Challenging the boundaries of exclusive Europeanisation: How young refugees unsettle normative spaces of urban citizenship

Abstract

This article combines postcolonial and feminist geography approaches to make sense of refugees’ everyday lives in Europe. The article weaves ‘global’ accounts on migration and ‘local’ negotiations of inclusion and exclusion into one story: how young refugees, within urban spaces of arrival, challenge and reformulate European orders of belonging and citizenship. Departing from works that conceptualise arrival within the urban fabric, it suggests a postcolonial lens to young refugees’ intimate and embodied processes of emplacement. My explorations are based on field research conducted in the East German city of Leipzig. This local urban context provides unique insights into how migration-related phenomena are negotiated in a very particular European region in which postsocialist and postcolonial histories of migration intersect. Based on qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, the article interprets the young peoples’ articulations as ways of ‘speaking back’ to and countering the violent and hierarchical segmentation of the (post)colonial world. In creating alternative spaces of belonging, citizenship and encounter, they decentre Europe from below.

Introduction

It was on Tuesday, the day we are supposed to receive our pocket money from the service. On that very day, we put ourselves together and said: ‘Nobody is receiving money in this camp today!’ (laughing) It was no violence, you know? [. . .] We needed these people to talk to us, why our cases are different, why we have to spend two years in this camp, while others are getting transferred after some weeks. After a while, they called the police. And they came – more than ten police vans! (laughing) They stood everywhere. We were around 20, 25 people to protest – all Nigerians. Then, the police walked towards us and asked, ‘What is the problem?’ And then we explained the problem and the situation, what we are facing here as Black immigrants. And then they understood the situation and made a request that somebody from the BAMF [the National Agency for the Management of Migration in Germany] should attend us. A lady from the camp, not from the BAMF, came out to talk to us. I tell you, after two weeks, every one of them, who has spent more than eight months there, they transferred all of them. All the Black.

Lucius ¹ (8 April 2021)

In this interview quote, Lucius, a young refugee from Nigeria, describes a situation of protest in an initial reception centre in Leipzig. He and a group of fellow young refugees from West African countries obstruct the weekly distribution of pocket money, where all the refugees living in that camp queue up, in order to exert pressure on the camp administration. They request information about the progress of their asylum procedures and an explanation why refugees from other global regions (e.g. Venezuela) are being transferred from what they call the ‘camp’ ² to regional asylum accommodations, that offer more freedoms, after a few weeks, while they have to wait for months, sometimes for years. With this protest action, they aim at drawing attention to the perceived injustice they face as Black refugees from West Africa in Europe. This interview quote highlights how European asylum administrations, with their power to produce frictions, regulate and separate, can equally constitute a site of action and critical response for young refugees. ³ From their perspective, Europe – one of the important destinations of refugees’ arrival worldwide, especially since 2015 – reveals itself as a space of (im)possibilities. On the one hand, young refugees face experiences of waiting, immobility and structural insecurity (e.g. Dempsey, 2020; Kox et al., 2020). Mayblin et al. (2020) refer to the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) to capture these everyday experiences of poverty, isolation and hopelessness. On the other hand, young refugees find ways to bring their lives forward and create embodied spaces of citizenship, ease and care (Dempsey, 2021).

In this article, I combine postcolonial approaches to Europe/Europeanisation with feminist geography research on ‘the global intimate’ (Hyndman, 2019; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Pain and Staeheli, 2014) in order to interpret young refugees’ everyday struggles as labour against postcolonial power. It is my objective to weave ‘global’ accounts on migration, coloniality and borders, and ‘local’ negotiations of inclusion and exclusion into one story and show how young refugees, with their practices, narratives and imaginations, challenge and reformulate European spaces of belonging and citizenship. The combination of these two perspectives allows me to highlight the trans-scalar entanglements between the embodied, intimate and sensory experiences of the urban everyday and global orders of postcolonial power.

My understanding of Europe builds on postcolonial perspectives that highlight, on the one hand, how the historical era of colonial domination and suppression reverberates within contemporary Western societies. As Kinnvall (2016) states, ‘colonialism has never left Europe unaffected and is still part of European reality’ (p. 153). The asylum camp is one example for this complex, contradictory and multi-layered inheritance: It is not only the material manifestation of policies that strive to separate ‘the West [from] the Rest’ (Hall, 1992) through the denial of citizenship to the majority of people who petition for asylum in Europe (De Genova, 2017: 3). It also represents a set of discourses that, along the concept of ‘integration’, devalues ethnic, cultural and religious expressions that are deemed ‘non-European’ and establishes hierarchies of worth between individuals and collectives of different origins. Europe, hence, appears as a postcolonial racial project (Adam et al., 2019; De Genova, 2016; El-Tayeb, 2011; Kinnvall, 2016) that ‘produces a clear boundary between what is inside and valuable and what is outside and inferior’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xiii). Postcolonial refugees are constructed as ‘outsiders’ of European citizenship (Davies and Isakjee, 2019: 3; Nyamnjoh, 2006). On the other hand, the postcolonial paradigm marks a rupture with these violent histories of oppression and promotes a shift in perspective towards the critical, transformative and subversive agency of BIPoC ⁴ subjectivities. Likewise, the various sites in which European asylum policies operate can be transformed into places of struggle for citizenship and belonging. ⁵ To sum up, I follow Kinnvall (2016) who picks up Balibar’s (2009) seminal essay and suggests ‘discussing European space as borderlands through which an idea of Europe has been created out of a continuous process of colonization and decolonization’ (p. 154). In order to grasp these interrelated processes, I draw on scholars who decentre/provincialise Europe in retelling the continent’s history and present from a global standpoint – a perspective of migration that is sensitive to the underlying violent colonial histories and interrelations (Adam et al., 2019; Castro Varela and Dhawan, 2009; Römhild, 2010; Santos and Boatcă, 2022). Following Chakrabarty’s (2008) call for the provincialisation of Europe, within these works, ‘Europe’ is approached as a ‘heterogeneous, multiple and unfinished project, as a product and site of production of a globally shared entangled history of powerful post-colonial relations’ (Adam et al., 2019: 7).

