Resistance in the Illegality Arena. Counter-Labelling in a Shrinking Space for Migrant Solidarity
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2025-06-25
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
This thesis explores how migrant solidarity organisations in the Netherlands engage in discursive resistance against the illegality discourse – a dominant discourse that legally, politically and socially marginalises illegalised migrants. Through ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews, participatory observation and informal conversations, this research investigates how these organisations navigate increasing political hostility, restrictive migration policies and shrinking civic space. Central to this study is the concept of counter-labelling, which I understand as a set of discursive strategies aimed at resisting dominant labels that produce knowledge about migrants and inform policy-making processes. By conceptualising the interaction between state pressure and solidarity resistance as an ‘illegality arena’, this thesis highlights the tensions and frictions that emerge from multilevel collaboration, shifting migration control and hybrid forms of solidarity. In doing so, this research contributes to academic debates on the illegality discourse, migrant solidarity and discursive resistance, offering insights into how knowledge production in the migration sphere is both contested and reimagined from below. The findings underscore the relevance of counter-discursive strategies in increasingly exclusionary socio-political contexts and call for more inclusive, transcendent and reflexive forms of solidarity.
Keywords: Illegality discourse, migrant solidarity, counter-labelling, discursive resistance, illegalised migrants, migration control, illegality arena
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen