Brunilda Pali
Brunilda Pali is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Besides criminology, she has a background of psychology, gender studies, and cultural studies. She is also currently the Vice-Chair of the European Forum Restorative Justice Board. She publishes on multiple themes, like restorative, social and environmental justice, critical criminology, security, social movements, gender, and arts.
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In this chapter we will read the refugee movements, focusing on the case of the Vienna protests which have started in 2012, by framing the refugees as political agents, and their actions as constituting political action.
This chapter starts by contextualising the debate on political agency through the work of Hannah Arendt on statelessness. Statelessness entails the loss of the ‘right to have rights’, and according to Arendt, the political agency of a subject lacking the ‘right to have rights’ is unthinkable. Within her framework of thought, refugees would have to belong to a body politics before they can make demands as political subjects. Furthermore, according to Arendt, political action must be free of life necessities.
Arguing with Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler and applying their ideas of politics as dissensus and precarity to our reading of the refugee protest in Vienna, we will challenge both these claims, and argue that the protest constitutes political action, precisely because the refugees take agency in spite of their lack of the ‘right to have rights’, through the staging of their precarity and life necessities.