Central to this understanding of Europe are notions of race, racialisation and whiteness/Blackness. I use the term race as an analytical perspective that deciphers the various and dynamic ways of how the engendering of others as ‘Others’ – the basement of the colonial civilisatory mission – reverberates within our contemporary societies that are characterised by migrations and translocal connections (do Mar Castro Varela and Mecheril, 2016: 10–11). Hall and Mercer (2017) define race as ‘the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences’ (p. 33). The (dis)continuous processes of Europeanisation sketched above are deeply intertwined with the reproduction of race as a ‘socio-political category of distinction and discrimination’ (De Genova, 2016: 78). De Genova (2016) very explicitly dismantles ‘the European question’ and respective ‘Europeanness’ as a ‘racial problem – a problem of postcolonial whiteness’ (p. 79). Whiteness, here, is not understood as a phenotypical feature of bodies, but as a relational category of difference that works in relation with the colonial construction of ‘the coloured, racialized and marked “other”’ (Braidotti, 2006: 81). It is this ‘constitutive “other[ ]”’ (Braidotti, 2006) ‘that allows the Europeans to universalize their whiteness as defining human trait’ (Braidotti, 2006). Ahmed (2007) approaches whiteness from a phenomenological perspective as orientation: a ‘point from which the world unfolds’, constituting what is ‘here’, close and proximate p. 154). However, racialisation – the process of creating racist knowledge about (groups of) people – not only works along the distinction between Black and white. Contemporary forms of racism increasingly work on the grounds of (ascribed) cultural and/or religious affiliations, in close interaction with social categories such as class, or sexuality – in producing, for instance, the racial category of ‘Muslim’/‘Arab’ (De Genova, 2016: 81). Race, as Hall and Mercer (2017) state, works as a relational concept – a ‘sliding signifier’ (p. 33).

Local urban contexts of arrival, that are at the heart of this article, constitute the sites where the outlined systems of differentiation and their critical reworking by postcolonial refugees literally take place. Here is where the struggles of who gains access to European spaces of citizenship and, accordingly, comes to belong to Europe are negotiated. The East German city of Leipzig, in this regard, appears as a particularly interesting site of study: refugees’ (and other migrants’) arrival in Leipzig has been debated and negotiated against the backdrop of the city’s post-1989 experiences of outmigration, shrinkage and population losses. International migration, in these first years after the upheaval, was welcomed as a means to combat vacancies and urban decay (Wiest and Kirndörfer, 2019, 2020). It was only in the early 2000s that the tide began to turn and Leipzig, in a very short time, turned into the fastest growing metropolis in Germany with a considerable increase of international migration (from 6% in 2000, 14.7% in 2018 to 19% in 2022 (Stadt Leipzig, 2023: 10)). This development is reflected in local discursive dynamics and strategic planning rhetoric that continuously enhance the city’s image as ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘tolerant’ – always with reference to the city’s past as a fair trade location, hosting, for instance, the yearly international book fair. This self-promotion as a ‘modern European metropolis’ (Stadt Leipzig, 2016) becomes particularly salient in the context of discourses that continue to reproduce ‘the German East’ as potentially xenophobic and distant from the lived realities of a society of migration. While the city of Leipzig, also in reference to its active and varied civil society, embraces this status of ‘pioneer’ in the German East, this does not imply a rupture with the tendency to invisibilise East German migration histories. The various and long-term migratory dynamics and complexities in the East are still not integrated into narratives that continue to negotiate the position of ‘the German East’ in a unified Germany. This is violently displayed in the heightening numbers of racist attacks in the city. ⁶ Practices of othering and racist differentiation continue to shape migrants’ and refugees’ everyday life in the city. Migration, particularly that of refugees, in the city, hence, turns into a site of struggle and contestation – between strategic internationalisation, exclusionary and racist practices and an urban fabric that still works towards a ‘grounded’, everyday cosmopolitanism.

Meeus et al. (2018: 1) have developed the concept of ‘arrival infrastructures’ in order to discuss the complex relationship between processes of arrival and urban space: ‘We broadly define arrival infrastructures as those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated’. While ‘arrival infrastructures’ do not figure as central concept for my analysis, the way their authors relate space, scale, the city and migration/migrant agency provides an ideal starting point for my reflections on refugees’ negotiations of belonging and citizenship in the city. Following their critique of thinking ‘the city’ as a ‘delimited container[ ]’ (Meeus et al., 2019: 14), I use it as a perspective that allows me to conflate the intimate and embodied agency of young refugees with local forms of governance, in their entanglement with global orders of postcolonial power. Hence, this article picks up Meeus et al.’s plea for a ‘multi-scalar analysis of arrival infrastructures’ (p. 12) and suggests a postcolonial lens that allows us to explicitly address the multiple and historically embedded power relations and processes of differentiation that permeate the processes of young refugees’ arrival and emplacement.

To sum up, the local site that young refugees come to inhabit, interrupt and – potentially – own is fractured. In rattling at Europe’s selective and hierarchical reception scheme, they are ‘displacing and de-centering Europe on the level of everyday life. They are provincializing it’ (Mezzadra, 2010).

The empirical material that I discuss in this article was collected in the city of Leipzig, within the context of a HERA-funded research project on ‘The everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public space’. ⁷ The aim of this project was to explore young refugees’ stories of homemaking, their interaction with arrival infrastructures and their negotiations of inclusion and exclusion in public spaces.

The core questions the article will address are as follows: How do young refugees, within their urban everyday, challenge and contest exclusive orders of citizenship and belonging and, by this, decentre Europe from below?

In the first section, the article discusses the nexus between postcolonial approaches to Europe/Europeanisation and an intimacy-geopolitics lens advanced in feminist geography. The methodological approach, the empirical material and the author’s positionality within the research project on which this contribution is based are discussed in the ‘The intimate urban everyday of postcolonial European power’ section. In the ‘Methodology, project context and positionality’ section, the article examines the research question through an exploration of the empirical material in three sub-sections: the article shows how young refugees contest the limits posed by their legal status and respond to the hierarchical conceptions of European asylum schemes; how they rupture with the whiteness of European city space and how they, in emplacing ⁸ their translocal lives, summon the continent’s entangled colonial histories. In the last section, the article summarises the key findings and closes with a discussion of how the analysis of processes of European (dis)integration can be productively set in motion from the perspective of young people who claim their ‘right to Europe’ (Römhild, 2010). The ‘Europe’ at stake here appears as an imaginative, administrative and micro-political space that becomes appropriated and reimagined by young refugees who claim citizenship from an urban position that is grounded within translocality, the emotional experiences of arrival and an embodied knowledge that spans across scales.

