Civil society actors have become crucial providers of humanitarian aid and solidarity to migrants subjected to increasingly hostile border regimes in the “Global North.” Scholarship has highlighted this rising support (Brković et al. 2021; Feischmidt et al. 2019), particularly in response to the European “long summer of migration” from 2015 onward where nearly a million displaced peoples sought asylum in European Union member states.1 Civil society involves several actors including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), other civil society organizations, social movements, and citizens providing aid and engaging in political resistance against border regimes (Ambrosini 2022).
The centrality of civil society actors is structurally reinforced in a political moment where humanitarian, neoliberal, and securitizing logics have permeated the governance of migration. Governments mobilize “humanitarian borderwork” (Pallister-Wilkins 2017) whereby humanitarian rhetoric functions to secure borders, and pursue neoliberal strategies diffusing migration management to non-state actors in the name of efficiency and value for money—including privatizing border protection (Yin 2023) and contracting NGOs to deliver pared-back services (Gerard and Weber 2019; Giudici 2021). Given this diffusion of governance to non-state actors, scholars have questioned whether they perpetuate border regimes or challenge them (Ambrosini 2022; Cuttitta et al. 2023).
This article contributes an Australian example to scholarship on the political potential of civil society movements for migrants. I focus on support to people subjected to Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB), a hostile border policy treating boat arrivals unequally to other migrants and refugees (RCOA 2022). While punitive border measures receive public attention, there is less awareness of the protracted precarity imposed upon people living within the Australian community on restrictive bridging visas, subjected to welfare deterrence (Mills and Klein 2021) while awaiting decisions on their refugee claims. Civil society support for bridging visa holders has become necessary as well as politicized against the grain of a bipartisan border policy supported by both major political parties and bolstered by a “loud panic” (Van Berlo 2015) positioning asylum seekers as a “security threat” (Sharples et al. 2023).
Civil society actors comprise a movement of nonprofit workers, volunteers, activists, faith- and community-based organizations, with heterogeneity along gendered, classed, and racialized lines. Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and digital ethnography spanning from 2015 to 2020 in the Naarm (Melbourne) civil society movement supporting people seeking asylum, my main contribution is an intersectional and ethnographic exploration of what I term “civil society silos”—fault lines revealing power dynamics and heterogeneity within movements. Civil society supporters themselves pointed out silos, frustrated at the movement's inability to unite across differences or wishing it to be “more political.” I analyze the creation of silos through diverging claims to expertise. Following anthropological literature, I define expertise as the production of and claim to knowledge (Mosse 2011). Claims to expertise in the movement form assertions that legitimize particular—and sometimes contrasting—approaches to providing support.
I identify and analyze five forms of expertise—professional, lived, societal, relational, and Indigenous—alongside my own production of research expertise. My examples map roughly onto different groups: professionals, such as lawyers and social workers volunteering in NGOs; advocates with lived experience, such as people from migrant and refugee backgrounds and First Nations peoples; organizers of protest rallies; and volunteers delivering aid. In linking expertise to particular groups, I do not intend to essentialize but rather sketch a broad overview. The movement encompasses many supporters, including religious groups, beyond the scope of my research (see Hodge 2019). Additionally, there is dynamic interplay whereby supporters may deploy several forms of expertise at once.
Engaging with scholars linking expertise to colonialism and neoliberalism (Kothari 2005; Li 2007), I critically examine whether the deployment of expertise by movement actors signals the permeation of racialized neoliberal logics into movement spaces. I find that while elements mimic technocratic, universalizing principles of neoliberal expertise, movement expertise is also deployed subversively to legitimate alternative knowledges and collectivizing politics against neoliberal bordering. However, there remain fundamental differences and power imbalances. While a dominant accessible politics appeals to the mainstream, a more marginalized politics seeks a fundamental restructuring of power relations. Through unpacking the politics of civil society movements, I offer an intersectional perspective taking into account the impact of race, gender, and power on shaping moral stances and political possibilities.
