thedebate around militant research will be summarized.

Bordermonitoring.eu

We founded bordermonitoring.eu in 2011 as a charitable non-profit organization witha focus on researching, publicizing and altering the contemporary European borderand migration regime in Europe. We founded the association as an explicit researchorganization that does not shy away from theoretical questions but that at the sametime attempts to have a practical impact. The association has the stated aim of effectingconcrete repercussions in the political space through critical knowledge production.We also founded it in order to provide an independent institutional framework throughwhich we can carry out research and participate in political campaigns.Obviously, and we want to make this point very clear, we were not the first

actor in this field in Germany. Our work is greatly inspired by the work of theForschungsgesellschaft Flucht und Migration,2 who already in the 1990s mappedand investigated the European border and migration regime without beingimmersed in academia. More academically oriented, but also a concrete politicalproject, was the research group Transit Migration, who were actively involved inthe Frassanito network, to which we owe many theoretical insights and practicalinspiration. We would also like to mention the German-language Network ofCritical Migration and Border Regime Studies, Kritnet,3 founded in 2007, a non-institutionalized network that aims to provide critical insight in the field ofmigration and border regime studies and which has nearly 300 members to date.This network provides a space where current categories in migration and borderstudies are being deconstructed, where theoretical discussion is being conducted,and where methodological approaches and pitfalls are an issue. The network thus

Postcolonial Studies, 2013, Vol. 16, No. 3, 259–268

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provides one of the many reflective spaces we feel are a necessary condition formilitant research and critical investigation.We come from this background of political, anti-racist networks as well as

academic work in the field of border and migration studies. However, we felt thatthese two spheres were—despite the examples to the contrary cited above—generally disconnected in their modes of knowledge production. What seemednecessary was to bridge this gap. While we value the academic discussions andrigidity, and although academic research has often uncovered crucial informationand arguments, the latency of publication and university structures that enforceindividual rather than collective research form a barrier to the dissemination, andsubsequent discussion, of that knowledge, especially when ephemeral. To putforward just one example: Transit Migration’s and the Frassanito network’scontributions to a critical understanding of migration and borders, not only inEurope, via the concepts of border regimes and the autonomy of migration, haveprovided us with invaluable instruments to approach and make sense of what iscurrently occurring at the borders of Europe, and within. We believe that thesecontributions also played an important role in making the European border regimea site of contestation by anti-racist networks, forging one of the few trulyEuropean radical movements of the early twenty-first century in the process. Buteven despite a specific focus on ethnographic methods of investigation, at least onthe part of Transit Migration through its method of ethnographic border analysis,4

we are still far from more than a selective—both geographically as well astemporally—understanding of phenomena around the borders of Europe. To beclear about this claim, we attribute this to the characteristics of current academicstructures and their funding, not to the actual people involved.On the activist side, however, we often felt a lack of appreciation for theoretical

arguments or critical, reflexive assessment of one’s practice, more often than notinduced by precarious conditions under which items of knowledge are beingproduced. Frassanito’s intervention against the understanding of the Europeanborder regime implicit in the term ‘Fortress Europe’ is only the most obviousexample of the former, even though this issue has long been resolved. It is moreinstructive to focus on the latter, i.e. the precarious conditions of production. Themere ability to do (ethnographic) research at the borders of Europe is more oftenthan not predicated on the availability of funds. In our observation this has led towhat we might refer to as professionalization of investigative work, funded by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and foundations. This introduced the problemof knowledge being appropriated for campaigns that focused more on a short-termgoal and less on an abstract critique. An analysis of this conflict in aims of criticalknowledge production needs to take into account the political economy of the riseof NGOs and private, charitable foundations and their terms of (re-)production, andmore generally the commodification of knowledge. Especially the latter warrants adetailed discussion by itself, which is larger than the scope of this article.