The intimate urban everyday of postcolonial European power

In this section, I explore how European exclusive citizenship, as an expression of postcolonial power, operates through the micro-zones of intimate everyday life. I follow Barabantseva et al. (2021), who plead for a ‘focus on the intimate [that] extends inquiry beyond more familiar “personal”, “private” attachments to encompass the variety of complex, protean power relations operating in our (neo)colonial present’ (p. 344). The concept of ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ (Pain and Staeheli, 2014) argues against macrostructural accounts of geopolitics and rethinks practices of state control and governance as embodied and linked to the self: ‘. . . the global and the intimate constitute one another’ (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006: 446). Intimacy-geopolitics highlights not only how ‘the geopolitical’ is perceived, responded to and rearticulated by actors within and through intimate spaces. It also asks for a critical engagement of geopolitics, ‘itself as also and already intimate’ (Pain and Staeheli, 2014: 345): ‘Intimacy is not simply the terrain on which broader sets of power relations are written. It is already out there, quietly working to produce domination as well as resistance across all practices and sites’ (Barabantseva et al., 2021: 346).

Dealing with (refugee) migration, from this perspective, allows us to simultaneously address the intimate agency and the protagonism of people who decide to flee, and the workings of postcolonial European power (Hyndman, 2019: 5). Europe, approached as a postcolonial racial project, ‘bleed[s] into’ (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006: 450) the intimate in various ways: first, in the manner in which young refugees negotiate the ‘geopolitics of refugee categorisations’ (Myadar and Dempsey, 2021: 1) in the course of their asylum procedures. This attribution of different statuses creates violent hierarchies between people who arrive, ‘reminiscent of the orientalist and racialised practices of European colonialism and imperialism’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018: 20). Second, it does so through the discursive construction of postcolonial refugees as ‘outsiders’ of European citizenship. Young refugees contest these visual and discursive regimes of othering (De Genova, 2016) that, on the one hand, reproduce ‘European whiteness’ as ‘a regime of continentwide recognized visual markers that construct nonwhiteness as non-Europeanness’ (El-Tayeb, 2011: xxiv) and, on the other hand, Arab/Muslim refugees as ‘Europe’s premier Other’ (De Genova, 2016). Braidotti (2006) asks very pointedly: ‘Can one be European, Black and Muslim?’ (p. 82). Third, through the hegemonic narrative that retells (refugee) migration as something that is ‘external’ to Europe, muting and silencing the continent’s ‘entangled global history’ (Adam et al., 2019; Conrad et al., 2013). The fact that People of Colour in Europe continuously have to struggle for their inclusion and representation is a consequence of colonial and imperial histories. These struggles contest the racialised exclusion of subjectivities, who, from the stance of historical and contemporary postcolonial relations and interconnections, form part of Europe but do not figure as ‘European’ within public discourses (Göle, 2012). While ‘classical’ geopolitics’ ‘state-centred approach fails to attend to intimate, embodied, affective and emotional landscapes [. . .] of forcibly displaced peoples [. . .]’ (Myadar and Dempsey, 2021: 3), feminist geopolitics within this topic focuses on ‘the intersection of embodied experiences and social ordering produced by the global refugee regime’ (Myadar and Dempsey, 2021: 1–2).

Intimacy, however, is also the site onto which the critical reworking of boundaries produced by geopolitical categorisations is enacted: feminist geopolitics places the emphasis on the embodied agency and counter-politics that ‘subvert or otherwise negotiate the symbolical and physical grids of borders, surveillance and control within then global world order’ (Dempsey, 2020: 3–4). Young refugees find ways to bring their lives forward and create embodied spaces of citizenship, ease and care. Citizenship, from this stance, is understood as ‘routine practices and experiences of daily lives as citizens [as they . . .] negotiate exclusion and marginalization’ (Dempsey, 2020: 630). Isin and Nielsen (2008), with their notion ‘Acts of citizenship’, equally highlight this process of constituting oneself as citizen. They ask: ‘How do subjects become claimants of rights, entitlements and responsibilities?’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008: 18). Struggles for citizenship can involve ‘momentous acts’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008), such as protest movements and ‘quiet’ politics of encounter and connectivity through which subjects enact ‘emotional citizenry’ (Askins, 2014, 2016; Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2014). Young refugees enact citizenship in formulating critical responses to the systems that constrain their subjectivities and tease out means to remain capable of acting.

To summarise then, combining postcolonial approaches to Europe/Europeanisation with an intimacy-geopolitics lens allows me to contribute to a better understanding of the (dis)continuous processes of European decolonisation and the role that the critical agencies of young refugees play in recreating Europe from below. I will trace in detail in the three empirical sections below how young refugees contest the triad of European exclusive citizenship I sketched above.

Methodology, project context and positionality

Within the Leipzig case study, I conducted 20 narrative interviews with young refugees, ⁹ in addition to 3 story mapping workshops ¹⁰ and ethnographic field research in different socio-cultural contexts across the city. Due to the pandemic, around half of the interviews were conducted online, the other half in public green spaces, cafés or during walks through the city. The fully transcribed and anonymised interviews were, as a first step, read and re-read with the aim of developing an inductive coding scheme. Further inspired by grounded theory coding techniques (Boehm, 1994; Strauss and Corbin, 1990), I then revisited the material from a stance of critical Europeanisation literature.

The critical reflection of my own positionality was part of the research process from the start. Inspired by feminist debates around positionality and reflexivity (Kohl and McCutcheon, 2015; Nast and Pile, 2008; Sultana, 2007; Tuzcu, 2017), I wished to go beyond a mere ‘listing’ of markers of my (privileged) identity. Instead, I aimed at engaging in an ‘embodied reflexivity’ (Nast and Pile, 2008: 82), developed along concrete moments within my fieldwork – moments that unveiled ‘others’ construction of [me] through their initiatives, spaces, bodies, judgement, prescriptions etc.’ (Nast and Pile, 2008: 70). It begins with my initial hesitation to engage in a research project written along the hierarchical category of ‘refugee’ – aware that I, as a white researcher with a German passport, would be the least able to subvert the boundaries placed by this powerful construction, especially within academic realms. It was particularly in one interview situation with a young man who had left Iran for political reasons several years before, without being granted refugee status, that my reluctance was confirmed: never had I been so pointedly and directly confronted with my class- and race-related privilege, but, more importantly, with all the ambivalence of doing research informed and shaped by a ‘nation-state migration apparatus’ (Dahinden, 2016), running the risk of reproducing its categories and normalisations. My interlocutor very explicitly identified me and my interview request, in the course of the interview, as part and parcel of a white system that racialises and exploits non-white subjectivities. He said,

And this voluntary work. There are many people here who benefit from our situation in order to improve themselves. Many. They come towards you and want something like, sorry when I say this, an interview or that you engage yourself on a voluntary basis.