The article is structured as follows. I first provide context for the racialized Australian neoliberal–humanitarian nexus in migration governance and consider the role of the civil society movement. I then detail my fieldsite and positionality before examining how neoliberalized principles of expertise are applied to migration governance and civil society spaces. Analyzing ethnographic examples, I consider how the invocation of movement expertise both replicates and resists racialized neoliberal paradigms, with the aim of broadening definitions of expertise to include marginalized and devalued knowledges.
Australia's Neoliberal–Humanitarian Migration Nexus and Civil Society Response
Operation Sovereign Borders is the latest in a string of deterrence-based Australian migration policies, continuing a racialized longue durée of humanitarian and neoliberal interventions deeply intertwined with its violent settler colonial history (Moreton-Robinson 2007; Pugliese 2015; Reardon-Smith 2024). The White Australia Policy restricted non-white immigration under the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 for the perceived benefit of the fledging nation, and policies of assimilation sought to erase First Nations peoples under the guise of “helping” and “civilizing.” This racialized paternalism carries into the present through neoliberal policies such as the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention—a neoliberalized military foray into Aboriginal communities to eradicate alcoholism and child abuse (Lovell 2014)—and punitive welfare deterrence approaches (Mills and Klein 2021) designed to control and manage racialized populations such as asylum seekers (Vogl and Methven 2020) and First Nations communities (Klein 2020). In the late 1980s, parallel forces of neoliberalization and securitization saw the diffusion of welfare to non-state actors (Van Gramberg and Bassett 2005), the introduction of mandatory and indefinite detention policies (Tofighian and Boochani 2021), and a “dual-track” refugee processing system differentiating “deserving” migrants from “undeserving” asylum seekers classified as “irregular” or “non-genuine” based on mode of arrival (Loughnan 2019; Peterie 2017). This system is racialized, prioritizing those culturally similar to “us” (Peterie 2017), and neoliberalized, favoring productive bodies (Ramsay 2020). Deterrence has since been the main policy setting toward boat arrivals, including legal changes to the Migration Act 1958 that externalize responsibility onto neighboring countries (Loughnan 2019).
Since 2013, OSB continues this trend of racialized neoliberal–humanitarian governance. Boat turn-backs by the Australian Navy and indefinite incarceration on islands (Manus, Nauru, and Christmas Island) are a form of “cruel care” (Silverstein 2023) and “compassionate borderwork” (Little and Vaughan-Williams 2017) justified in humanitarian terms—“saving lives at sea” by deterring people smugglers and preventing dangerous journeys on unseaworthy vessels. In practice this amounts to “letting die” (Foucault 2003), towing vessels to international waters and leaving them unassisted. Lesser-known is the racialized neoliberal abandonment (Povinelli 2011) enacted upon boat arrivals within Australia on bridging visas, where the government retracts support to ensure they “never make Australia home” (DHA 2022b). Waiting often for years for their claims to be assessed, they receive a veneer of support through government-contracted NGOs equaling a 10-minute monthly case appointment (Interview with service provider, 2015). This follows a pattern of implicating NGOs in migration management as intermediaries between the state and migrants (Riva and Hoffstaedter 2021), conducting policing work (Gerard and Weber 2019), and upholding neoliberal norms (Ramsay 2020). Scholars (Hartley and Fleay 2017; Van Kooy and Bowman 2019; Vogl and Methven 2020) have detailed the harmful impacts of bridging visas, including limiting/denial of work and study rights, conditional income support less than the welfare benefit, threat of visa cancellation, and no recourse to permanent migration pathways. Protracted waiting has been likened by those with lived experience to a “weaponization of time” as torture (Tofighian and Boochani 2021). During my primary fieldwork from 2015 to 2016, this impacted 10,000 people in Melbourne and nearly 30,000 in Australia (DHA 2016).2