From Lesvos to Dublin

Questions around organizing and structures for collective, critical endeavours areimportant, but they are just the institutional setting. In order to get to the political

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issues at hand, we will provide an account of activities of the last years, which wewould trace back to the Noborder Camp in Lesvos5 in the summer of 2009.Lesvos is a Greek island situated on the external border of Europe, and since

2008, an increasing number of refugees and migrants have attempted and mostoften succeeded in crossing the sea that separates Lesvos and Turkey. In Greece,they were faced with detention under the most inhumane conditions, and adefunct asylum system. Just to lodge an asylum application was near impossible,and an application would lead to a longer period of detention than without. Somost people opted against lodging an asylum application, and were released withthe notorious White Paper, which officially read as a deportation order, butpractically allowed a legal stay in Greece for 30 days, with the order to leaveGreece no matter in which direction. Certainly, this circumvention of implement-ing an asylum system as mandated by the EU was a strategy on the part of theGreek government and not merely a blatant disregard for human rights, a neo-orientalist view that was often voiced, in the media, by governments and NGOsof northern Europe alike. The crucial point however is that this strategy wasshort-sighted. Despite earlier failure or refusal to do so, the Greek authorities didtake fingerprints and enter them into the European Dactyloscopy (EuroDAC), theEuropean fingerprint database, with the sole purpose of identifying migrants andasylum seekers within the EU and determining their first point of entry, i.e. thecountry in charge of examining the respective asylum application under theDublin II regime. Since Dublin II enforces the physical presence of the asylumseeker in the country in charge, there were a lot of intra-European deportations toGreece.The Noborder Camp was very successful at disrupting the functioning of the

border for some weeks, and it was crucial in the eventual closure of the infamousPagani detention centre, an old warehouse in the vicinity of Mytilini, the island’scapital, where several hundred migrants were detained in five rooms. With thisdevelopment, the Dublin II regime, i.e. the internal safe third country rule withinthe EU, the system of mobilization, the internal borders of Europe, thefingerprints in EuroDAC, and the social and political conditions of asylumseekers in general within the EU, moved into our focus.We were quite excited when, in January 2011, Greece dropped out of the

Dublin II system and most deportations to Greece under Dublin II weresuspended. This is where we saw a political opportunity to alter the veryconditions of asylum in Europe in favour of those on their way to, or already in,Europe. Our premise was that if yet another EU member state were to drop out ofDublin II, the system itself would crumble: the—ironical—threat of perpetualmobility would be removed from those migrants and refugees who had managedto cross the border of Europe. The price to be gained may be even larger: thewhole Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the holy grail of Schengen’sinterior policy, is predicated on the premise that there are comparable asylumstandards throughout the EU. So if another country were to drop out of the DublinII system due to its failure to uphold the illusion of a harmonized asylum systemthroughout the EU, the CEAS itself would be history before it even came intoexistence properly.

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Some explanation may be needed at this point. We do uphold the right toasylum as a fundamental right that should be guaranteed fully by all states. But—and this refers to our discussion of asylum in the context of the contemporaryEuropean migration and border regime to follow below—there is a need for acritical examination of asylum as a concrete technology of governing migration toEurope. The promise of a harmonized CEAS as laid down in the Treaty ofAmsterdam (1997) was largely motivated by tightening access to asylumconsistently throughout the EU and establishing asylum standards at the lowestcommon denominator of what existed in national legislation and practicepreviously. The project w2eu.info, describing itself as providing ‘independentinformation for refugees and migrants coming to Europe’6 and yet anotherinitiative stemming from the Noborder Camp in Lesvos, can also be seen as amonitor of the heterogeneity of asylum and migration legislation in the EU. Theoften stark differences between national legislations constitute the actual crackswithin the regime that work in favour of the project of migration, and not againstit. To this end, the CEAS is less a vision than a dangerous tendency in theEuropean governmentality of migration.In our analysis, this rather unexpected opening caused by the suspension of

deportations came about through the confluence of various developments. For along time, Dublin II had been a neglected issue in the anti-racist movements as faras we can tell. It is a highly bureaucratic set of rules, the subject of intricatedebates amongst the lawyers we know, and a very special extension of the asylumsystem, to which we will return later. Rather, it was the continued and increasingresistance of refugees who were threatened with deportation, especially to Greece,that made Dublin II an issue within and around the scene. NGOs picked upindividual, often extreme cases and made them public. Lawyers started tochallenge Dublin II deportations in courts, although German law did not haveprovisions for challenging a deportation order under Dublin II. The finalargument, not only in the courts, was about the living conditions of asylumseekers in Greece and access to asylum. Due to the fiction of the CEAS, i.e. theassumption of comparable asylum standards within the EU, there was actually noproper body of knowledge concerning these points. Confronted with this fact,courts relied on firsthand accounts and reports by NGOs that were quick to fillthe gap.We believe that we can trace the impact of one particular ‘document’, i.e. a

