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Scientific articles

Berlin: Emergency shelters and contemporary border struggles

Researching the developments of present political economy must necessarily include investigating the tools of contemporary border regime. These are used for surveillance and control of populations in order to create new divisions of labour and enable extraction of rent by using peoples’ bodies. The article focuses on emergency shelters in Berlin, that is, on their function and ways in which the asylum seekers accommodated there spontaneously struggle against them. The research was done as a militant and cooperative work of the network Lager Mobilisation Network in Berlin’s district Wedding, which builds connections with people housed in the sports halls in the mentioned district. The author underlines that exhausting the aslyum seekers psychically is one of the strategies for filtering the ‘unwanted’ from the ‘wanted’, that is the ones that are interesting for the labour market. At the same time, the restriction of movement and limited access to civil rights confine asylum seekers in emergency shelters run by private companies, which seek profits on their account. Far from claiming that non-profit companies have a ‘better’ shelter administration, since the boundaries between them and profit-oriented companies are often blurred, the author rather speaks of new forms of anticolonial struggles by the people living inside. He understands these struggles as the struggles against the contemporary border regime in Germany and the EU and as a potential for building an inclusive society.

 


Article inside journal

Issue No. 264 - The Balkan Migratory Route: From Revolts on the Borders to the Striptease of Humanism
Source
Časopis za kritiko znanosti
Numbering
2016 , volume volume 44 , issue issue 264