Due to this neoliberal abandonment, the civil society movement for people seeking asylum has become indispensable for both political advocacy and aid. In a landscape cluttered by non-state actors, it is important to define civil society. In Europe during the long summer of migration, the term initially signified grassroots support, distinct from professionalized NGOs (Vandevoordt and Verschraegen 2019). Yet as grassroots actors were impelled to professionalize (Brković et al. 2021: 3), the lines were less clear: as Maurizio Ambrosini (2022) notes, civil society now encompasses diverse supporters and motivations from NGOs to citizens to social movements, leading to questions about whether these actors challenge or perpetuate border regimes (Cuttitta et al. 2023). While some perform acts of “civil disobedience” (Sandri 2018; Schwiertz and Schwenken 2020) and solidarity (Rozakou 2017), others engage in depoliticization through unwittingly upholding borders (Cuttitta 2017), replicating racialized hierarchies (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto 2015) by assuming an oppressed “other” to be saved (Braun 2017), and reproducing neoliberal regimes of care (Brković et al. 2021: 5) by shouldering state responsibilities. Robin Vandevoordt and Gert Verschraegen (2019: 123) capture this duality in their term “subversive humanitarianism,” showing how Belgian volunteers recognize the depoliticizing tendencies of aid provision yet use this as a channel to subvert the “ruling [anti- migrant] sociopolitical climate.” Ambrosini (2022) concludes that diverse supporters nevertheless share a commitment to “de-bordering solidarity.” Here, even those who do not overtly express political opposition do so through the very act of practical help that challenges xenophobic stances.
In Australia, scholars refer to the social movement for refugees (Hodge 2019; Stivens 2018). I use the term “civil society” to convey the blurred lines whereby those advocating for change are often at the forefront of aid delivery and to engage with insights from the European literature. As in the European context, I observed heterogeneity of supporters and political motivations when I conducted my research within the Naarm civil society movement. Political stances were racialized and gendered, ranging from desiring systemic change to simply helping those in need. There were varying levels of reflexivity regarding neoliberal and racialized contradictions within support. Despite heterogeneity, there was a collective politics against OSB—entailing a willful distinction from government-contracted NGOs viewed as part of the border regime,3 and moral commitment to “doing the right thing” in the face of the uncaring government's wrongdoings. This manifested in collective practices including public rallies/actions, performative protest (Hodge 2019), friendships/connections, aid provision, fundraising, and advocacy. While this article focuses on silos, the shared quest for “de-bordering solidarity” is taken as a given.
Positionality and Research Expertise
I began 16 months of doctoral fieldwork in Melbourne in June 2015. Informed by previous roles in Australian government and NGOs, I was politically motivated to visibilize OSB's hidden violence, as well as the support that existed for people seeking asylum. Melbourne was chosen for its active movement and large number of bridging visa holders. I was interested in the contrast between this “welcoming city” and the hostile national context. The timing lent itself well to comparative research, given the 2015 European civil society response.
Fieldwork commenced with sector mapping and shadowing volunteers in diverse roles (casework, legal aid, English lessons, material aid) before I immersed myself as a volunteer-researcher within food aid, material aid, and campaigns teams. Additionally, I conducted 54 semi-structured interviews with volunteers, nonprofit staff, activists, and people seeking asylum; attended protests and fundraisers; accompanied volunteers visiting Melbourne's detention centers; and provided pro bono research to a nonprofit assisting claimants. In 2017, I conducted digital ethnography of movement groups on Facebook, and in 2019–20, I conducted six weeks of follow-up fieldwork. The main change I noted was increasing “movement fatigue,” as the 2016 and 2019 federal election results maintained hostile border policy.
My fieldsite is a sensitive political context, and I consider several factors relating to ethics and positionality. I practice a reflexive feminist approach that is attendant to power relations (Lokot 2019) between movement actors as well as between myself and my participants, entailing openness about research and long-term mutualistic relationships when possible. I am aware that my positionality—a thirty-something white settler Australian woman with overseas-born parents, opposed to OSB—fits squarely within the dominant volunteer profile. Movement actors often equated our goals, and I mainly encountered people seeking asylum through aid provision. During fieldwork and while publishing this research, my positionality places me within established gendered, racialized dynamics, and provides me with privilege further heightened by the settler colonial context. I am also conscious of the movement's fragility, both in terms of relationships between civil society supporters and the wider politicized Australian landscape. I anonymize organizations and individuals to protect these dynamics.
