This contribution centers refugees as political actors and knowledge producers. Refugees and asylum seekers challenge dominant perceptions of them as mere, apolitical beings, as dangerous individuals, or as exploitable labor. They accomplish this by creating their own counter-knowledge, in which they narrate a different story about themselves. Refugees and asylum seekers display their knowledge by using art, humor, and their embodied experiences and demonstrate that they are political beings, builders of peace, and teachers of the host society rather than its students; they refuse to be depoliticized. The findings of the analysis are drawn from the author’s book “Making Refugees’ Political Agency Visible. Practices of the Subject”.
In the 2025 coalition agreement between the CDU, CSU, and SPD, we read: “We will organize and control migration and effectively push back irregular migration. This is why, among other things, we will explicitly include the goal of ‘limiting’ migration in the Residence Act in addition to ‘controlling’ it.” (p. 92). The quote exemplifies the dominant thinking on (forced) migration as something that must be governed and controlled, leaving no space for considering the political agency of refugees. My work is interested in refugees’ and asylum seekers’ agency beyond citizenship and beyond organized political protest. Political agency can take on many more forms and functions than this contribution can discuss, and I am interested here in one particular understanding of political agency, namely as the ability to create meaning through practices: Refugees are political actors because they enact and disrupt ideas of refugeehood. This is an everyday, individual, yet socially constituted agency. It is political because it challenges what is thinkable (and doable) about forced migration. My understanding aligns with postcolonial work on suppressed people’s knowledge as a crucial site of resistance and with recent literature on refugees’ political agency as world-building and mundane practices. The ways in which especially Western societies know refugees follow patterns that repeat themselves in different historical and geographic contexts. In my book, I find that three dominant ideas that refugees face in their individual lives are the notion of refugees as pitiable and barely human life, as dangerous, and as only useful as laborers. They deny that refugees and asylum seekers have political rights, i.e., rights to make political demands and participate in political life: They are portrayed as too lacking, in capacities or morals, to be able to contribute to the political community. If we fall into the same patterns repeatedly, is there potential for disrupting these ideas? In ethnographic research conducted in Berlin and Vienna in 2019 and 2020, I found there is indeed still space for people labelled refugees and asylum seekers to challenge these entrenched knowledges and to enact themselves as political beings. To find out how refugees enact and challenge powerful discourses about what a “refugee” is, I conducted fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers at consultation offices, German and integration courses, accommodations, theater projects, a non-governmental organization, and a federal courtroom in Vienna. I conducted participant observation and 36 interviews with 39 people labeled “refugees” and “asylum seekers” from Afghanistan, the Republic of Guinea, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
No such thing as an apolitical body
The idea of refugees as pitiable and barely human has been reproduced numerous times throughout history, including in the context of colonialism: It feeds on racist ideas that dehumanize any Other and reduce them to bare biological beings, bare bodies, who only have biological needs and no political stance. This construction is powerful in part because it underlies the asylum system itself, where people must, to a certain degree, prove that they are “needy” enough to deserve protection. People seeking asylum must rely on the idea of being helpless in this sense. In analyzing how my interlocutors challenge this idea, I draw on the concept of political agency as meaning-making agency, as explained above. For example, my interlocutors presented their knowledge about alternative meanings of refugeehood, namely, strength and even heroism. To flee requires perseverance, a stark contrast to the idea of helplessness. Refugees and asylum seekers know this because they have been through it, but also because they can draw on knowledge about refugees obtained before their own flight. The idea that refugees are weak and helpless is a particular Western-centric knowledge that does not hold in other cultural and geographic contexts, as one Berlin-based artist stressed: “In Syria, these people are defined like that: […] This is a Palestinian refugee, and they have no fear”. The notion of the fearless refugee is not somehow ‘better’ than that of the weak one, but this is to highlight how this interlocutor challenged the universality of the helplessness idea. The quote emerged when the Syrian voiced discontent with being perceived as helpless and contrasted this with his previous understanding of refugeehood. My interlocutors also challenged the idea of the apolitical body. This involved introducing an altogether different type of knowledge, namely, a political knowledge ingrained in the body: Embodied experiences like displacement and racialization constitute forms of political knowledge, revealing how power is inscribed onto the body as “the inscribed surface of events” (p. 148). In an activist theater in Berlin, actors accessed this knowledge through theatrical practices like the Body as Archive. The body contains knowledge about the political realities of flight, and this is made visible through theatrical performances: When a person has experienced discrimination in their body, they can recreate this for the audience. People may also express that their lives have become divided between places and times: One actor described that his feet were on the shores of the Gaza Strip, while his head was in an asylum hearing in Germany. In expressing this corporal knowledge, he showed that the body is always already politically marked by its past experiences. His statement is political because the body makes visible the consequences of displacement and asylum procedures.
Some interlocutors also mobilized different knowledges about being “just human”, knowledges that draw on „cosmopolitanism from below“:, Being human is what we all have in common, citizens and non-citizens alike: We all have “the same blood color”, as a Vienna-based musician from Syria said. This alternative knowledge about being in unity as humans challenges the idea that the biological dimension of humanness is exclusive to refugees: We all have bodies, but they are always political. It is not only refugees who are ever regarded in biological terms, but in their case, racist discourses dehumanize them by reducing them to mere biology. Yet, all human bodies are more than biological organisms, but shaped by society and politics. The life histories of refugees especially powerfully illustrate how bodies are politically inscribed by past experiences.
