Housing struggles challenging racial capitalism: The politics of the No Evictions Network in Glasgow

Abstract

This article engages with the struggles of the ‘No Evictions Network’ (NEN) in Glasgow, a migrant- and activist-led organisation set up to resist the eviction of 300 asylum seekers by the multinational company Serco, which held a £1 billion-pound contract to provide housing to 17,000 asylum seekers in the UK. The NEN constituted the coming together of migrants’ and tenants’ struggles in the city. Drawing on the NEN’s experiences, the article highlights how the political economies of the border and the outsourcing of asylum accommodation create powerful ‘asylum corporate landlords’ (ACLs) like Serco. We position the emergence of such ACLs in debates around racial capitalism, housing financialisation and the carceral economies of migration to explore how they extract value from the disposability of racialised migrant populations. Building on this, we analyse how a shared housing crisis and the experiences of dispossession choreographing lives across different communities and tenants shaped a fertile ground for the articulation of tenants’ unions and migrant groups in Glasgow. We analyse these struggles through the lens of racial capitalism, highlighting the common grounds enabling their convergence, the novel practices developed and the challenges faced. Linking the emergence of ACLs with the NEN’s experiences, the article insists that the logics of racial capitalism not only perpetuate dispossession and disposability but are also met with multifaceted forms of solidarity making and collective agency.