Importantly, I acknowledge that the role of “researcher as expert” is pertinent to this article. Converting everyday practices and experiences into academic discourse is an assertion of expertise, with specific impetus within the neoliberal university (Shore and Wright 2017) with its managerial cultures and pressures to publish that impel the performance of authority. Research power dynamics can result in varied outcomes such as challenging research authority, collaboration, or exploitation (Holmes and Marcus 2005). I recognize that my—and any—research is partial and positioned, and ask the reader to hold research expertise alongside the forms of expertise I will unpack. Like these forms, research expertise can both replicate and subvert neoliberal agendas.
Expertise as Neoliberal Logic
With an understanding of my fieldsite, I turn to the conceptual core of this article: a critical examination of the movement's deployment of expertise, and whether it constitutes a racialized neoliberal logic. Expertise has long been a topic of interest to anthropologists. Dominic Boyer charts an “anthropology of experts and expertise” since the 1980s, positioning expertise as a form of “skilled knowing” (2008: 39). Experts are first and foremost producers of knowledge (Mosse 2011), and as knowledge is intimately intertwined with power (Foucault 2008), experts function to legitimate and perpetuate particular forms of knowledge. Expertise produces and maintains professional identities and norms, such as “global best practice” in management consulting (Chong 2018) or universal models in development (Mosse 2011).
Particular attention has been paid to the relationship between neoliberalism and expertise. This does not mean that expertise is de facto neoliberal—yet, as Janet Newman (2017: 87) notes, part of the interest stems from shifts in dominant modes of expertise: “neoliberalism is often viewed as displacing old forms of expertise: those associated with Fordist economies and hierarchical orderings of power.” Neoliberal expertise is diffuse, operating at multiple scales (Li 2007).
There has been a keen focus on neoliberal expertise in development contexts. Tania Murray Li's (2007) work in Indonesia tracks over 200 years of development interventions from colonialism to neoliberalism, noting the common thread of experts seeking to “improve” the lives of rural Indonesians. Deploying a method Li terms “rendering technical”—depoliticized, technocratic language defining problems and solutions—these interventions functioned as an “anti-politics machine” (Ferguson 1994), disembedding issues from sociopolitical context and upholding the status quo. Uma Kothari (2005: 425), examining the rise of “development experts,” similarly found that they were agents of modernization using knowledge to perpetuate unequal power relations. While “masquerading as universal and neutral . . . ‘acceptable’ forms of authority by mobilising overarching discourses of ‘humanitarianism,’ ‘philanthropy’ and poverty alleviation, presented in contradistinction to the exploitative colonial projects” (Kothari 2005: 433), in fact “development schemes reflect a form of cultural imperialism founded on ideas about the ‘professional,’ ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’” rooted in “neoliberal development imaginaries” and a “eurocentrism that is highly gendered and racialised” (Kothari 2005: 427). First Nations scholars cast a similar critique at white “experts” in Australia representing Indigenous issues (Moreton- Robinson 2007). Here, while purporting to work with local populations, experts instead function to maintain a racialized neoliberal order. Expertise becomes a closed loop where failure merely justifies the need for more effective, advanced forms of expertise (Mitchell 2002).
This development critique of neoliberal expertise is relevant to migration governance, where similar universalizing, technocratic principles are prevalent. Humanitarian principles prioritize neutrality and universality (Fassin 2007). International aid workers parachute in and out of humanitarian emergency contexts, applying one-size-fits-all models of aid eligibility and distribution (Dunn 2012). Their global “expatriate” expertise is valued above that of local staff (Fassin 2007), affirming the racialization of expertise that privileges whiteness and devalues local knowledges (Bian 2022). Neoliberal contracting models of service provision create a short-term focus on the urgent present that denies the development of longer-term planning and relationships (Brun 2016).
