Impossible Futures? The Ambivalent Temporalities of Grassroots Humanitarian Action

‘There Is No Future in Humanitarianism’

Many scholars have problematised the ‘imaginary of emergency’ and the tropes of ‘crisis’ underlying much contemporary humanitarian action (Fassin, 2011; Nyers, 2006; Ticktin, 2011). By focusing on alleviating suffering in the ‘here and now’, humanitarians often fail to locate recent events within a longer chronology of man-made causes and effects (Malkki, 1995). As Ticktin (2016: 262) puts it: ‘With this temporal perspective, there is no way to understand events in a larger historical context, no time to think of the past or plan for the future: humanitarianism frames events as sudden and unpredictable’. Famine crises, to give but one example, are often portrayed and responded to as natural crises requiring immediate material responses, even though their deeper-lying causes are often structural, man-made and, above all, political (Calhoun, 2008). And in the context of displacement, migration is often framed as a ‘crisis’ that opens a window of opportunity for governments to pass policy reforms that limit migrants’ rights (Calhoun, 2008). Forced migrants in particular have been widely described as being subjected to a temporal politics that puts their lives on hold. So while refugee camps are often initially conceived of as temporary, they often turn into protracted, urbanised spaces that separate its residents from their surrounding societies (Agier, 2011; Brun, 2010; Malkki, 1995).

In addition, encounters between humanitarians and recipients of aid are often characterised by a concern for recipients’ immediate, physical needs rather than their future aspirations and past trajectories. In ‘There Is No Future in Humanitarianism’, Cathrine Brun (2016) draws on Fassin’s useful distinction between biological and biographical lives to argue that actors offering aid tend to focus on recipients’ urgent, physical needs, rather than their context-dependent social lives. ‘Saving biological lives’, that is, ‘does not entail a future’ but immediate, material action. According to her, many people working professionally in humanitarian organisations feel ‘stuck’ in the present. And while Brun then goes on to show that there is hope for organising these encounters differently, she nevertheless concludes that partly due to the parameters of action determined by the state, ‘there is little room for thinking about futures in the current humanitarian system’ (ibid.: 394).

Other scholars have argued that a temporal focus on the present has become a defining feature of humanitarian action only in the 20th century. Craig Calhoun (2008) and Thomas Haskell (1985), for instance, have emphasised that humanitarian sentiments arose in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a broader movement that aimed to improve the fate of humanity. Ideas of a better future, characterised by a fundamental equality between human beings, have long guided humanitarians in a variety of sites and struggles: offering universal medical care to wounded soldiers, calls for the abolishment of slavery, colonial missionary work and philanthropy towards the poor in the North. As Calhoun (2008: 76) argues, ‘Humanitarianism took root in the modern world not as a response to war or “emergencies” but as part of an effort to remake the world so that it better served the interests of humanity’. In this sense, the ‘imaginary of emergency’ which came to dominate humanitarian discourses and actions in the (late) 20th century, has itself been a relatively recent, historically contingent phenomenon.

In the last few decades, humanitarian actors seem to have incorporated the future back into their modes of action. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for instance, has traditionally operated in and around refugee camps where they offer immediate medical services in a setting of crisis. Since the late 1990s, however, MSF has gradually expanded its horizon to include HIV treatments and advocacy for access to affordable drugs. This led the organisation not only to target different actors, such as pharmaceutical companies, states, trade agreements and laboratories, but also to expand its temporal horizon beyond the humanitarian present, and to adapt to the slower rhythms of research, policy-making and advocacy (Redfield, 2013). By expanding its temporal horizons, however, MSF also faced new tensions and dilemmas. Up until then, the organisation’s ethos had been firmly focused on medical relief in crisis settings, which required, above all, a quick and efficient system of mobility, logistics and project-based interventions. By including goals set in the future, the NGO needed to rethink its approach, its practical organisation and its political strategies. This involved a partial shift in political strategy from ‘denunciation’ (bearing witness to scenes of suffering, and denouncing the immediate actions of political actors) to ‘description’ (describing structural causes of epidemics and lack of access to affordable drugs) (Redfield, 2013).