The question I took home, on this particular day, which I equally understand as a reflexive ‘navigator’ for the analysis on which this article is based, was: How could the systemic unease I felt throughout several research situations translate into a more rigorous commitment to politically relevant research and ethical research practice? One answer to this question, for me, was to address interviewees as experts of their living situation and as analysts of intersecting systems of boundary-drawing and exclusion. I experienced my research partners as people who have learned to decipher and negotiate the way in which racialising systems permeate situations of urban encounter, social and love relations, relations to the self and ways to appropriate public spaces. The commitment to partner organisations and initiatives we worked together with in this project was another strategy to reduce hierarchies within processes of knowledge production and enact research as dialogical, reflexive, open to admit failures and shortcomings, and readjust the course of the research. While this commitment could not resolve the fundamental power asymmetry inherent in the project’s architecture, it is my aim to engage in (self-)critical reflections in such a way that they contribute to dismantling the multiple manifestations of European postcolonial power not only in our research fields but also our academic practices.

Countering the ‘geopolitics of categorisation’

Lucius, in his late twenties, had left Nigeria, and, consequently, his family, for political reasons 2 years prior to our interview. When we met (online), ¹¹ he had just been transferred from Leipzig to Dresden, ¹² the second biggest city in the federal State of Saxony in Germany. In the quote that the article opened with, he looks back on his first few months in the initial camp in Leipzig, provided by the national state that organises the first arrival of immigrants in Germany and describes a situation of protest. This protest targets the violent frictions produced by asylum administrations between groups of refugees and counters the racialising logic according to which they attribute the right to protection.

I interpret Lucius’ description as a claim for justice and equal treatment and, more specifically, an uprising against asylum policies that, basically, exclude immigrants from African countries from protection schemes. ¹³ The young refugees resist their status as ‘outsiders of citizenship’ (Nyamnjoh, 2006) and, in doing this, challenge the ‘founding and continuing logic of the modern European state [as] one which sees European space and citizenship as a right for the “native” European, but a precious and scarcely distributed gift to those outside its political borders’ (Davies and Isakjee, 2019: 3).

Critical responses towards European asylum administrations that separate people petitioning for asylum and deny young asylum seekers the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1949: 34) are manifold. They can be very manifest, as illustrated in the introductory quote, where young refugees from South West Africa claim justice and the right to equal treatment (Walters, 2008: 194). Through their critical collective action, they become visible as political actors in a space outside the ‘classical’ realms of urban agency and very pointedly attack the hierarchical conceptions of European Union (EU) asylum policies. As Dempsey (2020) has demonstrated for the Dutch context, here as well, ‘migrants [. . .] subvert hegemonic geopolitical discourses and categorisations of migrants’ (p. 18). The camp, as a ‘site [. . .] of control and violence’, is momentarily transformed into a ‘place [. . .] in which migrants produce alternative agencies and advocacy networks that transcend camp borders and challenge subjectivity through [. . .] asylum procedures’ (Dempsey, 2020: 4).

Resistance against the ‘geopolitics of refugee categorisations’ (Myadar and Dempsey, 2021: 1), however, is also situated in the ‘mundane sites’ (Askins, 2016: 523) of everyday life (Staeheli et al., 2012: 630). Fabrice, for instance, a young man from Cameroon, describes how he responds to the limits that his precarious citizenship position poses to his life – having been rejected at the first step with his asylum claim. Thanks to funding he managed to obtain from the local municipality, he launched an open-Mic-music festival that, in the following months and years, turns into a serial event and well-known artistic space for musicians and artists of all backgrounds in the city (see next section):

I have received funding from the cultural office, with the help of Brunnengasse e.V., ¹⁴ and then I could organise my event. I was really happy about that because I had not known that I, as a foreigner in this society, could organise an event and receive support from the Office. [. . .] I told that to my friends in Cameroon: ‘Hey dudes, I’m starting an event in my city’. And they asked me: ‘But how? You’ve said you haven’t even got a residence permit!’ I answered them: ‘I don’t know, but I am a human being!’ (Fabrice, 14 May 2020)

His argument mirrors the discrepancy between formal citizenship, as attributed through legal status, and the ‘practice and experience of citizenship’ (Staeheli et al., 2012: 630). Regardless of his precarious legal situation, Fabrice claims his right to live as an active citizen in the city, based on his mere humanity. The local context of Leipzig plays a particular role here. Migrant communities have started to become visible as urban actors (Ulrich, 2019) especially within the last decade – in the form of local initiatives, regional umbrella organisations or through their activities within long-standing socio-cultural centres. They have contributed to the emergence of a very vivid and critical civil society that partially counterbalances formal barriers to participation. The city administration, it seems, has recognised the benefits of supporting this emerging and perpetuating urban sphere, picking up the discursive threads of Leipzig as a ‘cosmopolitan city’. Fabrice’s engagement is situated at the interface of the enabling potential of local participation, a pervasive deprivation of citizenship rights and the manifold recalcitrant tactics of emplacement in the context of migration. His enactment of citizenship particularly involves a community-related and affective practice: the main aim of his events, he says, is to create connections between humans beyond the separating and hierarchical categories of European racialising societies mentioned above. He acts on the basis of his convivial convictions and everyday practice of solidarity:

I was very thankful for that [the funding, E.K.] and would really say, if we all try to give love to one another, life would be much more beautiful. Because it’s not only about funding. What I envision is that anybody who can see me in the street or anywhere can speak with me, like a normal person, not as a foreigner, or an African guy. [. . .] The main aim of *event* is to bring people together. (Fabrice, 14 May 2020)

In connecting people and, through this, creating spaces of belonging, Fabrice enacts ‘emotional citizenry’ (Hörschelmann and El Refaie, 2014). What he sets into practice, though, is not a ‘naïve’ vision of convivial, cosmopolitan encounters (Gilroy, 2004). His style of collaborating and organising promotes a working mode based on trust, connection and care and acts very consciously against fraction, control and the philosophy of rules to which he is regularly reoriented. ¹⁵

