Negotiating Borders through a Politics of Scale: Municipalities and Urban Civil Society Initiatives in the Contested Field of Migration

In contrast to the increasingly repressive migration policies at national and supranational scales, new pro-migrant policies, networks, and practices of support have been initiated at the local scale. In numerous European municipalities, political visions and concrete experiences of inclusive approaches in the field of migration have emerged in recent years that combine questions of the right to global freedom of movement and social rights. While numerous studies have examined these “politics of scale” and scale-making at the local level in different places, this forum aims to further these debates by reflecting the entanglement of social movements and civil society organisations with the local municipalities across Europe and by bringing the analyses and experiences of diverse initiatives into discussion. We therefore examine practices, relations and institutions of local migration politics that re-negotiate and bypass national and supranational borders at local scales, but also create new borders and boundaries in these processes. With this multidisciplinary forum, we aim at advancing empirical analysis as well as theoretical debates in the wider field of migration and geopolitics. Each contribution deals with a concrete empirical case of local politics and the challenges that emerge in these contexts – focusing on European “host societies” in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, and Germany – as well as with analytical concepts that are key to understanding these cases and to linking them to broader societal structures and dynamics.