This expanding of the temporal horizons of humanitarian action is a development that is by no means limited to MSF. Many humanitarian organisations have increasingly included long-term goals such as human rights, development, advocacy and resiliency into their work. In their historical review of the field, Barnett and Weiss (2008) argue that this has opened up a fundamental question for humanitarian actors: if they move their sphere of action, what distinguishes them from interest-driven actors like states, corporate lobby groups and non-profit advocacy groups? In other words, from the very moment humanitarian actors shift focus from the present to the future, they risk losing part of their moral aura. Humanitarian actors often derive their moral legitimacy and power to act from responding, in a condition of emergency, to people’s immediate needs regardless of their identities. Focusing on social, political and legal change, however, often requires taking a firm stand against exploitative economics, rights-abuses or exclusionary social policies. As soon as humanitarians do so, they are forced to choose sides and stand in solidarity with those who are exploited (cf. Scott-Smith, 2016). And this, in turn, endangers the principle of neutrality (not taking sides), which these actors use to create a ‘humanitarian space’ where care can be provided to those in need, without interference of powerful political actors. By expanding their temporal horizons towards the future, in other words, humanitarians risk shrinking their space for action.

Political Action as Prefiguration

In contrast to works on humanitarianism, the literature on political activism and social movements often describes such forms of action as being inherently future-oriented. People are thought to be mobilised into collective political action by a discontent with the present, and a desire for social and/or political change in the near or distant future (Jasper, 1998; Milan, 2013). Rather than shrinking their space for action, their future orientation is even described as a necessary precondition in order to bring about transformations in a society. In his seminal book on collective action, Melucci (1996: 1) thus regards social movements as ‘prophets of the present’ who ‘speak before’: they announce the commencement of change and act as harbingers of yet-to-come political and social transitions. Adam (2010: 365) illustrates how social movements move the future from ‘the domain of fate into a realm of action potential’.

Unsurprisingly, then, there is a rich body of work analysing how visions of a better society guide collective political action and social movements. Valérie Fournier (2002: 192), for instance, proposes to read grassroots movements through the lens of utopianism. She argues that utopian thinking ‘undermines [the] dominant understanding of what is possible and opens up new conceptual spaces for imagining and practicing possible futures’. At the same time, she stresses the imperfect nature of utopia, in that it always resists closure and stasis and lives from constant movement and tension. According to Fournier, grassroots movements themselves embody these transformative functions of utopia through their self-governing and self-reliant forms of organisation.

The growing literature on practices and relationships of solidarity has also pointed out how imaginations of the present and the future conflate in the temporal horizons of collective forms of action. For instance, Alexander (2006: 3) argues that there is an important transcendental aspect to solidarity: ‘Solidarity is possible because people are oriented not only to the here and now but to the ideal, to the transcended, to what they hope will be everlasting’. Solidarities are said to be ‘inventive’ of new social relations and thus bring about future social and political possibilities in the present (see Featherstone, 2012: 6; Rakopoulos, 2016). According to these authors, solidarity bridges different temporalities in that it arises both out of present contradictions and certain images of the future.

In social movement studies, the conflation of present and future in collective action has been discussed more thoroughly through the lens of ‘prefigurative politics’. This concept refers to how activists attempt to embody, through their own organisational and individual practices, the social and political relations they hope to achieve in the future (Swain, 2019). Two different types of prefigurative action have been described in the literature, each with a slightly different temporal orientation. Activists rooted in the first type try to align their practices (their ‘means’) with the future they envisage (their ‘ends’) (ibid.). When movements strive towards peaceful social relations, for instance, they refrain from using violent or disruptive strategies to reach that goal. In this conception, the future radiates back onto the present and guides activists’ actions. This way of acting and thinking is generally associated with pacifist and religiously-inspired movements that are influenced by the Christian idea of ‘prefiguration’ (e.g. how ‘figures’ in the Old Testament anticipate the New Testament). However, this type of prefigurative action has been criticised by more radical activists and scholars, partly for its moderate attitude towards immediate change (Gordon, 2018), and partly because it requires a relatively coherent ideology of how the ideal future looks like (Swain, 2019).