Another example of emotional citizenry that challenges the racialising logics of European acceptance schemes and is performed rather ‘quietly’ (Askins, 2014) in the realms of everyday life is the politics of knowledge. Gaining knowledge about how (excluding) systems work and transmitting this knowledge to fellow refugees constitute another micropolitics of resistance through which young refugees can, in spite of the barriers erected to their agency, expand their spaces of action. Schilliger (2020) refers to this as a ‘cognitive process’ of knowledge production and sharing that ‘includes awareness of the politics of domination’ (p. 6). The way in which Lucius navigates arrival is exemplary here: after being forced out of his country, he slowly discovers an asylum system that is strange and cruel to him. It admits him, a bureaucratic act, it scrutinises his motivations for leaving his country in asking him for proof regarding his sudden forced escape from Nigeria, ¹⁶ it rejects his case due to the lack of the latter, it keeps him in a segregated space of waiting for years during the revision of his case, while other refugees are allowed to settle, it torments him with ‘letters, letters, letters’ (Interview, 8 April 2021) and, when he delivers the proof, rejects his case again – arguing on the basis of intra-African ‘safe countries’. ¹⁷ His initial bewilderment gradually gives way to a conscious practice of analysis. From month to month, and through a dreary day-to-day routine, Lucius starts to build up complex knowledge: the structural injustice, a political system that racialises him, the coloniality of power and everyday acts of violence intersect within a Europe that, to his surprise, violates human rights – his very reason for coming here – on an daily basis. He asks questions, challenges decisions, seeks support and builds up networks. Bit by bit, he deciphers a European system of selective citizenship that reproduces and spatialises racialised injustice and, based on this, develops a sense of critical geopolitical agency. The knowledge he develops is an embodied knowledge that links the everyday to the structural, the body to the system and the local to the global. He uses his knowledge to intervene and improve the situation of fellow African refugees in Germany. When we come to discuss a video that documents a racist incident in a tram that had gone viral in Germany in May 2021, Lucius articulates the answer he has found to his most pressing question: ‘Who is to blame for these acts against humanity?’ He holds restrictive asylum policies at least co-responsible, as they legitimise and normalise the rejection and deportation of people and deny them a life in peace, safety and justice: ‘If the government uses intelligence for racist discrimination against us, what else should we expect from its citizens?’ (Political speech, 1 May 2021). Lucius’ articulation points very directly to what the intimacy-geopolitics lens tries to emphasise: the intersection of structural violence, everyday experiences, embodied agency and (micro-)politics of resistance. Lucius’ politics of knowledge, in sum, is a rebellion against the politics of separation, concealment, disinformation and non-involvement upon which EU asylum infrastructures are built. Through his analysis, Lucius finds spaces to act and liberate himself, at least momentarily, from a position of passive compliance.

The aim of this section was to sketch a variety of critical responses towards Europe’s selective and hierarchical reception scheme that, through the ‘geopolitics of refugee categorisations’ (Myadar and Dempsey, 2021: 1), discriminates against arriving migrants and produces violent frictions between different groups of refugees. On the one hand, these critical responses represent differently articulated claims for and enactments of citizenship: perceptible and ‘imperceptible’ (Wilcke, 2018), collective and individual and organised and on a daily basis. They include political protest, an ‘ordinary’ emotional citizenry that relies on practices of connectivity and care, and the politics of knowledge. On the other hand, they are also investments into a convivial European future that overcomes discriminatory practices of separation. They are ‘displacing [. . .] Europe on the level of everyday life’ (Mezzadra, 2010) by rattling at Europe’s exclusive citizenship regimes.

Challenging European whiteness

The protest in Dresden . . . it was really a peaceful and successful protest. [. . .] Yeah, but I was so shocked to know, in a very big city like Dresden, making that kind of protest in the city centre, there were a lot of policemen on the ground you know. And I was the only Black person. The protesters and people who were passing by, they were all white. (Lucius, 8 April 2021)

And then I said: ‘Okay, how can I bring my friends, my acquaintances, the whole world together? So that we wouldn’t judge one another anymore, or criticise one another but see each other positively?’ This was my wish. And then I said: ‘Okay, music. Maybe music is the best way’. (Fabrice, 15 April 2020)

Europe, as a postcolonial racial project, does not only become manifest through its hierarchical and selective citizenship regimes that institutionalise within asylum administrations. It equally ‘bleed[s] into’ (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006: 450) the everyday arenas of urban encounter. Young refugees face acts of exclusion and racism as they move through the city and struggle to make it their own. The notion of ‘European whiteness’ (El-Tayeb, 2011) is key here in order to trace and understand the multiple embodied performances of inclusion and exclusion in urban public spaces and how they become reformulated through young refugees’ place-making strategies.

The aim of this second section is to understand the urban experiences of young refugees as reflections and disruptive re-creations of urban intimacies that are oriented around whiteness and, hence, a power-laden imagination of what is ‘close’ or ‘distant’, ‘here’ or ‘there’ and ‘in’ or ‘out’. Ahmed’s (2007) phenomenological approach that investigates how whiteness orients our bodies, affects and movements is particularly helpful here as it analyses the reproduction of racialised difference through an embodied and spatial lens. Spaces ‘take the shape of “what” resides within them’, they become ‘orientated around whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2007: 157). El-Tayeb (2011), in her book ‘European Others’, explores the emergence of what she defines as ‘European whiteness’ in detail: ‘a regime of continentwide recognized visual markers that construct nonwhiteness as non-Europeanness’ (p. xxiv). Thinking these two perspectives together, we can summarise with Schilliger (2020) that young refugees of colour ‘are so to speak wearing the external border of Europe on their bodies’ (De Genova, 2016: 88). Being Black or embodying the racialised category ‘Muslim’ delimits their scopes of action in movements across and means to appropriate the city. In the following, I explore how young refugees resist these painful exclusions and constraints by creating new, non-hegemonic urban intimacies that foster comfort and ease.

