Happy New Year to all our friends, colleagues and members! We hope the break or change in routine have left you energised for 2026. The last year has been bleak for so many. The Gaza horror, needless (and nameless) deaths in the Mediterranean and Channel, physical, legislative and verbal attacks on migrants, including refugees, are just some of the scars carried by 2025.
These injustices impact on our communities in multiple ways, and shape the society and culture we live in. At MMB we support the work you do ‘that contributes to creating a more just world’. Critical spaces for reflection and debate are precious and must be preserved.
Together, what did we manage to do last year?
We were particularly proud to have published a Bristol University Press edited collectionRethinking Migration. The volume showcases our Bristol Approach – conceptual, critical and creative – and you can read more about it and download it for free here.
Earlier in the year we produced the MMB podcast, Migration Unboxed, which has now had more than 2,000 downloads! All five episodes are available, with the final one exploring MMB’s radically interdisciplinary take on migration and mobility studies. We continue to regularly publish on the MMB blog with recent posts on digital monitoring, SIM card artworks, vigilante ‘justice’ in South Africa, and work within the UK asylum system.
In Bristol city we’ve continued to collaborate with ACH to run online webinars, most recently on environment and migration. In December, we participated in a great roundtable event discussing the theme of ‘Unstable Ground: Movement, Materiality and Transformation’, in relation to Spike’s current exhibitions by Nour Jaouda and Dan Lie. Lucy Donkin, Nariman Massoumi and Michael Malay gave interventions challenging conventional narratives of place, memory and identity, that were the subject of lively conversations with Spike Associates. We’re looking forward to more!
We also are building our international collaborations. As many of you know, we have enjoyed a very productive relationship with scholars in New York, facilitated by Benjamin Meaker grants and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship. We are delighted that the MMB/Multiple Mobilities Collective published a joint visual essay ‘On seeing crossings: Dover/Calais’ drawing on our experiences of visits to Dover/Calais. We also were pleased to strengthen our ties with UC Santa Cruz in the US and Linköping University in Sweden and to run a solidarity event on migration research and justice.
With all that behind us what is there to look forward to this year?
The MMB Blog series will continue, and we will aim to develop a series on narrative change in the coming months. On 13th January we are holding an event to respond to the government’s consultation on a ‘Fairer Path to Settlement’. Spoiler alert: it is anything but fair. We’d really encourage people to engage in this consultation. If you are not able to attend the event, it’s not too late to contribute responses. Even if you don’t have time to complete the form yourself, send your suggestions for things to add to the collective Bristol submission to Bridget by Friday 30th January.
We have several events coming up too starting with a joint event with Centre for Law and History, who have invited Duncan Wallace, from Melbourne to speak on the legal history of deportation on the 3rd February. And a regular film club will be restarted led by Nariman Massoumi, Dept. of Film and Television. Watch this space to hear about more and we look forward to working with you in 2026!
Debates on policy change mainly focus on argument, evidence, and institutional processes. While essential, they can often operate independently and within circles of power. The biases driving decisions and public attitudes shape a dominant narrative in policy demands that diminishes the voices of those affected by the policy. Antigone – International Migrants Day, performed at St Margaret’s House in London, offers a compelling example of how creative practice can intervene at this narrative level, particularly in debates around the rights of migrant domestic workers in the UK.
The performance was a part of a creative health and theatre activism project led by Cheryl Gallagher and Drashti Shah, with members of Waling Waling, a migrant domestic workers’ union. This production uses Antigone to engage with contemporary experiences of immigration control, undervalued labour, and resistance. From a governance perspective, the project’s significance lies not simply in its artistic form, but in how it reframes who is speaking, how they are seen, and what political claims become possible.
Waling Waling Drama Group’s Performance at the Omnibus Theatre in April 2025 Photograph by Drashti Shah
From Victimisation to Agency
Post Theresa May’s abolition of the domestic worker visa in 2012 and the growing hostile environment in the UK, migrant domestic workers were categorised as victims – a narrative trap that focuses on rescuing from abuse over empowering the worker with their rights. Scholar Bridget Anderson constructively critiques the approach of categorising migrants as the good workers or the poor slaves. She argues that the Modern Slavery Act, 2015, essentially stripped away the rights that ensured the dignity of their labour under the domestic worker visa. While this act could benefit workers forced into labour, it fails those who arrived with legitimate work contracts but are still exploited, because their legal right to work has been taken away.