This valorization of expertise as technocratic, impartial, and temporary creates both a racialized hierarchy and a feminization of knowledges seen as driven by emotion and relationality. This can lead to devaluing both volunteer and local forms of expertise (Bian 2022). Volunteering is positioned as an “affective act” (Humphris and Yarris 2022) that can deliver impactful relationships and outcomes but also inconsistencies and individualization of approaches. Gendered and racialized aspects come into the mix, with white women ridiculed for their “need to help” (Malkki 2015), dismissed as a “sentimental colonial encounter” (Mostafanezhad 2013). Yet these are false binaries: volunteers and locals possess expertise, and migration “experts” bring emotion into decision-making (Kalir 2019). Anthropological inquiry emphasizes the need to humanize experts by attending to them “not solely as rational(ist) creatures . . . but rather as desiring, relating, doubting, anxious, contentious, affective” (Boyer 2008: 38). E. Summerson Carr (2010: 17) notes that expertise is “what people do rather than what people possess,” something people learn as an interactional and ideological process. These processual and affective elements of expertise are something to keep in mind throughout the forthcoming examples.
Expertise in the Naarm Civil Society Movement
Like humanitarian and development contexts, expertise functions to perpetuate neoliberalized approaches in Australian migration governance. Professionalized NGOs win government contracts to deliver services by displaying expertise, demonstrating value for money through applying universal solutions (Sampson 2015). There is some suspicion of “professionalization” among civil society supporters distinguishing themselves from government-contracted NGOs. Grassroots efforts are instead fueled by emotions, such as outrage (Stivens 2018) and desire for change. Yet there is also a need for expertise. As Maila Stivens (2018: 90) notes in relation to the Melbourne movement of which I write, professional skills assist political effectiveness. There is hence a strategic mobilization of expertise in service of movement goals.
In the following examples, I identify forms of movement expertise. I choose the term “expertise” to highlight how claims to knowledge were used to assert authority and legitimacy, both in competition with other knowledges and against neoliberal bordering. I highlight the reflexivity of actors and messiness of everyday practices by showing that even within categories of expertise, there existed tensions. These snapshots are not necessarily generalizable, and silos are more complex than comparative analysis allows for—in practice, supporters may build an advocacy repertoire out of combinations of expertise. My point is to be generative rather than exhaustive through comparison.
Professional Expertise
Every morning, volunteers at a large nonprofit—doctors, social workers, nutritionists, lawyers, and teachers mixed with kitchen, food and material aid helpers—crammed into the boardroom for the briefing, spilling out the doorway. NGO staff gave operational updates and political news with a sense of urgency: our legal team is struggling under the number of asylum applications, the situation on Manus is worsening.
Briefings were popular with volunteers because they provided real-time updates from staff, drawing on their expertise as long-term movement actors and legal/policy specialists to offer informed behind-the-scenes commentary on current events. This motivated volunteers to give their all on the frontlines of a crisis of their government's making. But Kevin,4 one of the social work managers, shared with me that his team would often avoid briefings. The fervent energy contradicted their focus on safe spaces—preventing re-traumatization by encouraging a sense of agency over what their clients could control in the present rather than becoming overwhelmed by future uncertainty or past trauma. Kevin was concerned that briefings detailing violent updates, such as deaths on Manus Island, created an unsafe environment and galvanized righteous supporters: “Volunteers see the protest, the fight. And that's what attracts them. [In casework] we're trying to quieten down our volunteers to be in a peaceful enough state to work with people and understand that people's situations are the crisis, but the volunteer is not in crisis themselves.” When volunteers did attend briefings, Kevin would spend time resetting their emotional register before they saw clients.
Another social work manager explained: “We attract a certain kind of angry volunteer through our aggressive advocacy. We see the Department [of Home Affairs] as evil and us as angels/saviors. This environment of good/evil is what our clients are fleeing. This paradigm may be good for advocacy, but it's counterproductive for therapy.” Legal and therapeutic experts thus sought to cultivate volunteer emotions in contrasting ways. This spoke to a wider tension in approaches. Legal experts critiqued casework as depoliticizing, focusing on individual cases rather than systemic change, and protectionist, disempowering clients by limiting access to information. Social workers disagreed, as they were trained in a systems approach to social justice that was both advocacy and care based—but prioritized client safety above all. These forms of professional expertise thus conflicted, even though both held a commitment to care and advocacy.
