Forest, forest, forest. Sometimes we sleep. Walking, sleep, walking, sleep. It’s dangerous on this way

Hidden migrant routes through Croatia lead through forest areas (among other types of terrain) which include those along state borders, but also forests in the interior of the territory. Those forests can variously be seen as shelters for migrants, albeit harsh, or as green tunnels leading to desired destinations, and as scenes of suffering and violence. This article approaches the forests in question as landscapes that have been transformed from a neutral natural environment into active factors for creating and maintaining border control regimes and deterring and expelling unwanted migrants. Based on our long-term field research and publicly available (archival, media and other) sources, we seek to document, interpret, and interconnect the objects and practices involved in constructing the forest as a hostile terrain and perilous environment for migrants, and as an important element in controlling unwanted migrations. These are, on the one hand, objects and practices that intervene into forests, such as setting up cameras or cutting down trees, and, on the other, interventions that take place in forests, such as police interception or expulsion. Apart from these external interventions, in this context of remodeling forests into dangerous environments, one can also discuss the role of nature itself and its characteristics, as well as the causes of why migrants find themselves in nature in the first place. Although, at first glance, it seems that people on the move choose the forest as the place and route of their movement of their own volition, they are pushed and expelled into these forests by exclusionary policies (visa regimes, asylum systems, etc.). This, ultimately, classifies forests in Croatia as weaponized landscapes of exclusion and death, such as the desert (e.g., De León 2015), mountain (Del Biaggio et al. 2020), maritime (e.g., Albahari 2015) or archipelago (Mountz 2017) landscapes

Possible Citizens: Migration Enforcement as the Performance of Citizenship in the United Arab Emirates

While most boundary-making studies examine native-born citizens’ opposition to immigration, this article explains why immigrants develop anti-immigrant attitudes. Under what conditions do previous generations of immigrants develop solidarity with newcomers? When might immigrants, instead, police national boundaries and oppose further immigration or naturalization? I argue that under uncertain citizenship status, long-term immigrants are unlikely to develop solidarity with newcomers, despite common experience with exclusionary citizenship policies. Drawing on interviews with naturalization applicants in the United Arab Emirates, this article analyses how policies that unevenly distribute rights and protections to non-citizens structure relationships between immigrant groups. Moving beyond citizen/non-citizen binaries, it calls attention to hierarchies among non-citizens, examining how long-term immigrants with partial and conditional rights police national boundaries to navigate exclusionary policies. When states restrict citizenship, making it a scarce good, immigrants may respond to uncertainty by competing and, thus, limiting access to that good for newcomers. When naturalization is arduous, applicants face pressures to continually perform citizenship to prove that they deserve inclusion. Naturalization applicants lacked citizenship, but they immigrated to the UAE before the establishment of its guest-worker program and claimed Emirati identity by differentiating themselves from “migrant workers.” I show how migration enforcement and boundary-policing factored into their perceptions and performances of what it meant to be a “good” Emirati citizen. Ethnic hierarchies and the timing of migration created distinctions between immigrants eligible for naturalization and those who were not. The mere possibility of inclusion in the citizenry may generate hierarchies between immigrants, precluding solidarity, and encouraging boundary-policing.

Wonderful World House From Exclusion to Intercultural Relations in the Aftermath of Law Decree 113/2018 (Immigration and Security Decree)

This chapter offers an overview of the role of social relations in reception practices towards asylum seekers and refugees, updating these considerations in the framework of the Immigration and Security Decree (3). The experience of the Wonderful World House in Parma is described as a reaction to the exclusionary policies enacted at the national level (4) and it is analysed as a space offering emplacement opportunities both to migrants and Italians (5). The final part confronts the Wonderful World experience with the concepts of direct social action and social innovation, in order to foreshadow its medium- and long-term impact in asylum policy making (6).

From Making the Glory to Facing the Decay

What were the main characteristics of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hungarian collective identity and memory political debates? They were no longer determined by the discourse of liberal-rights-extending assimilation, yet public speech was also not entirely determined by the ethnicist–essentialist subject matter of the interwar national characterology discourse; rather, the internal dilemma of the rights-extending assimilation was externalized. There were some who sought to advance the extension of rights in the direction of suffrage. Others held on to rights extension in the hope of assimilation and believed they could promote it through establishing institutions of public education. Others abided by rights-extending assimilation, but interpreted it in terms of individual cultural achievements. Yet others believed that their fears of historical Hungary falling apart and the decay of the national middle class could be counterbalanced by curtailing or revoking nationalities’ rights and exclusionary policies against them. This article focuses on four different types of forging a collective identity: programmes, master narratives, political languages, strategies and regimes of memory.

Grievances and Fears in Islamist Movements: Revisiting the Link between Exclusion, Insecurity, and Political Violence

This article examines how exclusionary policies and repressive measures affect the propensity of Islamist groups in nondemocratic settings to engage in violence. The central argument is that exclusion from electoral politics, from civil society, and from public discourse can increase political grievances, whereas symbolic threats to religious values spark sociocultural grievances; state violence and repression foster a sense of insecurity. The article proposes that Islamist groups are both principled and strategic actors, who may adopt violent rhetoric in response to political or sociocultural grievances, but who resort to violent tactics primarily out of a sense of insecurity. The quantitative examination of twenty-two Islamist groups from the Middle East confirms that exclusionary policies can spark violent rhetoric, whereas repression and threats to the physical integrity of a group increase the propensity toward violent behavior. However, when insecurity turns into disillusionment, groups can also move away from violence if they feel alienated from the public. The close investigation of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya in Egypt shows that the response to repression depends on the length of the conflict, the level of fragmentation within an organization, and public opinion.

Assembling street vending

Current scholarship on street vending in cities of the global south have mainly focused on street vendors and their politics of resistance against the state’s revanchist and exclusionary policies. This article draws from, and seeks to contribute to, this literature by considering the strategies of, and the shifting associations between, a broader range of agents – in addition to street vendors themselves – and the ways they shape and reshape street vending as a performed and diversely constituted practice. The article examines how the embedded relationships between agents including various state entities, shopkeepers and street vendors, as well as city buildings, infrastructure and policies, have been shaping geographically uneven and spatially differentiated forms, intensity and distribution of street vending in three different locations in Tehran. To make this argument, the article draws on assemblage thinking for framing the processes and trajectories through which urban street vending is being (re)territorialised and de-territorialised. The article demonstrates that moving beyond the dichotomised analysis of power relationships between the state and vendors matters for a better understanding of street vending practices as the local articulations of the fragmented, multi-scaled and multi-sited networks of associations that are stitched into different places in the city and shape diverse socio-material formations of street vending.