Artful builders of peace
Another dominant idea about refugees and asylum seekers is that they are criminals, terrorists, or overall uncontrollable. Male refugees and asylum seekers are understood as dangerous, and female refugees are seen as victims of patriarchal oppression. How do refugees navigate this perception? First, rather than disturbing the peace, during my fieldwork I encountered people whose flight experience had made them more skilled as peacebuilders. Flight is not a causal or correlative means to become better peacebuilders (see recent research on how refugees make sense of and build peace), but the people I encountered showed how their intercultural skills acquired during the flight had equipped them with practical, experienced knowledge about being at peace with one another. Various refugee-led initiatives I encountered were explicitly directed at “building bridges,” disseminating their intercultural knowledge within and beyond their communities. Other methods of building stories of peace often involved art and/or humor. Activists used music, theater, and even clothing design to tell stories of peaceful coexistence. Humor is essential to point out the absurdity of the criminality idea, which paints refugees as “wild people” incapable of self-control (a caricature of such a “wild man” featured prominently in a theater piece in Berlin). In interviews and in their art, my interlocutors refused to be criminalized and pointed out who, in their perspectives, are the actual criminals, namely the people they fled from and the Western governments enabling their crimes through weapons exports. A theater collective in Berlin also challenged the victimization of refugee women through art and humor: One scene of their piece parodies a cooking show starring two women. One actress, a German blonde, embodies traditional gender roles, while the other, a Syrian Kurdish woman, represents a modern, career-focused person who dislikes cooking. They argue about gender roles, but ultimately unite for abortion legalization in Germany. The portrayal sarcastically contrasts the modern, independent refugee woman with the traditional German character; that they agree, in the end, can be read as a call for intersectional alliances that insists that reproductive justice must account for overlapping forms of oppression rather than assuming a singular, homogeneous experience of womanhood. The performers refuse the notion that they are dangerous, and enact themselves as humorous observers of the hypocrisies of their host society.
Teachers, not students
The idea of refugees being only useful as laborers is more ambivalent than the other two: Being able to work was important for most of my interlocutors to lead independent lives. However, it is often intertwined with exploitative practices as refugees are frequently not allowed into the regular labor market. Many people I met during my fieldwork were stuck in a perpetual student mode, obligated to attend more and more labor market integration courses and trainings rather than being admitted to work. . Some interlocutors perceived this as infantilizing and some practices I observed at the courses, such as calling students by the informal “Du” while teachers insisted on the formal “Sie”, treated attendees more like children rather than adults. Often people could not work in their profession of choice because of the non-recognition of their qualifications. More recent policies, such as the “Job Turbo”, have, however, aimed at enabling a faster labor market access.
Many people I met contested both their exploitation and infantilization. As an example, take a Vienna-based activist from Pakistan. He told me “I use international laws [,not national laws]”,as a framework to guide his self-understanding and everyday actions, including in the workplace, thereby rejecting the exceptional status imposed on him by national regulations. This use of laws that not (yet) in effect for oneself is a „practice of taking rights“. It questions who has rights and who does not, and how this difference is made along lines of (non)citizenship. Some people also challenged their perpetual schooling, and in so doing, disrupted the ideas about who is ignorant and who is knowledgeable. Some participants of language courses or clients of consultation offices used their extraordinary skills in terms of language, interculturality, and the asylum system to enact themselves as teachers when teachers or consultants knew less than them: When a language teacher in Berlin could not describe a grammatical phenomenon in the pupils’ native language, a woman fluent in Persian essentially took over the class. The reversal of roles also played out in my relationship with my interlocutors, who challenged my position both as a privileged German and a supposedly knowledgeable researcher. Again, humor was crucial. For example, I witnessed that people labelled refugee and asylum seekers were constantly treated as “good students” through (however well-meant) compliments on their language skills. Some research participants reflected this by mockingly praising my German. They made me feel how condescending it is to be repeatedly reminded that you are not quite a part of the host society yet, and that others can judge you. My conversation partners also flipped the researcher-researched dynamic when they tested me rather than simply having their insights extracted. Frustrated with explaining what being a refugee means, one of the Berlin-based actors from asked me, “How will you define ‘refugee’?” This left me grappling to formulate a satisfactory answer and made me the student in this situation. While my work was focused on everyday challenges, more public examples are Firas Alshater’s Zukar videos. He recounts being pushed onto Hartz IV instead of being allowed to work, even joking about trying prostitution and mockingly shows that some refugees are more knowledgeable about German customs, such as Easter or waste separation, than Germans themselves, exposing the patronizing idea of refugees as students.
New knowledge from the margins
Dominant ideas about refugees and asylum seekers affect what are considered legitimate ways of treating them (as barely human, or potential criminals, or useless unless they contribute economically). As mentioned above, these ideas represent a finite number of perceptions repeated throughout history. What they have in common is, first, that they produce unresolvable tensions between the preferred degree of proximity and distance of refugees: Refugees and asylum seekers become „immanent outsiders“ who are at once expected to integrate and at the same time kept at a distance from the host society. Second, the contradictions still achieve one common outcome: They depoliticize refugees and their agency: Refugees and asylum seekers are either too barely human, too dangerous, or too childlike to have any political rights. When people known as refugees challenge the dominant knowledge about them, they challenge being suspended in the in-between and demand to be treated normally while being different: They point to contributions they can make to a host society precisely by bringing something new to it. This, in turn, challenges our understanding of societal and political organization, including where boundaries are established: It blurs the lines between insider and outsider and questions how we define one or the other. The challenging interventions press host societies to reconsider the criteria for participation in the political community. By expressing their counter-knowledge, refugees and asylum seekers broaden the space of what is thinkable about how we know refugees, the asylum system, and the political world order at large.
Harbisch, Amelie. Refugees as political actors: counter-knowledge and the refusal to be depoliticized. Forced Migration Studies Blog, 03 December 2025, https://fluchtforschung.net/refugees-as-political-actors-counter-knowledge-and-the-refusal-to-be-depoliticized/, DOI: 10.59350/srs1f-6h377.