Grassroots responses to mass migration in Europe : Introduction

Abstract

Whereas migration continuously is taking place, the events of the second half of the year 2015 and the first months of 2016 still mark a historical exception when over million refugee-migrants made their way across the different layers of the European border regime, marching along motorways, demanding again and again to cross the next border, and finally starting to arrive in masses at Central European cities. The international situation with the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war in the backyard of Europe had led to a rise in numbers of displaced and fleeing persons from 2011 onwards. The national and EU reception infrastructure and EU asylum system, as formulated within the framework of the CEAS (Common European Asylum System), were not prepared to accommodate these numbers of people seeking protection, shelter and security in a decent way as stipulated in international, European and national law. The 'long summer of migration, ' as these months were labelled in critical migration studies (Kasparek & Speer, 2016), led to a temporal suspension of the EU and nation-state border and migration control regime and a massive 'migration reception crisis' across the continent. While there was general uncertainty over what kind of 'crisis' that was and who it belonged to, as Rajaram (2016) notes in his 'Introduction' to a special issue of Intersections. East