short video clip. During the Noborder Camp in Lesvos, migrants started a hungerstrike inside the Pagani detention centre. A camera was smuggled into thedetention centre, resulting in a short video being published on the internet, ‘Voicesfrom the Inside of Pagani’.7 It circulated quickly—the by now commonphenomenon of ‘going viral’—and was soon circulated worldwide by Reuters,shown on CNN, presented by the United Nations High Commissioner forRefugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. In preparation for its ground-breaking rulingagainst a Dublin II deportation to Greece, the German Constitutional Courtspecifically requested this video. While this circumstantial evidence is not enoughto establish causality, we are nevertheless convinced that this video, this very rawitem of knowledge, through which detained migrants directly spoke to a globalaudience, played an important role in the struggle against Dublin II. In this vein,

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we turned to various member states of the EU, in order to establish and circulateknowledge that could be used against Dublin II. While we were never again ableto obtain such footage, which could be circulated by itself, we produced reportson Italy, Malta and Hungary8 that tried to capture in words and quotations whatwe found.

Hungary

The starting point of the research that led to the publication of the report onHungary was in 2011. It came about through contact between about ten mainlySomali minors residing in Germany at that moment, fearing their deportation backto Hungary under Dublin II, and activists in Germany who had been monitoringthe border between Hungary and Ukraine since the Noborder Camp in Ukraine in2007.9 The migrants reported horrible stories about being homeless in Hungaryand mistreatment in detention. In several meetings with them, joined also by theirlawyers, their legal guardians, and NGO and UNHCR representatives, wediscussed possible strategies to avoid their deportation to Hungary. We alsoconducted a series of interviews with them, which can be seen as the base of ourfurther research in Hungary.This starting point of our research reveals a lot about our perspective on

activism, and the anthropology of the political contemporary, and raises furtherquestions. First—and this is of course nothing really new—fieldwork in our timesdoesn’t necessarily mean that a geographical fixed field is visited by mobileresearchers. On the contrary, it was the subjects in the field, and with them thefield itself, which were moving, now sitting in the office of a lawyer in theGerman town of Frankfurt, to be researched by local activists.10

But—and this is the second point—would we, the researchers, have beenpresent at all if we hadn’t expected horror stories about the lives of refugees inHungary? Initially, we were less motivated by a re-narration of the spectacle ofsuffering, but rather by the opportunity to scandalize the Dublin II regime as awhole. However, this raises the first question: can the documentation, thescandalization of human suffering, be a legitimate tool in our quest for globalfreedom of movement at all? Pointing out grievances while appealing tocompassion has been the standard repertoire of humanitarian causes since theabolitionist movement in the eighteenth century. Françoise Vergès howeverconvincingly points out that this very appeal to humanitarian reason cannot beconsidered pure, but rather establishes a different form of power reminiscent ofwhat Foucault describes as pastoral power, i.e. the power inherent to the care-taker.11 At the same time, Vergès argues, the identification with the suffering ofthe victims induces a cleansing of guilt of the perpetrators. Similarly, the last yearshave seen what William Walters calls the Birth of the Humanitarian Border,12 i.e.a multiplication of humanitarian interventions at the borders, especially in Europe.We cannot but avoid the question of whether these humanitarian interventions arereally as pure as professed, or rather the product of a European schizophreniawhich has brought about a harsh border regime and needs to compensate in a poseof self-righteousness, just like Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the self-proclaimed judge

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in Camus’ novel The Fall, when he argues: ‘The more I accuse myself, the moreright I have to judge you.’13