The second type of prefigurative action is associated with neo-anarchist thought and with specific practices of anti-hierarchical organisation (e.g. consensus-based decision-making) (Gordon, 2018). Rather than ‘patiently building for the future’ (Holloway, 2010 in Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero, 2018: 4), these activists put more emphasis on immediate social and political change. Processes of decision-making and community-building (‘means’) are seen as a goal in itself (‘end’), which can generate alternative futures that are yet to be determined (Gordon, 2018; Swain, 2019). This approach thus ‘collapses the temporal distance between the struggle and the goal’ (Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero, 2018: 4). It has therefore been termed a ‘presentist prefiguration’, as it ‘privileges the immediate’ and ‘projects the present into the future’, rather than the other way round (ibid.).

This type of prefigurative action in particular has been criticised for focusing too much on their own practices which, if not accompanied with strategies to create broader social and political change, renders them indistinguishable from counter-cultural or lifestyle projects (Swain, 2019; Wagner-Pacifici and Ruggero, 2018; Yates, 2015). In that case, a strong focus on the immediate present may distract their attention from broader changes in the future. This might also be the case with more explicitly political grassroots initiatives supporting migrants. Scholars have recently shown how the rise of repressive migration policies has pressured activists into alleviating migrants’ immediate needs in the present, rather than working towards a different future. Due to the perpetuated ‘crisis’ in Greece, for instance, the anarchist ‘solidarian’ movement has been drawn into a gift-giving logic which they had long considered a taboo (Rozakou, 2016). Similarly, in a recent edited collection by Donatella della Porta (2018), several contributions have pointed out how more explicitly political collectives have expanded their repertoire of action to include forms of ad-hoc support as ‘direct social action’ (Zamponi, 2018). Both of these possible implications, however, would complicate the clear-cut distinctions between the supposedly opposite temporal horizons of humanitarian and political action (see della Porta and Steinhilper, forthcoming).

Taken together, a simultaneous focus on the present and the future has often been discussed as a risk, potentially shrinking the power to intervene for both humanitarian and political actors. While the former risk losing their moral aura deriving from their principle to ‘not take sides’ by a focus on the future, the latter risk losing their ability to work towards long-term changes by addressing the needs of the present. Yet, we have also scrutinised works that have provided a more optimistic reading of a conflating relationship between present-oriented and future-oriented action. It might offer a chance for humanitarians not to unwillingly slide into the power dynamics at play. More explicitly political actors might derive a more powerful stance by enacting possible alternatives already in the present. In the remainder of this article, we show how grassroots initiatives supporting migrants in Belgium and Germany navigate this thin line between risks and opportunities arising from their simultaneous focus on the present and the future.

Disrupting the Present

Many of the volunteers we have worked with started their commitment in response to the images of a so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ that circulated widely in the media in the summer months of 2015 (cf. Karakayali and Kleist, 2016). Although they had been primarily mobilised by a humanitarian incentive to provide for the basic needs of suffering asylum seekers and to tackle the perceived emergency situation, many also engaged more critically with long-term political and legal structures. In Germany, commentators argued that the migration summer and its relatively welcoming attitude towards migrants – epitomised by chancellor Angela Merkel’s ‘Wir schaffen das’ – was followed by a ‘long autumn of restrictions’ (cf. Schwiertz and Ratfisch, 2016). For instance, the German NGO Pro Asyl published numerous press statements that raised awareness for the drastic cutbacks in the rights of migrants and asylum seekers since late 2015, such as the rigorous enforcement of deportation orders or the classification of further ‘safe countries of origin’ (e.g. Pro Asyl, 2017).

Many of the German volunteers with whom the second author of this paper has conducted research with and who had started their commitment amidst an ostensible German ‘Welcome Culture’ in 2015 did not hesitate to openly disrupt such policy changes (Fleischmann, 2017). Most tellingly, they developed a repertoire of actions seeking to counteract and interrupt the enforcement of deportations. In the course of their commitment, some volunteers also built personal ties to asylum seekers who originated from countries with low chances of recognition, such as Afghanistan or sub-Saharan African countries. If their beneficiaries’ asylum application was eventually turned down, they frequently considered this decision as unjust, blaming the authorities for counteracting their volunteering activities and sending asylum seekers back to unsafe environments. We witnessed many cases in which volunteers did not accept such decisions and actively interrupted them in order to change the prescribed future for either the affected individual or for all people originating from a certain country of origin (cf. Hinger et al., 2018).