Lived Expertise
Lawyers and social workers were among thousands of supporters staging nationwide protests against the harmful effects of OSB. At a rainy Melbourne march, a young woman in a black hijab stood on a makeshift stage. Her serious face visible above a sea of umbrellas, she addressed the rally:
We demanded speakers with lived experience. I don't think that was an outrageous demand. What was outrageous was the way the refugee community was silenced. How can you say you're advocating if you're actively silencing? It's time to listen. The only time we're invited to speak for ourselves is when you want to hear stories of our suffering. Never for solutions. Why do you think we need white people to legitimize our experiences? We are experts of our own narrative. Don't undermine our authority.
This speech at the 2017 Melbourne event for the biggest annual refugee march in Australia was a response to the decision of rally organizers to choose speakers from a range of backgrounds. The decision was contested through an online social media campaign led by organizations of color who “called out” rally organizers with posts demanding more speakers with lived experience. These posts were deleted by organizers, which was interpreted as silencing and led to a heated online debate. One online commenter wrote: “Solidarity does not include writing a statement telling the very people you claim to help to shut up.”
By claiming expertise over their own narrative, this speaker powerfully laid out the aim of lived expertise—to value lived experiences as important sources of knowledge. Lived expertise was invoked as an overlooked form of authority and key criteria for leadership roles, decisions, and solutions. Advocates for lived expertise—from migrant and refugee backgrounds as well as white allies often displaying “white guilt” (Kowal 2015)—leveled the pejorative charge of “white saviorism” against perceived paternalistic behaviors. Fundraising and services framing clients as suffering/needy were seen as bolstering a “white savior industrial complex” (INCITE! 2007).5 This critique related to “decolonizing solidarity” (Land 2015) by redressing power relations within the movement—the social/cultural capital and privilege white actors possessed and the replication of unequal dynamics. As another online commenter reflected:
It is incredibly important to build strategic alliances within and across movements. But the content of alliances is important, not simply the fact that they are made. If they are drenched in white saviourism . . . refusal to engage with criticism and insight from people with lived experience, denial of historical context, lack of intersectionality etc. then are they valuable, and who are they the best for?
Lived expertise was thus viewed as integral to making sure that decolonization was not just a “metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012), but also practiced in movement relations.
Societal Expertise
The disagreement between event organizers and advocates for lived expertise was racialized, yet also hinged on strategic and ideological differences around how to mobilize and sustain a movement. The organizers eventually increased the number of speakers with lived experience, affirming that “it is vitally important for refugee voices to be heard, particularly when the government is trying to silence them.” But, they added: “We do not agree that only refugees should speak. We believe the current balance [refugees, teacher, lawyer, interfaith panel, event organizer] is a good platform to get the political message across. The [online campaign] risks undermining the event, which has attracted unprecedented support from across the community in solidarity with refugees and people seeking asylum.” Here the organizers viewed lived expertise as just one form of knowledge in a wider toolkit, and their speakers also included professional and religious experts.
In making this choice to cater to as many potential supporters as possible, organizers asserted their societal expertise. This was a confidence in what would strategically attract the majority, based on nationally valorized principles such as inclusivity and fairness. It was an effort to make everyone feel part of the cause and participate actively. As one of the online commenters put it: “We are ALL responsible for taking action, and having people from different parts of the community show leadership sets an example we all have to fight. It has taken a massive network to build the rally to [thousands] attending and wouldn't have happened without encouraging people that this is their fight too.”
The political aim of societal expertise was therefore quite different to lived expertise. The former sought to cast the net wide, appealing to common values to recruit the Australian public, and viewed the latter as divisive.6 The latter was about redressing structural injustices and centering marginalized voices, and viewed the former as ignoring systemic issues.