This dominant framing often reduces workers to passive subjects of protection rather than active participants in shaping their own futures. This has concrete implications: their demands for rights, autonomy, and structural reform can be sidelined.
Antigone – International Migrants Day disrupts this. On stage, migrant domestic workers represent themselves. The performance does not ask for sympathy alone, but for recognition of workers as decision-makers, organisers, and political actors. This shift matters because public legitimacy is a prerequisite for policy influence. However, the challenge of mobilising public influence can be a different battle. As Cheryl Gallacher, the Director of the Waling Waling Drama Project, notes, “Our attempt as theatre makers to engage the public, academia, government, and arts and culture organisations has been an intentional process. Our creative engagement is built on the ethos of building agency and respecting the immense campaigning experience Waling Waling brings. Their campaign secured the issuance of the domestic worker visa in 1998. They have lived this struggle and won before. Now, true to its commitment to restoring the visa and including domestic work in the Employment Rights Bill, Waling Waling’s stance has been strong and unwavering.”
Why Narrative Matters in Governance
From a public policy perspective, this project highlights the limits of purely technocratic approaches to change. Evidence can demonstrate harm, but cannot alone change how society values certain lives or forms of labour. Narrative, by contrast, shapes the meaning. It defines how problems are understood and whose perspectives matter.
By adapting a classical story, the performance creates an entry point for audiences who may not be familiar with the realities of migrant domestic work. At the same time, the reinterpretation challenges audiences to question the authority of laws that produce harm. It is deeply political: it asks who laws serve, who they exclude, and what forms of disobedience become necessary when legal frameworks deny dignity.
The Importance of Civic Space
Staging the performance in a community setting – followed by shared food and discussion – transforms theatre into a civic encounter. Audience members are not simply consumers of culture; they are participants in a collective moment of reflection.
This matters because civic space is increasingly constrained, particularly for migrant communities. Such cultural events create informal arenas where political ideas circulate, alliances form, and difficult conversations happen outside formal institutions. These spaces complement policy forums to sustain the social conditions that enable democratic engagement.
Extending this public engagement, the Waling Waling Drama Group performed Antigone for the newly formed Domestic Worker Branch at Unite, the Union. The event garnered huge support from Unite’s leadership, illustrating how changing the narrative can amplify voices within crucial political structures often distracted by competing priorities and the influence of dominant narratives.
Creative Practice as Building Long-Term Policy Infrastructure
It would be a mistake to evaluate Antigone – International Migrants Day solely in terms of immediate policy outcomes. Its contribution lies in changing how migrant domestic workers are seen – by audiences, allies, and potentially policymakers – thus strengthening the foundations for future advocacy.
Dr Manoj Dias-Abey highlighted the difficulty of measuring immediate policy outcomes during the December 16th post-performance panel. At this stage, inclusion in the Employment Rights Bill faces a challenge: the Government prefers to release a broad framework first, deferring specifics to amendments over the next two years. Therefore, a campaign like this, which builds on the groundwork laid since the 1990s and operates on a two-year advocacy timeline, cannot expect swift policy results.
Viviane Abayomi, the outgoing Vice-Chair of Waling Waling, also challenged this drawn-out approach. As she prepares for a long-term campaign battle, she argues that domestic workers’ past victories, including the 1990s campaign that secured the original visa, should be evidence enough for the Government to include domestic work in the Bill now, without requiring another two-year lobbying effort for amendments.
Conclusion
Antigone – International Migrants Day demonstrates that political agency is not only asserted through legislation or lobbying, but also through cultural expression. By reclaiming narrative control and occupying public space, migrant domestic workers are reshaping policy conversations.
For those concerned with migration governance, labour rights, or democratic participation, this project reminds us that policy change begins long before a bill is drafted. It begins with who we listen to, how we understand their stories, and whether we recognise them as political equals.
About the Authors:
Ravi Jaiswal is an alumnus of the MA Governance, Development and Public Policy, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, and currently works at the Brighton and Hove City Council as the Community Safety Caseworker.
Nikita is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE, where her work focuses on social mobility and social inequalities.
