ABSTRACT
This first ethnographic chapter gives an account of a cycle of migrant protests that emerged in 2012 in Germany as a response to the suicide of a resident of a communal asylum centre. When Mohammad Rahsepar took his own life, fellow residents mobilised in protest, and began to challenge in an antagonistic manner the laws, actors, and discourses that forced them into what they conceived as ‘non-citizenship’, a state of marginality and deportability. Referring to themselves as the ‘Non-Citizens’, the migrant activists staged their political campaigns in numerous demonstrations, occupations, and hunger strikes, demanding to be heard and seen as political subjects. Their uncompromising interventions posed a series of difficult questions, not only to (state) authorities but also to their supporters. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work and Citizenship Studies scholarship, this chapter conceptualises the Non-Citizen struggle as a form of migratory dissent and explores the question whether we can conceive of such a dissensual politics whose protagonists strive towards incorporation into the body of citizenship as, nonetheless, enacting a radical politics that counters the rationale and violence of the sovereign order.