Nearly all the interviews in the sample demonstrate how racialised difference – not only along the lines of whiteness and Blackness but also other physical markers, such as a headscarf – affects the sphere of everyday life. The experience of ‘sticking out’ is, for instance, reflected by Mohammed:

When I arrived, in 2017, there were very few people from Africa, very few Black people. And when I went to sit in the tram, people backed away. They didn’t stand close to me. It upset me a lot. There was a lot of racism. Now it’s better. People are getting used to us. I feel more comfortable in the tram now. And today, when somebody shows a racist side with me, I’ll tell him. Because when I tell him, it relaxes me. (Mohammed, 17 August 2020)

Mohammed has faced anti-Black racism from the start: not only racist insults but also embodied and affective performances of distance/disgust in mundane everyday life spaces, for instance, in the tram, when people back away from him as he enters. Especially in his first years, he apprehends every moment when the tram approaches a stop. Lucius, as shown in the first of the two introductory quotes, speaks of his experience of being ‘the only Black person’ on the square in the city of Dresden as a ‘shock’. With more Black people in the city, Mohammed says, he feels more secure. Mohammed evokes a local transformation here that is complex and partially contradictory. On the one hand, People of Colour have always been there – East Germany equally relied on migrant workers from so-called fellow socialist ‘brother countries’, such as Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Cuba and China, ever since the founding of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic). Within the last few decades, however, international migration – partly via West German metropoles – has increased significantly in the city. This has particularly been the case since 2015, when ‘in the course of three years, the number of asylum-seeking persons in Leipzig has tripled’ (Schäfer, 2022). Mohammed experiences this visible presence of other young newcomers of Colour as a relief. Another young refugee, Abia, also experiences racism and othering – in her case, within the category of ‘Muslim’. This category, according to De Genova (2016), ‘operates as a racial condensation that is produced as inherently heterogeneous, while yet inimical to the white (Christian, “European”) identity of “the West”’ (p. 12):

You know, maybe my expectations were a bit . . . naïve. Because I know Germany only from what I’ve heard in the media in my country of origin. And there, Europeans are always: open! Because of this . . . voluntary work and what Germany does and so on. Then you think that people are very respectful and accepting [. . .]. And it is with this thought that I came here and then I saw something else, especially here in Leipzig. And you realise this, very simply, in the streets, how people look at each other, right? You notice at once: ‘You’re not normal, you are somewhat alien, extra-terrestrial’. (Abia, 24 June 2020)

Lucius’, Mohammed’s and Abia’s reflections are representative of how ‘sticking out’ makes ‘non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different’ (Ahmed, 2007: 157). The city, in El-Tayeb’s (2011) view, becomes ‘a repository of that which cannot be named: the visible presence of racialised populations whose concentrated presence necessarily implies a threatening violation of the “normal”’ (p. xxxii). The way in which young refugees of Colour rupture with the normativity of European spaces, as described by El-Tayeb (2011), rebounds on them.

However, most of my interview partners adopt strategies of resistance, and refute racism and othering in different ways. Mohammed, for instance, confronts people who make racist remarks with their practice: When, during his football practice, he repeatedly hears a person calling insults after him, he goes to see his coach: ‘If he keeps doing this, I’ll call the police’. When the person says ‘sorry’ during a set-up meeting, Mohammed replies: ‘No, I don’t want any “I’m sorry”, I only want you to stop saying these things to me, only that’. He does not look for emotional ‘redemption’ for what he has experienced, nor does he want to forgive: he wants to free his pathway from the barriers that othering and racist insulting place on his practices of emplacement in a new living context. Naming racism, confronting people with their practice without seeking emotional ‘repair’ or ‘healing’ is his way to refute victimisation and to position himself as an actor endowed with superior global knowledge.

Acceding to – or creating – spaces of comfort in which whiteness is not the orchestrating norm is another strategy to counteract racism and othering. Fabrice, with his live event sketched in the previous section, creates one of the first Black cultural urban public spaces in the city of Leipzig, offering artists of Colour a space to step out as artists and, by doing this, at least momentarily, push the limits of the racialised category ‘refugee’. ‘I wanted to create a space where people can come together and talk to each other, pose questions and interact with me as a normal human being, not see me as a foreigner or a black man’ (Fabrice, 15 April 2020). His collaboration with intercultural-leftist projects, such as neighbourhood gardens, produces a productive rupture: through his events, primarily white spaces transform into a space newly owned and appropriated by BIPoC ¹⁸ musicians, still barely visible as socio-cultural actors in the urban landscape. The dominant society’s spaces, through this embodied presence of postcolonial relations with the world, become creolised. ¹⁹ I understand this creation of new intimate spaces of cultural/artistic articulation that invites particularly non-white subjects to enact artistic citizenship as a geopolitical practice: one that centres Black bodies within the hegemonically white urban realm. Abia also engages in centring Muslim articulations in the city, through the ‘quiet politics’ (Askins, 2014) of reimagination. She imagines not only a city that accepts her, in her difference, but, most of all, a city that allows her to practice her religion within her everyday, ²⁰ that offers places for prayer and ‘places for women of other cultures, for example, swimming pools or gyms’ (24 June 2020). As has already been noted above, this emplacement of marginalised subjectivities in urban public and semi-public spaces is of particular relevance in an urban context that is slowly diversifying, but where whiteness is still the hegemonic norm (Kniestedt, 2021; Müller, 2015). Creating places that invoke BIPoC subjectivities as active citizens of the city constitutes a counterbalancing force in an everyday climate shaped by microaggressions and racism. Young refugees ‘insert’ themselves into an urban fabric that, while encouraging comprehensive action against right-wing radicalism, proves reluctant to integrate antiracist stances and practices (Schick, 2020; Wiest and Kirndörfer, 2020).

To sum up, the perpetuation of European whiteness as another expression of European postcolonial power is enacted, perceived and responded within the realms of intimate urban encounters. One the one hand, public urban spaces offer young refugees opportunities to engage in practices that enhance their feelings of belonging in the city. On the other hand, they appear as arenas of embodied struggles around the question of who belongs to Europe: Acts that discard young refugees from Western European centres can be subtle – a gesture, looks – or overtly aggressive – verbal and/or physical attacks. Young refugees have to adopt various strategies to cope with and face the violence that lies – potentially – within embodied encounters of an urban everyday that is saturated by racialised normativities. The aim of this section was to trace how young refugees contest the racialised normativity of European city spaces by refuting practices of othering and racism, recreating spaces of ease and comfort for non-hegemonic subjectivities and reimagining the city as transcultural space. These embodied spaces of citizenship centre BIPoC subjectivities in the city and, hence, summon a new inclusivity of European city spaces.

In the next and last section, I investigate embodied experiences of trans-scalar entanglements and translocality – material, imaginative and sensory – as a third realm that chafes at bounded notions of Europe split off from the continent’s (post )colonial global interrelations.

Subverting boundaries through trans-scalar entanglements and translocal connections

F:

This is my favourite place. And Völkerschlachtdenkmal! ²¹

EK:

What do you like about Völkerschlachtdenkmal?

