Performative Hybridity of Informal Initiatives Helping Refugees: A Way of Resistance

Abstract

The so-called “refugee crisis” has challenged establishment putting its capacities under question as the image of a chaotic situation prevailed over European Union and its member states intervention. Formal civil society and big transnational humanitarian institutions also became the target of the critics of a heterogeneous public. Present work argues that current forms of civil engagement, manifested for example in informal initiatives helping refugees, locate their efforts under an umbrella of decolonization of their own societies. Participants in informal initiatives produce with their actions a discourse of outrage, preferentially channelized through direct action approaches, which persecutes the creation of an emancipative alternative. In such a way, participants distance themselves from their societies of origin and came closer to the subaltern groups, such as those under the label “refugees”. Informal initiatives participants became, at least figuratively, the new “hybrids” in our society. A group of people figuratively localized between the oppressor forces and the subalterns. Far from essentialist conceptions of hybridity and aware of the critic literature at this respect the concept of hybridity is understood in performative terms. Present study attempts to describe the performance of hybridity by informal initiatives in a context of exercising dialectical power with other social actors, such as authorities as part as the oppressor forces; established civil society which does not seem to really challenge status quo; refugees as a forming subaltern group; and within themselves as part of two worlds full of contradictions and incongruences.