Relational Expertise
Sitting next to a volunteer driving a clanking trailer of donated furniture through the suburbs felt a world away from the protests through the busy city streets. We were greeted warmly by the people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds we visited, the young kids of those with families excited and curious. Volunteers at this community group were almost all women and rarely attended the large-scale rallies, rather operating locally—gathering donations through local Facebook groups, running sewing and clothing bees, and publicizing through neighborhood festivals, garage sales, bake sales, and Bunnings sausage sizzles. They framed this as the support of a neighbor to a neighbor, invoking national values of mateship and duty. Volunteering and fundraising centered on domestic activities rather than images of far-off suffering strangers (Boltanski 1999).
Through neighborliness, volunteers enacted relational expertise. Like societal expertise, this involved mobilizing national values, but it was two-pronged—making people seeking asylum relatable to Australians but also involving relationship-building between volunteers and clients. The founder, Simone, explained that neighborliness attracted people who “wanted to offer a hand of friendship too, not just stuff.” Neighborliness made people seeking asylum more familiar and sought to replace the power dynamic of aid with mutuality. However, in promoting dependence on one another rather than a role for the state, neighborliness could augment neoliberal values of community self-reliance and responsible citizenship (Muehlebach 2012). This community group faced critique from other advocates of being depoliticizing, not focused on systemic change. As I have noted elsewhere (Altman 2022), this critique was also gendered, devaluing the political contributions of women volunteers. Yet prioritizing the personal was something that volunteers were proud of; as Donna emphasized at their 2015 Annual General Meeting, “we put the people above the politics of it.”
Relational expertise was also prevalent among volunteers in a nonprofit foodbank, where they developed cultural understanding and fostered long-term friendships through aid interactions with people seeking asylum. For some volunteers this was a political choice “to see the difference I make every day, whereas the rallies don't change anything.” Yet others channeled this firsthand knowledge into advocacy efforts, writing letters to the editor and attending protests. Another important layer of relational expertise was present when people with lived experience became volunteers themselves, sharing language and cultural affinity with recipients (see Olliff 2022). This was actively pursued by some organizations as these volunteers added value as cultural brokers, but others were dissuaded by fears it could be exploitative when clients felt obligated to volunteer.
Relational expertise could contribute to knowledge mismatches between volunteers, staff, and donors. Long-term volunteers held more institutional and client knowledge than high turnover, contract-based staff. This could cause tensions when staff imposed universal, technocratic rules based on consistency and eligibility that seemed too general to volunteers, leading them to develop personalized ways of distributing aid. Volunteers also challenged negative attitudes from donors assuming recipients should be grateful. Volunteers explained that many asylum seekers came from skilled “high status” backgrounds and felt ashamed to accept secondhand goods. Here, relational expertise provided nuance and complexity to public assumptions and aid relations.
Indigenous Expertise
Confined to the sandstone steps of Melbourne's Treasury Building by police blockades, a crowd waved banners sporting slogans such as “Bring back exiled refugees held hostage in Nauru and Manus” and “Australia is a crime scene.” Smoke billowed from eucalyptus leaves in an open fire pit, the remnants of a traditional “Welcome to Country” ceremony. An Aboriginal elder stamped a passport emblazoned with the red, black, and yellow flag and proffered it to a former detainee with a handshake. As the crowd whooped at the “new citizen” pumping his arm in triumph, the elder declared: “This country is the land of the liar, and the home of the thief! We [need to] acknowledge people's human rights generally, that's the first stop. And we [Aboriginal] mob haven't even got to that point with our own business. So. Refugees are Welcome.”
I attended this Aboriginal Passport ceremony in 2016. As Joseph Pugliese (2015: 84) compellingly documents, since 2012 these ceremonies form “instantiations of social justice praxis” linking the ongoing usurpation of Aboriginal sovereignty with the violence of Australia's border regime. Hosted by activists from First Nations, refugee, and former detainee backgrounds, the event's media release stated solidarity between communities of color and Black peoples, acknowledging their shared continued oppression under Australia's colonial borders.
