ABSTRACT
Migrant protests and actions such as Sans-Papiers, No One Is Illegal, No Borders, Vienna Refugee Protests, A Day Without Us marches, and other migrant protests engage in public demonstrations and occupy public/symbolic places. At the same time, diverse forms of migrant struggles take place in less publicly visible spaces or even by avoiding the dominant regimes of visibility through escape, falsification of papers, destruction of identity documents, destruction of fingertips to avoid biometrical identification, and other forms of everyday resistance by which migrants render themselves unclassifiable, imperceptible, and unidentifiable. This chapter examines this ‘invisible’ resistance, its implications for the state’s exercise of sovereignty, and its cosmopolitan potential, described as “taking back the means of legitimate movement,” “tying the hands of the state,” “creating a new ontology,” and “working towards the shipwreck of the state.” Unlike a cosmopolitanism from above that requires a public sphere and transparency, a cosmopolitanism from below can have its resource in the invisibility of certain actions, especially because invisibility leads to the event of visible/public protest.
