Unruly subjects offers an intimate account of everyday solidarity and resistance against state-sanctioned violence and abandonment at Europe's borders. Set in Greece, it traces the struggles of 'illegalised' migrants confined in EU-funded camps, alongside the thousands of grassroots volunteers who have created self-organised infrastructures of care and support for people on the move. At the heart of Unruly subjects lie the encounters and creative solidarities between two central figures - refugees and volunteers, undesirable non-citizens and citizen-humanitarians - as they navigate, contest and bear witness to daily indignities and injustices. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research in the Aegean archipelago, it interrogates the ambivalent politics of these solidarities: how they transgress racialised logics of control enforced by camps, and how they are increasingly criminalised and silenced by the state. Rather than romanticising these struggles, Unruly Subjects composes a mosaic of resistance, marked by inevitable contradictions and compromises. Told through the testimonies, dilemmas, hopes and frustrations of those on the frontlines, the book makes a compelling case for recognising these lived experiments in solidarity - however fragile or fraught - as vital political interventions. With urgency and clarity, Unruly subjects reveals what is at stake - not only in Greece, but for all who seek to carve out more just and humane futures against Europe's increasingly hostile border regime.
Unruly Subjects : Migration, Solidarity and Resistance in Greece