ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses migrant protests in Idomeni, Greece, triggered by the closure of the EU borders in the summer of 2015 and argues that their protests, although often going against existing positive law, should not be conceived as lawless. From a normative perspective the migrants’ claims require the acknowledgement and extension of the notion of citizenship to a cosmopolitan notion of contestatory citizenship. Thus the chapter describes the protests as a cosmopolitan contestatory citizenship, based on a neo-republican account of freedom as non-domination. Cosmopolitanism is not an added dimension to acts of contestation of border control: migrants’ protests are inherently cosmopolitan since they challenge the narrow statist authority of the ‘right to exclude’ and imagine new ways of being in the world free from domination.