In Belgium, the largest grassroots initiatives were mobilised by a humanitarian imperative and by a more political reaction to hostile migration policies (Vandevoordt and Verschraegen, 2019). In Brussels, for instance, the Plateforme Citoyenne organised counter-marauds to disrupt police raids on so-called ‘transit migrants’. In January 2018, the Plateforme received an anonymous tip about a planned police raid in Maximilian Park. In consequence, it called upon its volunteers and supporters to help their ‘friends’ during the action. By the time the police arrived, all migrants had already left the area. In their place, more than 3000 citizens formed a human chain around the Park. These counter-marauds were then repeated several times over the next few months (Vandevoordt, 2019b; Vandevoordt, forthcoming).

Summing up, in different contexts, grassroots initiatives in both Germany and Belgium have engaged in more disruptive actions seeking to break with the present status quo, while enforcing a different alternative – thus seeking to shorten the distance between present and future.

Re-scaling Policy Change

Quite often, the grassroots initiatives we have worked with felt unable to influence national policies, complaining about how their demands for change were ‘not being heard’ by their governments. In order to manoeuvre themselves out of situations in which they felt ‘stuck’ in the present, grassroots initiatives have tried to re-scale their actions and demands towards different levels of policy-making, from municipalities to the European Union. They have done so by either scaling down or by scaling up their claims. By ‘scale’, we mean the spatial level of policy-making. In order to insert change towards their desired future, some grassroots initiatives have thus shifted by directing their demands towards levels of policy-making other than the national government.

The strategy of scaling down points to the role cities and municipalities can play in promoting solidarity (Agustín and Jørgensen, 2019; Bauder, 2017; Mayer, 2018). In Belgium, the Plateforme has tried to advocate with the Federal government to establish a reception and orientation centre for so-called ‘transit-migrants’. As the Federal government – who has the formal competence over asylum and migration in Belgium – continued its repressive approach, however, the Plateforme successfully negotiated with local governance levels. In December 2017, the Plateforme attracted enough funds from the Region of Brussels, the City of Brussels and some of Brussels’ 19 municipalities to establish their own collective reception centre, where migrants received shelter, food and legal information, to open up a humanitarian hub near the Maximilian Park, which it runs together with Médecins sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde. As we have detailed elsewhere, the city of Brussels thus had a crucial impact on the Plateforme’s ability to expand (Vandevoordt, 2019a).

The Plateforme is by far not the only case that successfully shifted scales to local levels of governance. While the ‘welcoming network’ in Flanders has been unsuccessful to advocate with the Flemish government, some of its local groups have cooperated closely with local municipalities, and, in some cases, were quite successful in influencing their policies (ibid.). Many of the German grassroots initiatives formed in direct cooperation with municipalities and continued to work closely together with them over time (Fleischmann, 2019). In some cases, this entanglement undermined the ability of volunteers to act independently and to also take a critical stance towards local authorities. However, it also opened up more direct possibilities for grassroots initiatives to make their criticisms and demands for a better future heard, for instance, through the regular exchange meetings (so-called Runde Tische) that became established in many municipalities in the course of 2015 and brought together a diverse set of local actors involved in the reception of asylum seekers. Our fieldwork indicated that volunteers often proved to have a strong voice in these settings, sometimes being able to directly influence the decisions of municipalities to their advantage.

Lastly, we also came across several instances, in which local grassroots initiatives were scaling up in order to bring about changes towards their desired future. By this, we mean that they strategically joined efforts with initiatives in other regions or countries, in order to build (transnational) alliances that had a wider outreach. Works on migrant activism and urban solidarities have illustrated how collectives and urban governments have forged transnational alliances and networks in order to speak with a louder voice (Alcalde and Portos, 2018; Heimann et al., 2019; Steinhilper, 2018). In the German context, many local grassroots initiatives have recently begun to join greater networks. Since the notion of the German ‘Welcome Culture’ faded in the course of 2016, resulting in a sharp drop in media attention as well as a less appreciative stance by governmental actors, they have tried to make themselves more visible again. For instance, the Seebrücke (literal translation ‘sea bridge’) formed as an international alliance in 2018, taking actions for a future that guarantees safe passage for asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Since then, volunteers in numerous corners of Germany founded local Seebrücke offsprings. Many of them were able to join efforts with city councils or regional authorities in order to build ‘safe harbours’, declaring to receive asylum seekers who were saved from distress at sea in addition to those mandated by the federal government (Schwiertz and Steinhilper, forthcoming).