In August 2022, a group of men and women gathered at the entrance of Kalafong Hospital in Atteridgeville, a township near Pretoria, South Africa. They were not patients, nor were they staff. They were members of Operation Dudula (hereafter Dudula), a vigilante movement that has grown in visibility over the last three years. Their objective was simple, if chilling: to block access to health care for anyone whom they suspected of being a foreign national (or immigrant) based on the colour of their skin or the language that they spoke. Patients were turned away, accused of ‘stealing’ resources. In some cases, healthcare workers themselves were intimidated for treating immigrants.
This spectacle of exclusion has not ended. In 2025, Dudula (which loosely means to ‘push back’, ‘drive back’ or ‘push out’ in the local Zulu language) extended its activities to dozens of clinics across Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. As the group explained in a public statement: ‘Our goal is clear, to protect our people’s rights and ensure public services prioritise South Africans first.’ Later, the movement targeted schools, delivering letters to principals in Soweto that warned against enrolling undocumented children. The vigilante group’s de facto leader, Zandile Dabula, was even more explicit: ‘We’re going to be stationed at schools, and no foreign child will be allowed to attend a public school.’
What began as sporadic harassment has hardened into a strategy, to recast public services as checkpoints of belonging. Hospitals and school gates have become borders. Citizens and non-citizens are separated not by officials in uniforms but by self-appointed vigilantes.
Members of Operation Dudula stage a protest against immigrants in Gauteng Province, November 2025 (image: Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism).
From everyday bordering to vigilante bordering
Migration scholars describe ‘everyday bordering’ (Yuval-Davis et al. 2018) as the dispersal of immigration control into daily life, from landlords checking passports to nurses being asked to check who is entitled to care. Dudula takes this dynamic a step further.
The movement’s modus operandi amounts to what I call vigilante bordering, an overt and extra-legal enforcement of access by organised non-state actors who appropriate the logics of the border and re-stage them in ordinary sites. Unlike bureaucratic bordering, which disperses the state’s authority into welfare and work, vigilante bordering relies on coercion, intimidation and public spectacle to impose exclusionary rules of access. This often means operating alongside and sometimes against the law. The concept entails mobilising vigilantism to create everyday ‘border posts’ that confront and, in practice, curtail constitutional guarantees.
Dudula illustrates this phenomenon vividly. Hospitals and schools, spaces meant to symbolise universal rights, are re-imagined as checkpoints. Vigilantes patrol entry, scrutinise bodies and determine belonging. In so doing, they reproduce the aesthetics of border control while producing new geographies of exclusion.
Vigilante mobilisation and the making of vigilante borders
Operation Dudula did not appear from nowhere. It is a culmination of long-standing frustrations by South Africans with unemployment, inequality and weak service delivery, which are frequently channelled into xenophobic scapegoating. What distinguishes Dudula from earlier waves of anti-migrant violence in South Africa is its organised and performative character.
Rather than spontaneous riots, Dudula stages carefully choreographed blockades, livestreams confrontations and issues press statements. While their actions fall within the broader subject of policing everyday life in South Africa, as described by Buur and Jensen (2004), vigilante mobilisation functions as informal social control that blurs with state authority. In Dudula’s case, this control is explicitly redeployed to construct vigilante borders.
The consequences of vigilante bordering can be fatal. A sick one-year-old child died after the mother, from Malawi, was denied access to Johannesburg’s Alexandra Clinic by members of Dudula. The cumulative impact of these tragic events is that, over time, they instil fear in immigrant communities, prompting some to avoid hospitals altogether, which can delay treatment for tuberculosis, HIV or maternal health. Vigilante bordering in the health sector not only reshapes mobility but also impacts access at the most intimate scale.
Rights under siege
South Africa’s Bill of Rights enshrines socio-economic rights and the country’s Constitutional Court has repeatedly affirmed that these extend to all who live in it. The right to basic education (Section 29) is unconditional and the right to emergency health care (Section 27) is explicit. By disrupting access to both, Dudula challenges not only migrants’ rights but the state’s constitutional order.
Before the advent of vigilante bordering at the gates of public health institutions, immigrants had long been subjected to what migration scholars refer to as medical xenophobia. In abstract terms, it ‘refers to the negative attitudes and practices of health professionals and employees towards migrants and refugees based purely on their identity as non-South African’ (Crush and Tawodzera, 2013). These sustained practices of medical exclusion, which are now punctuated by intimidation at facilities, can have outsized effects. They do not simply inconvenience migrants, they also corrode trust in the health system itself.
