Refugees performing justice: Individual-level foreign policy norm contestation

It is well known that stakeholder individuals devise strategies to help themselves and each other in response to insufficient (to them) state policy solutions. However, foreign policy stakeholder individuals increasingly take to the streets to defend their interests as well. In the case of Germany, for instance, Ukrainian refugees have actively mobilised politically and are supporting various foreign policy actions. This includes demands around military support to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, as well as the just treatment of BIPOC asylum seekers and refugees coming from Ukraine. These claims are made in various spaces and formats such as demonstrations in public places, refugee rights organisations’ websites and Instagram pages, as well as arts fairs and festivals by and for Ukrainian refugees. Despite these manifestations of refugees’ public claims towards foreign policy, they are often overlooked in studies around the construction and contestation of foreign policy norms. Drawing on literature from the fields of political narratives, political psychology, political performance, norm contestation, political theory, and transitional justice, this paper aims to explore to what extent and how we can study individual stakeholders’ foreign policy norms. Against this background, I raise the following questions: To what extent can we understand the telling of refugees’ life stories and foreign policy demands as intentional performances? What intentions and effects might these performances have? To what extent do these performances utilise and politicise intersectional identities and situatedness? To what extent do these performances construct individual stakeholders’ own identities and legitimacy as speakers on foreign policy? To what extent do these performances contest or reproduce foreign policy norms brought forward by the government? How do different (imagined) audiences affect the ways in which individuals choose to curate these performances? To address these questions, I analyse interviews with individual BIPOC refugees from Ukraine who are based in Germany. Additionally, I analyse the outputs of a creative arts storytelling workshop with BIPOC refugees in Berlin. For this, with the support of art pedagogists that are experienced in working with refugees, individuals develop and perform imagined stories that retell their life stories as fictional utopias. Narrative literature is used to investigate how personal stories invoke intersectional identities and function to reproduce or counter macro foreign policy narratives. I operationalise this approach by analysing how the personal stories and opinions of individuals that are featured on NGO websites make meaning of 1) the foreign policy event, 2) the governments’ foreign policy response, and 3) themselves (their identities) in relation to these. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on innovative epistemologies for alternative rights, justice, and policy claims. It offers a theoretical framework to study the reproduction and contestation of foreign policy norms among actors that tend to be overlooked, such as the individuals they affect. The paper makes an empirical contribution by systematically studying real-life and fictional individual foreign policy narratives of refugees. Additionally, the paper offers insights into how creative tools such as arts and imagination can be used to study foreign policy norm contestation.