The Contested Solidarities of Refugee Support in Germany: Actions between Humanitarian Help and Political Activism

目的是将我的博士论文手稿作为一本专著在一家出版公司(Springer vs或Transcript)出版，以便将其发现提供给学术受众。本文调查了2015年夏季移民期间德国居民中出现的支持难民的做法。在这一点上，数千名移民在寻求庇护的过程中不定期地越过欧盟的外部边界，而抵达德国的寻求庇护者人数急剧增加。这一发展动员了史无前例数量的德国居民来“帮忙”。为了促进德国“欢迎文化”这一广为流传的概念，他们参与了志愿服务活动，并在该国许多角落发起了新的公民倡议，以支持难民。这本书分析了这些支持性做法是如何在(据称)非政治形式的人道主义援助和政治行动之间的矛盾空间中发展起来的。基于这些丰富的见解，该书展示了支持难民的做法总是与权力问题交织在一起，导致矛盾的、有时是意想不到的影响，从满足个人需求到共谋移民治理，再到在移民加剧的时代带来更具包容性的生活方式的政治可能性。换句话说，帮助难民是定位的，并回应了不同参与者和个人的想象和兴趣。分析起来，这本书发展了有争议的团结的概念。这一观点质疑了那些向难民提供帮助和支持的人的社会想象，并认为这些想象对于理解帮助难民的各种做法及其各种影响至关重要。从这一角度来看，该书有助于(A)从概念上理解社会人类学中的团结一词，并提供(B)对团结及其在移徙社会中的实践的有经验的理解。

The aim is to publish the manuscript of my PhD thesis as a monograph at a publishing company (Springer VS or Transcript) in Order to make its findings available to an academic audience. The dissertation investigates the practices in support of refugees that emerged among German residents in the migration summer of 2015. At this point in time, thousands of migrants crossed the external borders of the European Union irregularly in their search for asylum, while the numbers of asylum seekers arriving in Germany increased sharply. This development mobilized an unprecedented number of German residents to "help". Aiming to contribute to the widely circulating notion of a German "Welcome Culture", they engaged in volunteering practices and founded new citizens' initiatives in support of refugees in numerous Corners of the country. The book analyses how these supportive practices developed in an ambivalent space between (supposedly) `apolitical' forms of humanitarian help and political activism.Empirically, the book builds an 20 months of ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork with various actors involved in the reception of asylum seekers in Southern Germany. Building an these rich insights, the book shows how practices in support of refugees are always intertwined with questions of power, leading to ambivalent, at times unintended effects ranging from a fulfilment of personal needs to a complicity in the governance of migration to political possibilities to bring about more inclusive ways of living-together in an age of intensified migration. In other words, helping refugees is situated and responds to the imaginaries and interests of different actors and individuals involved.Analytically, the book develops the concept of Contested Solidarities. This perspective interrogates the social imaginaries of those who offered help and support to refugees and argues that they are central to understanding the manifold practices of helping refugees and their diverse effects. With this perspective, the book contributes to (a) the conceptual understanding of the term solidarity in social anthropology and provides (b) an empirically grounded understanding of solidarity and its practices in migration societies.