Civil society organisations, medical NGOs and legal advocates have sounded the alarm on vigilante mobilisation at health centres and schools. Médecins Sans Frontières has documented cases where Dudula intimidation effectively denied care, including reports of security staff and healthcare workers acting in collusion with the vigilante groups. Education rights groups have condemned school gate blockades as unlawful and harmful to child development.
Beyond South Africa
While Operation Dudula is distinctive, its orientation and approach are in no way unique. Across Europe, community patrols have targeted refugee housing. In the United States, volunteer militias monitor the southern border. In each case, vigilantes position themselves as defenders of sovereignty, translating social anxieties into exclusionary practices.
What South Africa shows is how such movements can turn inward, with hospitals and schools, rather than border posts, becoming the stage. The immediate implications are that any site of welfare provision can now be reframed as a border, eroding the universality of rights through the spread of vigilante bordering.
Towards counter-mobilisation
What, then, is to be done? I contend that the state has an obligation to preserve the rule of law and ensure the depoliticisation of hospitals and schools. So far, the timid response by the South African government and law enforcement authorities has only served to embolden vigilante groups such as Dudula. Some of their members are now engaging in open confrontation with immigrants inside hospital facilities. For as long as these vigilante groups are allowed to carry out their unlawful activities with impunity, vigilante bordering is bound to get worse.
South African civil society actors, from the media to NGOs, should be commended for the proactive approach they have taken to record and challenge vigilante bordering incidents across the country. Journalists, NGOs and community leaders deserve ongoing support to ensure that they continue exposing human rights abuses by groups like Dudula. Their advocacy efforts place the spotlight on the actions of vigilante groups and provide the impetus needed to constantly challenge and contest them. Over time, this reduces the spectre of accepting vigilante impunity as the norm.
Public education is necessary to help increase awareness about the dangers of denying healthcare access to a segment of the population. Dudula has garnered public sympathy for its actions by conveniently claiming that they are protecting ‘public resources’ by restricting non-South Africans from accessing public services. What is missing from the ongoing discourse on Dudula’s actions is that health access restrictions not only pose health risks to immigrants but can potentially impact the health security of communities in which immigrants reside, especially if there is an outbreak of a communicable disease.
Conclusion
Operation Dudula’s vigilante mobilisation is a demonstration of how everyday bordering is being appropriated by non-state actors to reshape everyday spaces like hospitals and schools into sites of exclusion. This new form of bordering, which I refer to as vigilante bordering, mimics the state’s control of access while undermining human right protections.
Recognising vigilante bordering matters for migration scholarship because it shifts the analytical gaze from state policy to non-state mobilisation. It matters for human rights advocates because it highlights the fragility of universal rights when enforcement is outsourced to vigilante actors. And it matters for everyday South Africans because it warns how easily the spaces of care and learning can be transformed into spaces of exclusion.
Enocent Nemuramba is a second-year PhD student in Politics at the University of Bristol and a member of the SPAIS Migration Group. His research interests include the ways in which multi-scalar power structures mediate migrant political economies. For his PhD research project he is using a critical multi-scalar lens to study how Zimbabwean immigrants living in the middle-income suburbs of Cape Town make and establish home.
Naturalisation is usually seen as a process by which migrants access the rights, duties and passport of their country of residence. They may feel that they belong there and want to be able to stay, have a say in its politics or access better jobs. States also have interests in naturalising migrants, usually because they bring skills or wealth, or because they are already considered part of a nation. In my initial research with Syrian refugees living across Turkey and Germany, however, naturalisation does not seem to be predominantly about the relationship between a state and a person. Instead, in the changing context of the Middle East, citizenship and naturalisation seems increasingly about navigating politics, travel and territory across multiple states – that is, about geopolitics.
