Unruly Subjects - by Ludek Stavinoha (Hardcover)

About the Book

Unruly Subjects unravels how everyday solidarity, resistance, and violent abandonment intersect at Europe's borders. Through long-term ethnographic research in Greece, it explores the creative, yet ambivalent solidarities between 'illegalised' migrants incarcerated in camps and the grassroots volunteers who support them.

Book Synopsis

Unruly Subjects takes readers to the epicentre of Europe's intensifying border struggles--the Aegean islands in Greece, where thousands of 'undesirable' migrants have been warehoused and violently abandoned in EU-funded refugee camps.

Drawing on nearly a decade of research, Ludek Stavinoha reveals the subterranean corners in which resistance brews and solidarity takes hold, tracing migrants' everyday struggles for dignity and their rights, alongside grassroots volunteers who have built vital infrastructures of support. At the heart of the book are the creative, if precarious and ambivalent, solidarities forged between volunteers and refugees, citizens and non-citizens, as they unsettle racialised boundaries and logics of control, in defiance of state-sanctioned violence, criminalisation, and neglect.

Urgent and compelling, Unruly Subjects illuminates how people navigate and subvert Europe's increasingly hostile border regime, and the alternative imaginaries of more just futures their struggles embody.

From the Back Cover

Unruly subjects offers an intimate account of everyday solidarity and resistance against state-sanctioned violence and abandonment at Europe's borders. Set in Greece, it traces the struggles of 'illegalised' migrants confined in EU-funded camps, alongside the thousands of grassroots volunteers who have created self-organised infrastructures of care and support for people on the move.

At the heart of Unruly subjects lie the encounters and creative solidarities between two central figures - refugees and volunteers, undesirable non-citizens and citizen-humanitarians - as they navigate, contest and bear witness to daily indignities and injustices. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research in the Aegean archipelago, it interrogates the ambivalent politics of these solidarities: how they transgress racialised logics of control enforced by camps, and how they are increasingly criminalised and silenced by the state.

Rather than romanticising these struggles, Unruly Subjects composes a mosaic of resistance, marked by inevitable contradictions and compromises. Told through the testimonies, dilemmas, hopes and frustrations of those on the frontlines, the book makes a compelling case for recognising these lived experiments in solidarity - however fragile or fraught - as vital political interventions.

With urgency and clarity, Unruly subjects reveals what is at stake - not only in Greece, but for all who seek to carve out more just and humane futures against Europe's increasingly hostile border regime.

About the Author

Dr Ludek Stavinoha is Associate Professor in Media and Global Development at the University of East Anglia