In the meantime, and removed from these political implications, our reportbased on our findings was used in court cases in Germany by lawyers arguing thata deportation to Hungary would seriously violate applicants’ rights to appeal forasylum under fair circumstances. About half of the courts stopped deportations toHungary in the past months. Apart from our report, the conditions in Hungarywere also criticized by various local and international NGOs. Even UNHCRCentral Europe advised nation-states not to deport asylum seekers to Hungaryuntil conditions had changed fundamentally. But, in December 2012, the UNHCRrevised this advice, after the government announced changes in the law.According to a statement by a German migration authorities liaison officerworking in the Hungarian migration office, which we in turn found in a Germancourt file, these changes were the result of intensive discussions of the Hungariangovernment with the UNHCR and the European Commission.This turn of events was definitely a setback, which led us to the following

conclusion: in cases where human rights violations were obvious and welldocumented, combined with pressure by the EU, Hungarian authorities werecompelled to act. However, these changes were in turn predicated on irregularmigrants rapidly transforming themselves into asylum seekers, to enter the realmof the UNHCR and the current humanitarian asylum discourse in Europe. Weknow that there is a danger in this argument, i.e. of it playing into the populistdiscourse on so-called bogus asylum seekers. However, as we will discuss later inour discussion of asylum, we are firmly convinced that, to the European art ofgoverning migration, it is actually advantageous when migrants cast themselves asasylum seekers. To the migrants themselves, it is not necessarily so. Afterobtaining a status in Hungary, successful asylum seekers are allowed to stay forhalf a year in a so-called ‘pre-integration camp’ in Hungary. After this period,they are normally kicked out and end up homeless. Paradoxically, obtaining astatus did not end social exclusion.What does this mean for an activist approach that focuses on scandalizing

human rights violations and breaches of international law such as the GenevaConvention on Refugees? Is there a realistic chance to reach behind the asylumdiscourse? Curiously, there was an isomorphism between the options of irregularmigrants and us activists. We both were challenged to enter the realm and thediscourse of asylum and human rights, and were subsequently confined by it. Justas the irregular-migrants-turned-asylum-seekers were not able to reach beyond themere recognition as refugees, we were—at that time—not able to reach beyondthe discourse of humanitarianism and human rights. We are certainly not naïveconcerning this issue. The language and practice of human rights and asylum as aparticular subset itself constitutes a particular apparatus that is far from innocent.It is thus not due to an infatuation that we speak the language of human rights.Rather, the use of that particular language was motivated and indeed necessitatedby the fact that in our daily practice we often do need a language that can beunderstood in the mainstream juridical and political realm, and in which we canphrase certain arguments. A political pragmatism can never be clean or pure, but

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this does not form an argument in favour of abandoning a critical reflection onone’s own use of that language and those arguments per se.

Asylum in Germany and Europe

In order to do so, let us pick a particular aspect of human rights, i.e. asylum, towhich a lot of references have already been made in the text. The right to asylumhas played a dominant role in German anti-racist networks since the 1990s. Thisis partly due to the fact that the right to asylum was prominently anchored in the1949 constitution as a consequence of the experience that only political exileallowed members of the opposition to German Nazism to survive. However,asylum played a minor role as a mode of governing migration to Germany; labourmigration between 1955 and 1973 played a much more central role. However, thissystem known as ‘Gastarbeit’ came to a stop in 1973 amidst the Fordist crisis.While migration connected with this particular mode of labour migration did notcome to a complete stop, the 1980s brought an increase in asylum cases.Increased global mobility, and especially the coup d’état in Turkey in 1980, led toan increased influx of refugees, the number of asylum applications in 1980topping 100,000 for the first time ever. During the 1980s, with a conservativefederal government still battling the notion of Germany being a country ofimmigration and intent on upholding the illusion that the part of the Germanpopulation without German citizenship would eventually ‘return’, asylum becameone of the central fields where migration would be negotiated. Severe restrictionswere imposed on asylum seekers, and the distinction between legitimate andillegitimate asylum seekers started to gain discursive traction.With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the resurgence of nationalism, the

connected wars of separation, and borders seemingly being opened up all over,millions of people were suddenly on the move. In Germany, this led to a spike inasylum applications, and an openly racist campaign against the right to asylumand migrants in general. In 1993, the right to asylum hitherto laid down in theconstitution was severely restricted, and an accompanying bill cut social benefitsto asylum seekers and made their living conditions in Germany harsher.While the anti-racist movement in Germany generally describes this reform as