Since 2011, about six million Syrians have been forced to flee the dictatorial regime of Bashar Al-Assad, his brutal crackdown against an uprising and a violent civil war. Most settled in Turkey and Germany. Although most of these continue to hold a temporary legal status, many have tried to naturalise in order to access rights they were denied by their own state. About 500,000 Syrians have become dual German-Syrian or Syrian-Turkish citizens. Holding citizenship of their country of residence is a way to feel more protected against rising anti-migrant sentiment and threats of mass deportation by right-wing pundits. In Frankfurt in 2021 Youssef, originally from Latakia, had just filed his citizenship application when he told me: ‘With the war in Syria, I know how quickly politics can change. At least with citizenship they won’t be able to kick me out.’
The Syrian-Turkish border at Nusaybin (image: William John Gauthier on Flickr, 2018)
With a Syrian passport, which was expensive and hard to get, the refugees I spoke to could rarely travel to see family in other states. The German and (although less so) Turkish passports helped with that.
But research participants also felt ambivalent about their new citizenship. They were often disappointed that, as dual citizens, they still faced racism and discrimination. Citizenship to them was not only about their own relationship to one nation-state. It was also about whether and how they could share lives with family and friends spread out across many different geographies. Dual citizens were even more aware that most Syrians could not travel or use their rights in a context where citizenship, more than anything else, determines life chances and status. Some felt that citizenship stuck them to a territory they had not chosen. Especially for Turkish-Syrians, citizenship meant they would probably never move elsewhere but settle in Turkey, a state in repeated economic crisis and political turmoil. For all, citizenship was embedded in their social networks across Germany, Turkey and Syria.
On 8 December 2024, Assad’s regime was overthrown, changing the lives of the Syrian diaspora overnight. Many Syrians have been trying to return to Syria. They want to visit family: parents or grandparents they have not seen in years, or siblings, nephews and nieces they have never met. They want to check up on their cities and homes, often reduced to mere rubble. Many want to participate in the rebuilding of their country. Again, however, citizenship divides opportunities. Syrians with a second passport can travel and return to their country of residence. Those with temporary refugee papers risk losing their status if they do. The security, economic and political situation in Syria remains fragile and permanent return is risky.
Meanwhile, Syrians have pointed out to me that it is not only them who are using their national citizenship for global purposes. Their states of residence are starting to do so too.
Taha, a naturalised citizen of Turkey originally from Deir Az-Zor in Syria, told me: ‘The Turkish state’s plan is to naturalize 1.5 million Syrians as a belt in the southern region.’ He thinks that giving citizenship to Syrians is one way through which Turkey seeks influence in Syria. It is not clear whether this will actually happen. Naturalisation for Syrians is granted on exceptional grounds. There are no official statistics and the Turkish government hasn’t updated the number of accepted Syrian citizenship applications for more than a year. Yet, for Syrians, naturalisation is part of a pattern that Yassin al Haj Saleh has called ‘liquid imperialism’ to describe the overlapping and opaque military, economic and political ways in which states such as Turkey, Russia, Iran and the US have shaped the Syrian civil war and denied Syrians self-determination. These practices echo older, imperial conceptions of membership that were not about democratic participation, national belonging or rights, but rather about competition for population to secure labour and territory.
Back in Germany, citizenship is also changing from a national to a global institution. The new citizenship law of 2024 requires applicants to abide to the German constitution or values, however vaguely defined. Following a late addition during the parliamentary process, however, it also requires citizens-to-be to swear to commit to the ‘prohibition against waging a war of aggression’ – shorthand for condemning the Russian war on Ukraine – and ‘Germany’s special historical responsibility for the unjust National Socialist regime and its consequences, in particular for the protection of Jewish life’ – relating to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
In short, both migrants and states increasingly use citizenship not only to access or regulate national belonging but also to navigate a changing geopolitical world order. These insights point to complicated questions about the changing struggles between citizenship, nationality, territory and the state. How do states employ the institution of citizenship not only for domestic benefit but also for global power? How is this embedded in imperial histories? How do citizens and citizens-to-be use multiple citizenships to negotiate the global hierarchy of passports? What do these practices do to the institution of citizenship itself, which is mostly still understood as membership in a nation-state? The case of Syrians naturalising across Germany and Turkey in the contexts of the transformations of the Middle East shows that we need to rethink what citizenship is and does in the 21st century, beyond membership in and to a nation-state territory.
Paladia Ziss is Senior Research Associate at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. She studies the politics and sociology of displacement and citizenship across postcolonial Europe and the Middle East.