In sum, grassroots initiatives also tried to move their desired future closer to the present by re-scaling their actions and demands towards different levels of governance.

Prefiguring Social Solidarity

In the past year, something unbelievable happened: (. . .) When it became clear that state actors were not reacting adequately in order to provide the most basic necessities to the newcomers, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of established residents reacted spontaneously and, together with the refugees, built structures of solidarity and understanding (. . .) Beyond established institutions, a broad and transnational process emerged that pointed to a future society in which issues of fair distribution, belonging and social rights are redefined. (Welcome2Stay Conference 2016; own translation; emphasis added)

In early 2016, the Welcome2stay organising committee published a call for contributions, which circulated widely in social media. It called on ‘the movements of welcome, of solidarity, of migration and of antiracism’ (ibid.) to participate in a joint conference in Leipzig. As the above retrospection illustrates, the organisers of the conference rated the extraordinary willingness to support refugees in 2015 also as an enactment of a ‘future society’ characterised by a redefined vision of belonging, social rights and distribution of wealth. The future also played a guiding role at the conference itself, which gathered around 800 volunteers and activists from across the country for self-organised workshops, discussion groups, plenary talks and social activities. It served as a laboratory in order to jointly elaborate visions for a more egalitarian society and to discuss potentials for future joint actions, resulting, for instance, in a series of nation-wide action days.

This example aptly illustrates what we repeatedly witnessed during our fieldwork in Belgium and Germany: from the very beginning, many of the grassroots initiatives that formed in 2015 were also inspired by visions of a better society, trying to prefigure them through their activities in the present (Feischmidt and Zakariás, 2019). To many, this future society was characterised by mutual support, togetherness and hospitality no matter the cultural or national background of origin. This lived alternative also served as an antidote to the right-wing tendencies that continue to be on the rise throughout Europe. Through their immediate actions in support of migrants, they were thus not only responding to immediate needs but simultaneously counteracting hostile sentiments towards migrants and actively building a future alternative in the ‘here and now’.

We therefore believe that grassroots initiatives supporting migrants are also laboratories for experimenting with alternative socialities (cf. Yates, 2015), actively shaping and enacting visions of a more egalitarian and inclusive social order, while creating new ways of relating in migration societies. This chips in with the literature that has pointed out how exceptional emergency situations also inspire ‘exceptional acts of coming together’ (Anderson, 2017: 593). Such moments might mobilise collective forms of action aiming to build a different future and giving rise to new forms of belonging and togetherness (Anderson, 2017; Kleist and Jansen, 2016). Despite responding to the immediate needs of the present, we thus suggest that grassroots initiatives’ actions are often ‘prefiguratively’ enacting ‘concrete utopias’ (Gordon, 2018) beyond existing migration and asylum legislation and state-led migration governance.

One particular way in which they have done so, is by performing and expressing their solidarity with migrants towards a broader public of citizens, media and NGOs. One of the key discourses constantly produced by the Plateforme Citoyenne, for instance, is that they show through their actions that more humane, pragmatic alternatives to the Federal government’s repressive approach are perfectly possible. As the Federal government refused to open a collective centre for stranded migrants, the Plateforme has done so by itself, thereby showing that it is possible to organise in practice. In addition, on its closed Facebook groups, stories of suffering and solidarity are continuously circulated. The Plateforme’s volunteers and coordinators constantly refer to the ability of citizens, while blaming the government for doing nothing but increase migrants’ problems. Some of these stories, such as the example of a single woman in her 90s housing several migrants at her home, are then shared publicly and gathered onto a website called Perles d’Accueil (literally: ‘Pearls of Accommodation’).

All of these examples point to the fact that, by offering humanitarian support, these volunteers enact the solidarity that they feel is lacking from the Federal government, while actively illustrating ways to do so in the future.