Postmigrant Societies in Times of Polarisation: Agency, Belonging and Resilience

ABSTRACT In the current socio‐political landscape of Central Europe, the ‘postmigration’ condition is marked by tensions between the structural recognition of migration and intensifying communicative polarisation, politically mobilised by nativist movements. This article argues that the analytical paradigms of both ‘integration’ and, more recently, ‘inclusion’ used in population geography and migration studies, are inadequate for capturing the complex, conflictual dynamics of these societies. Although ‘inclusion’ ostensibly aims to promote social cohesion, like ‘integration’ it often operates as a top‐down governance strategy that reinforces entrenched power relations, reproduces colonial hierarchies, and frames migrants as passive subjects marked by deficit. Drawing on the socio‐spatial contexts of Germany and Austria, we propose a conceptual shift towards a tripartite framework of agency , belonging , and resilience . Synthesising de Haas's aspirations‐capabilities model, Katz's topography of resistance, and Bork‐Hüffer et al.'s dialectics of space and agency, we reconceptualise differently positioned populations in postmigrant societies as political subjects actively navigating uneven power geometries. We distinguish between acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance, showing how diverse population groups – from the multi‐generational ‘postmigrant generation’ to newly arrived refugees – mobilise practices of survival, negotiation, creation, and transformation to modify and ‘make’ space. We argue that polarisation should not be understood as an external shock, but as a communicative intensification and political mobilisation of ongoing negotiations over plurality – albeit with tangible consequences for differently positioned populations. Addressing these consequences requires moving beyond a passive logic of inclusion toward engagement with the active spatial politics of refusal and ‘worlding’. In doing so, the article contributes to a postmigrant population geography that foregrounds the active spatial politics through which differently positioned groups negotiate, contest, and remake plural societies.