the abolition of the right to asylum, a closer look at the precise mechanismintroduced is warranted. For the right to asylum was preserved, but access to itwas strongly restricted. The introduction of the safe third country rule, i.e. theability for the federal asylum office not to evaluate asylum claims in cases wherethe applicant had come to Germany via a third country considered safe(conveniently, all countries surrounding Germany were immediately declaredsafe), caused a sharp drop in legitimate asylum applications. As a consequence,surveillance of the land borders of Germany was expanded a great deal, thefederal border police experiencing a sharp increase in budget and authority.Having effectively closed the land borders to asylum, this left airports as the onlyother relevant point of entry. There, an accelerated procedure of evaluating anasylum claim was implemented exta-territorially, i.e. within the zone of the airportbetween landing and border controls.

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These measures are noteworthy precisely because they foreshadow themechanism adopted by the European border and migration regime. While theEU is still struggling to establish safe third countries in the vicinity of the EU, theprinciple of negated responsibility for processing asylum applications is mirroredin the Dublin II regulation. The new focus on borders as a site of migrationcontrol is mirrored in the EU doctrine of integrated border management, theestablishment of Frontex as a nascent European border guard, and the incorpora-tion of Schengen into EU contracts proper. The idea of externalization, and thenotion that external to EU territory, EU laws and international laws do not apply,is the status quo in the Mediterranean.Furthermore, we would argue that the fact that asylum—as an individualizing

and inquisitive technology of governing migration—has become one of the mainpillars of the EU model is noteworthy by itself. For in the historical perspective,there was a wide range of policy models that nation-states in Europe adopted todeal with migration. Former colonial states such as the UK and France organizedtheir migration policies around post-colonial migrations, while southern statesrather relied on a model of illegalized labour migration and periodic legalizations,mirroring migration and policies around the US-Mexican border. With post-colonial migration becoming increasingly restricted, and an EU-wide ban onlegalizations imposed by the European Pact on Asylum and Immigration in 2008,asylum remains the sole system of legal migration to the EU, at least as long asconcepts such as circular migration and mobility partnerships remain in theexperimental stage. Not surprisingly, while there is no coordinated effort withinthe EU for legal labour migration, a considerable effort towards the implementa-tion of the Common European Asylum System is visible.

Academic and activist knowledge production

This brief sketch of the birth of the European border and migration regime detailsour analysis of the configuration of the current regime. But more importantly, atthe same time it explains why we had—at the time—such an explicit focus onasylum and borders. The interest in these two issues is not at all academic, butrooted in the manifold struggles that ensued around these issues. It is the struggleof asylum seekers in Germany against the practice of denial and deportation bythe German asylum authorities just as much as against the concrete, discrimin-atory living conditions; it is the struggle of migrants to overcome the borders ofEurope and to extricate themselves from the infrastructure of detention in Europe;and it is the struggle of migrants fighting for a right to stay and to live underhuman conditions in Europe. We think of ourselves as being part of thesestruggles, and they have taught us and shaped our understanding and thinking. Itis because of this indebtedness to the struggles, and the concrete sites they haveled us to, that we prefer to speak of and practise militant research, or activistknowledge production.In general, we believe the false dichotomy of activist versus academic

knowledge production to be an utterly futile and academic—in the precisemeaning—undertaking. Given the vastness of today’s border and migrationregimes, and the multiplicity of actors, discursive strands, institutions,

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materialization and legal formations, we cannot but conclude that there is a direneed for coordinated, pragmatic and focused production of knowledge concerningthese networks of power and knowledge. The question we need to discuss then isnot a supposed purity and incorruptibility of activist research versus a seeminglyrefined, structured and rigorous academic endeavour. Rather, we need to identifythe precise conditions of this production of knowledge and discuss them in apolitically sensitive manner.The first condition, which seriously irks us, is the tension between producing

concrete items of knowledge that can effect change and empower struggles andcontributing to a critical theory. As we have described above, this has led us ona slippery slope. Even if we have rather gradually slipped into the languageof human rights and asylum, the reference to law, regulations and norms ofinternational law, and the discovery of the globalized legal system as a field ofcontestation apart, it still constitutes part of our practice, and we need to accountfor it. It has delivered concrete results—deportations have been stopped due to thereports—but it has also played a part in reasserting a specific discourse of thegovernment of migration. The language of human rights and asylum isundoubtedly compatible with official EU rhetoric. What is needed is to maketransparent what we aim for when we use this language, even when we do sotactically.This leads us to the second issue we want to urge for. We posit that there cannot

