@incollection{8745019,
  abstract     = {{Since 2017, the federal Belgian government has intensified its attempts to arrest, detain and deport illegalized migrants, as well as to discourage those that cannot be deported from settling permanently. Several grass-roots initiatives, however, continue to offer humanitarian support to migrants irrespective of their legal status and try to hold the state accountable. This chapter draws on (ongoing) ethnographic work with three of Belgium’s largest such initiatives to describe their key political strategies. In spite of their different strategies, I argue that these three grass-roots initiatives share two properties that distinguish them from other organizations working in humanitarian settings. First, they enact a particularist solidarity with a specific group of migrants, which contrasts with the universalist reason implicit in more politically prudent humanitarian action. Second, these civil actors use their humanitarian support to maintain a continuous presence in the field, which ultimately shapes and feeds their political strategies. Civil actors combining these two characteristics, I argue, can be usefully conceptualized as enacting a socially and politically “subversive” form of humanitarianism. In this chapter, I will first sketch the rise of Europe’s “humanitarian borders” (Walters 2011), before describing these three initiatives’ political strategies in the period of January 2017 to July 2019.}},
  author       = {{Vandevoordt, Robin}},
  booktitle    = {{Citizen humanitarianism at European borders}},
  editor       = {{Gabrielsen Jumbert, Maria and Pascucci, Elisa}},
  isbn         = {{9780367557133}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{99--113}},
  publisher    = {{Routledge}},
  title        = {{A more subversive humanitarianism? The political strategies of grassroots initiatives supporting illegalized migrants}},
  url          = {{https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003094852-9/subversive-humanitarianism-robin-vandevoordt?context=ubx&refId=63b84514-e879-4b5a-a506-777784f36a8c}},
  year         = {{2021}},
}