F:

I’ve learned about Völkerschlachtdenkmal [the Monument of the Battle of the Nations, E.K.] in school. (laughing)

EK:

Oh, in Cameroon!

F:

Yes! It figured in my schoolbook. It is just funny and incredible for me, sometimes, that I am in Leipzig now. (Fabrice, 15 April 2020)

It is with this quote that I introduce this last section focussing on how young refugees challenge bounded notions of Europe by emplacing their translocal connections and trans-scalar imaginaries within their everyday lives. Through their everyday practices, these young people challenge the hegemonic construction of ‘migration’ as something external to Europe – a practice that mutes and silences the continent’s entangled global history – and the discursive omission and non-representation that go along with this. I draw on scholars here who decentre/provincialise Europe in retelling the continent’s history and present from a global standpoint.

The introductory quote transmits the entangledness of the global South and North as a consequence of colonial expansions and histories of migration. Fabrice explains:

The Völkerschlachtdenkmal has a connection with me, because I have learned about it in my history class in Cameroon and had never known that I should come here one day. This is why spending time at this monument fills me with joy. (Fabrice, Story Mapping Workshop, 9 February 2020)

When Fabrice first discovers the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, he experiences a stunning overlap of times and spaces. He is immediately reminded of his history lesson in his village in Cameroon, where a picture of this monument figured in his schoolbook. What jumps directly into the mind here is the perpetual presence of European history taught as universal history in former colonised regions, while histories of the global South remain absent in Western European schoolbooks – not to speak of colonial history itself. This discovery amazes him: ‘It is just funny for me and incredible, sometimes, that I am in Leipzig’. Fabrice’ story, his trajectory, spanning across distances and fractures – spatial, imaginative and historical – here, melts into a moment of surprise and awareness: ‘I am here now’. Fabrice’s embodied awareness of the intermingling of scales equally becomes tangible when, in an informal conversation, he tells me about a conflict he experienced in the course of the preparation of a music festival with a strong utopian message in the city. Initially co-founder of this project, he ultimately retired from it. He was concerned about the concept of the event that merely focused on the local sphere, the city of Leipzig. ‘I don’t want to consider Leipzig as an isolated entity’ (Informal conversation, 25 July 2020). His vision stretches from the local to the global – materialising in the slogan of the festival, ‘a world where many worlds fit in’. In our exchange, I experience Fabrice as deeply upset about attempts to silence his concern that ‘the local’ has to be brought into connection with the world. Upscaling is not a strategic move for him, with the aim of enlarging the scope of the event, but part of his embodied consciousness. Through his migratory experiences and the context of his growing-up, as the introductory quote shows, he embodies postcolonial global relations that foster new ways of thinking and creating spaces for connection and cultural expression. His way of (dis)engaging in citizenship practices is grounded within a form of cosmopolitanism that rethinks the local as a site of migration-related linkages and fractures with the world. This mirrors Römhild’s (2010) concept of minor cosmopolitanisms, a ‘figure of cosmopolitanism’ born out of the ‘local crossroads of mobilities’, conditioned by EU border regimes and deeply influenced by the ‘pragmatism, knowledge and the imagination of migration’ (p. 53, translations by the author).

‘Imagined Europe’ forms another layer of spatial global entanglements that show through the narratives. Abia, as we have seen above, before arriving in Leipzig and on the basis of media images, figured Europe as a welcoming space that supports refugees. After arrival, her everyday geographies of alienation and omission forced her to integrate a new understanding of what ‘Europe’ is and readjust her imagined future. As we have seen, she reimagines the city as a space that allows her to live according to her faith. The same holds true for Lucius, whose anticipation of ‘Europe’ as a space of human rights and equal access to citizenship is disappointed, which subsequently sets the grounds for his political action. It is through the latter, then, that he transforms Europe from ‘below’ – at the marketplaces, where he performs his speeches, in daily encounters with his neighbours, on the theatre stage or within the activist groups in which he is engaged. His fight for justice, the equal treatment of refugees and better connections between refugees and longer term residents in the city is another example of Römhild’s (2010) ‘minor cosmopolitanism’: a practice that ‘affront[s] the status quo of borders, also in their culturalised form, and [. . .] bring[s] them into disorder’ (p. 57, translations by the author). Lucius says,

A lot of people are living in this situation and they are all scared to speak out. And I just . . . hope that someday, all those things will come to an end, you know. I really don’t know how possible that is going to be. But I really want to see the situation where people can just live their normal life, you know? (Lucius, 8 April 2021)

‘The dream of a better life beyond the border, here, is pursued very practically and politically, within the limits of the feasible’ (Römhild, 2010: 58, translations by the author). Europe was part of the young people’s lifeworlds before arrival – in the form of a violent heritage and complicated promise to critically engage with global injustice. Both young people’s transformative actions – when protesting and creating place for prayer in the public library – are grounded within this translocal awareness and knowledge.

Sensory dimensions of place- and homemaking play a significant role within these globally entangled, translocal everyday spaces (Brickell and Datta, 2011: 6). Adil narrates Leipzig as a space that – through the presence of young refugees – is linked to various locations meaningful within the movements of migration. Affective relations to countries of origin, for instance, are translated into local practices that redefine the new place’s microsites:

I’m coming from Idlib and grew up in Damascus. There were many trees, like olive and fig trees. In summer, we have eaten figs from the tree and this smell of olives . . . And it is exactly this what I would like to do in Leipzig, to plant these trees. That is my dream. And I see that this is something many people are trying: To grow some plants here they know from home, some trees, cucumbers, tomatoes. They are always trying to plant them, getting the right equipment to make it work in this colder climate, using a greenhouse or something. (Adil, 28 October 2020)

Indeed, many of my interlocutors tell me stories about vegetables they try to grow on balconies and in small patches behind their flats. One young woman, with the help of an interpreter, explains that she does this ‘not to eat it or to enjoy the shade but to feel like she’s at home’. Planting vegetables from ‘home’ is a practice of affective and sensory appropriation of a new place, literally ‘planting’/grounding the ‘elsewhere’ in the ‘here’. New affective and sensory landscapes emerge and literally spread their rhizomatic webs in contemporary Europe. Finally, it is memories and associative emotions that interconnect spaces: As Draven explains,

I love to visit Eisenbahnstraße. I just feel like in Africa there. It’s like the best street in Cameroon there, where one can stroll and amble along. Nobody looks at you there, everybody does just his or her thing. I can just do whatever I want there. (Draven, 25 March 2020)