be militant research that is not collective and that is void of reflective spaces. Thisis an argument for the necessity to be immersed in concrete struggles, whichformulate concrete questions to be investigated and hypotheses to be tested. Justto be clear, we want to explicitly state that this argument cannot be reformulatedas a condition on research to be able to produce concrete knowledge and to beuseful. That is a neo-liberal argument that has already wreaked sufficient havoc inthe academic system. We argue that critical, and hence militant research cannot bedetached from the concrete conditions that are existing. Furthermore we stress theimportance of reflective spaces, be they activists’ plenaries or academic networks.It is in these spaces that the research and the subsequent interpretation of theresults are to be interrogated, both in terms of theory and practice.The last question we would like to put forward is the issue of funding. We feel

that there is a distinct lack of discussion about this topic. But if we are to takeourselves seriously as producers of knowledge, that is as workers in the twenty-first-century factories and start-ups of knowledge production, we need to raise theissue of wage. This is on the one hand a practical argument, in that money isnecessary for meaningful research and its subsequent publication and dissemina-tion. On the other hand, we hint at the current boom of knowledge-basedgovernance and the increasing commodification of knowledge. If we do notdiscuss the political economy of militant research, we are closing our eyes to ourvery conditions of existence as researchers and activists. Setting up an associationdid not solve this problem, but we did have the distinct experience that the labourmovement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had, namely that collectivebargaining is preferable to individual negotiations.These are the questions that we believe need to be raised. We do not consider

them merely theoretical questions, since they stem from a concrete engagement

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with the current political condition we live in and we struggle against. However,and this is where we see the strength of a nexus of academia and activism: webelieve that, collectively, we are better prepared to engage these issues comingfrom a perspective that is informed by the struggles as well as immersed in atheoretical discussion of the deeper questions surrounding these issues.

Notes1 We want to thank Glenda Garelli and Martina Tazzioli for discussing preliminary drafts with us and providinginvaluable input.

2 http://ffm-online.org.3 http://kritnet.org.4 Vassilis Tsianos and Sabine Hess, ‘Ethnographische Grenzregimeanalyse’, in Sabine Hess and BerndKasparek (eds), Grenzregime. Diskurse, Praktiken, Institutionen in Europa, Berlin: Assoziation A, 2010,pp 243–264; Vassilis Tsianos and Serhat Karakayali, ‘Transnational Migration and the Emergence of theEuropean Border Regime: An Ethnographic Analysis’, European Journal of Social Theory 13(3), 2010,pp 373–387.

5 w2eu.info: independent information for refugees and migrants coming to Europe.6 http://w2eu.info.7 http://w2eu.net/2009/08/20/voices-from-the-inside-of-pagani-detention-centre.8 See: bordermonitoring.eu, ‘Ungarn: Flüchtlinge zwischen Haft und Obdachlosigkeit. Bericht einer einjähri-gen. Recherche bis Februar 2012’, 2012, http://content.bordermonitoring.eu/bm.eu–ungarn.2012.pdf; border-monitoring.eu, ‘Malta: “Out of System”. Zur Situation von Flüchtlingen auf Malta’, 2012, http://content.bordermonitoring.eu/Malta.2012.pdf; bordermonitoring.eu, ‘Italien: “Vai Via!” Zur Situation der Flüchtlingein Italien. Ergebnisse einer einjährigen Recherche’, 2013, http://bordermonitoring.eu/2013/02/zur-situation-der-fluchtlinge-in-italien/.

9 http://bordermonitoring-ukraine.eu.10 James D Faubion and George E Marcus, Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s

Method in a Time of Transition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.11 Françoise Vergès, ‘The Age of Love’, Transformation 46, 2002, pp 1–20.12 William Walters, ‘Foucault and Frontiers: Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian Border’, in Ulrich

Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke (eds), Governmentality: Current Issues and FutureChallenges, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp 138–164.

13 Albert Camus, The Fall (1956), Justin O’Brien (trans), New York: Random House Digital, 1995.

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