Claims for Participation: A Rancièrean Reading of Refugee Protests

Jacques Rancière’s emancipatory understanding of politics offers an interesting perspective with regard to how certain political events, such as those in the Vienna Refugee Camp or the so-called Calais Jungle, can be conceptualized. Contrary to most other political theories, rights in Rancière’s conceptualization cannot be distributed from above by the state – they have to be claimed by the part who has no part in a process of emancipatory politics. Refugee protest movements, which emerge as political actors although they have not been assigned any political space by the particular societies in which they emerge as such, and which are able to politically contest their exclusion as well as a lack of an assigned space within particular polities, are a good example of such a part who has no part in the Rancièrean sense. Relying on Rancière’s conceptualizations this paper explores, on the basis of the events in the Vienna Refugee Camp as well as the so-called Calais Jungle, how protection seekers use rights they do not have access to yet (especially ‘political rights’, which are usually reserved to citizens) in order to manifest the violation of their ‘human rights’, which are rights they have on paper, but that they do not enjoy in practice. In claiming participation in the political discourse, protection seekers position themselves somewhere in between being aliens and citizens and, in doing so, they challenge default positions assigned to them by the host community.