In sum, a translocal and trans-scalar lens brings to the fore new spaces that emerge from the historical, material, sensory and always embodied linkages narrated, reflected and performed by young refugees in Leipzig. These spaces equally nurture new forms of citizenship that involve thinking, sensing and acting across scales and always within the consciousness of uneven power relations. Römhild’s (2010) concept of ‘minor cosmopolitanisms’ refers to this practice as a form of ‘global citizenship’ from below, enacted within local contexts, where the violence of borders is countered by refugees’ and other migrants’ practices of solidarity and mutual care. Their critical responses do not only represent differently articulated claims for and enactments of citizenship, but they are also investments into a convivial European future beyond divisions and racialising hierarchies. Young refugees, such as Lucius, Adil and Abia, ‘take [. . .] their right to Europe, that they can deduce from the long history of colonial entanglements of the West with “the rest of the world”’ (Römhild, 2010: 56). They embody, to follow her argument, this ‘other Europe’, ‘that the EU yet again, in a neo-colonial gesture, tries to separate from its own history’ (Römhild, 2010: 56, translations by the author).

Concluding remarks

In this article, I have combined postcolonial perspective on processes of Europe/Europeanisation with a feminist geopolitics lens in order to demonstrate in what way the everyday lives of young refugees in Western European cities are fissured by different reverberations of Europe’s colonial past. These reverberations find their expression within European asylum policies that not only restrict access to Europe and attribute the right to stay along deeply hierarchical reception schemes, but have also created urban lifeworlds at the edge of citizenship. Young refugees navigate these processes of exclusion and differentiated inclusion and struggle to emplace themselves as citizens in the city – through politics of knowledge and speaking-up, solidarity work and investments in convivial care. Postcolonial relations also affect urban encounters: young refugees negotiate the spatialities of racialisation within their urban everyday – in rupturing the whiteness of space, contesting racist discrimination and reimagining the city as a space that, among others, includes articulations of Islam. Finally, I have shown that young refugees respond to Europeanisation as a complex process that (dis)connects histories of the global North and the global South in engaging in translocal practices that involve the imagination as well as the senses. When the multiple and varied ‘elsewheres’ that lie within migratory biographies merge with local urban realities, new spaces emerge that span across scales and disrupt bounded imaginations of Europe. Hence, Western European cities and their complex manifestations of postcolonial relations constitute arenas of struggle and transformation that are evocative of a future Europe that becomes redefined from its margins.

Bridging postcolonial perspectives to Europe/Europeanisation with approaches around the ‘global intimate’, hence, proves particularly helpful when addressing the ways in which young refugees contest exclusive citizenship regimes within their urban everyday: postcolonial European power becomes effective through intimacy. The politics of refugee accommodation and dispersal of (im)mobility and (enforced) proximity are examples for policies that strive to direct and manage refugees’ movements and prevent access to urban spaces of encounter and participation. Experiences of being stuck in a refugee camp or continually forced to move on mirror colonial practices of exerting control over non-European ‘others’. Likewise, young refugees’ everyday practices of building their lives and enhancing urban participation for themselves and fellow refugees – against boundaries set to their agency – can be considered as struggles for citizenship. These struggles involve their embodied selves, local urban sites, and reach towards the ‘global’ in challenging Europe as an exclusive space for ‘native Europeans’. I interpret the young people’s articulations as ways of ‘speaking back’ to and countering the violent and hierarchical segmentation of the (post )colonial world (Kinnvall, 2016). Hence, the critical citizenship perspective that I have referred to in my threefold argument constitutes an important nexus between postcolonial Europe and ‘the global intimate’: It is crucial to make visible the minor and major acts of place-making that, gradually, reshape the city (Meeus et al., 2019: 14).

Urban arrival spaces appear as ideal sites to study postcolonial entanglements across the intimate. On the one hand, they appear as spaces of possibility where local forms of governance (en)counter national and supranational policies that regulate asylum in Europe (Kreichauf and Glorius, 2021: 874; Meeus et al., 2019: 23). On the other hand, cities constitute crossroads of mobilities and migratory movements and, consequently, sites where arrivals, struggles for staying or the possibilities of moving-on are negotiated (Meeus et al., 2019: 4–5). I pick up Meeus et al.’s (2019) understanding of ‘urbanity, and thus urban arrival infrastructures’, as ‘multi-directional’, ‘multi-scalar and to some extent deterritorialized’ (p. 22–23) and revive this debate from a postcolonial lens that interweaves the ‘intimate’ with the ‘global’ and emphasises processes of differentiation and racialisation. Approaching ‘the urban’ from the stance of young refugees’ everyday lives not only contributes to ‘unboxing’ the city in terms of (territorial) space and (presentist understandings of) time, but also to lay an emphasis on the violence that lies within arrival work.

Read against the backdrop of these findings, we can re-approach debates concerning a Europe that (dis)integrates from a very particular stance: its growing together appears as tightly interwoven with its narrative, imaginative and material separating from (post)colonial global regions and the connecting histories. This shows most manifestly through the materiality of national borders and discursive violence of internal bordering practices institutionalised within asylum administrations and infrastructures. But it is also, as we have seen, the discursive practice of delegitimising citizenship claims and the embodied realities of racialising differences that permeate everyday encounters which constantly mark non-native Europeans as outsiders of European citizenship. A Europe that disintegrates, from this angle, could be welcomed as a promise to – finally – integrate its violent pasts, embrace its fractures and, from here, redefine its premises. As O’Dwyer (2018) states, with reference to Ponzanesi (2016):

The migrant, as a postcolonial subject who ‘radically contests the place assigned to them by political and legal boundaries’, disrupts the European order and unearths the ‘nefarious long term effects’, that colonialism still has in shaping political and social structures, in a way that Europeans can no longer ignore.

Refugees differently situated at the ‘edge’ of citizenship appear, on the one hand, as pioneers of critical and transformative Europeanisation. By analysing and challenging Europe’s borders, and through their everyday practices, they rework its foundations. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the scope of violence that permeates their struggles, especially in the light of the planned tightening of EU asylum regulations. Against this backdrop, the article also underlines the significance that European urban centres play for young refugees to connect their struggles for citizenship and belonging with the multifarious urban networks of solidarity and convivial care. The planned relocation of the negotiations about who comes to belong to Europe towards the continent’s (carceral) peripheries is yet another manifestation of Europe’s enmeshment with a colonial past whose spatialities form the ground for young refugees’ struggles for citizenship and belonging.