Unruly Subjects

Unruly Subjects takes readers to the epicentre of Europe’s intensifying border struggles—the Aegean islands in Greece, where thousands of ‘undesirable’ migrants have been warehoused and violently abandoned in EU-funded refugee camps.

Drawing on nearly a decade of research, Ludek Stavinoha reveals the subterranean corners in which resistance brews and solidarity takes hold, tracing migrants’ everyday struggles for dignity and their rights, alongside grassroots volunteers who have built vital infrastructures of support. At the heart of the book are the creative, if precarious and ambivalent, solidarities forged between volunteers and refugees, citizens and non-citizens, as they unsettle racialised boundaries and logics of control, in defiance of state-sanctioned violence, criminalisation, and neglect.

Urgent and compelling, Unruly Subjects illuminates how people navigate and subvert Europe’s increasingly hostile border regime, and the alternative imaginaries of more just futures their struggles embody.