The ceremony asserted inalienable claims to sovereignty7 through fusing Aboriginal welcome with a deliberate repurposing of an Australian government citizenship ceremony. The smoking ceremony embodied Indigenous knowledge and expertise, demonstrating connection to Country, while the citizenship ceremony invoked a colonial ritual and flipped it to challenge state authority. The passport, crowning symbol of British Commonwealth sovereignty and legal technology to bestow rights on those deemed deserving, was “counter-discursively resignified” (Pugliese 2015: 86) to reclaim Aboriginal sovereignty. This entailed a “politics of refusal” (Simpson 2014): a rejection of the authority of the settler state to decide who was welcome.
Silos, Subversive Expertise, and Collectivizing Politics
Now that I have outlined forms of movement expertise, I move to a discussion of two topics: the formation of civil society silos, and whether there is potential in expertise to subvert neoliberalized border regimes. First, the examples make apparent that tensions exist between mobilizations of expertise. These appear in the cases of lawyers promoting advocacy versus safe spaces of social workers; decolonizing approaches of advocates of color conflicting with the “whole-of-society” mission of event organizers; and volunteers with relational knowledge contesting donor stereotypes or staff universal rules. Civil society supporters enact expertise to legitimize their approaches. It is in this way that expertise contributes to silos. While united in their cause, supporters are not always in agreement about how to practice their commitments.
I do not point out these silos in order to entrench them further, rather, to bring a sense of complexity to discussions of civil society movements by revealing the multiple, reflexive, and nuanced dynamics that exist within movements. I hope this comparative exercise may productively unveil points of commonality and mutual understanding. There are certainly overlaps—between lived and Indigenous expertise, both inalienable and embodied; between relational and societal expertise, seeking to engage and influence everyday Australians; and in the caring impulse underlying legal advocacy, therapeutic practices, and relational expertise. Some supporters traverse these silos fluidly—bringing relational expertise from volunteering into their activism at rallies, professional expertise to bear in political campaigns, or lived expertise into professional roles as social workers or lawyers.
Yet a critical analysis must be attendant to hierarchies of expertise that are re/produced through movement power relations. As in the earlier discussion of the racialized and gendered valorization of global technocratic expertise and the corresponding devaluation of local and volunteer knowledges, not all forms of knowledge within the movement are on equal ground. Two emerge as dominant—professional and societal expertise—while lived, relational, and Indigenous knowledges remain more marginalized. Lived experience has historically been, and continues to be, devalued in comparison to professionalized expertise, while societal expertise exercised by organizers is an assertion of their dominant place within Australian society. Indigenous sovereignty and connection to Country, though regularly symbolically acknowledged, is also continuously marginalized as a form of knowledge and authority within mainstream society, and relational volunteer knowledges are feminized as depoliticizing (in the case of women delivering material aid), or overruled by professional universal rules (in the foodbank). And even within the category of professional expertise, relational social work is feminized as depoliticizing when contrasted with the political urgency of legal advocacy.
Cognizant of these power imbalances, I want to consider whether the prevalence of expertise in the movement constitutes an encroachment of racialized neoliberal logics into humanitarian spaces or, conversely, can bestow power upon alternative ways of knowing. Elements of the mobilization of expertise echo the neoliberal focus on “improvement,” seen in the more dominant professional and societal forms of expertise: the desire to influence Australians to be more compassionate or responsible; making people seeking asylum into more agentic subjects through legal/therapeutic intervention; solving problems through technocratic solutions such as legal procedures, therapeutic interventions, or universal rules.
Yet, even though traces of neoliberal logic cling to its form, what also strongly emerges is the repurposing of expertise for subversive purposes. Here, I follow Newman (2017: 87) in “explor[ing] the forms of expertise that are deployed to mediate and contest neoliberal reason: to mitigate its consequences, to manage its contradictions and to prefigure alternative rationalities.” These forms of expertise are “affective as much as technical” (Newman 2017: 87). Marginalized forms of knowing within the movement were fundamentally different from neoliberal expertise. They included long-term, relational, feminist, anti-capitalist, decolonizing, embodied, and inalienable forms of knowledge based on identity, culture, relationships, and social and cultural capital. I return to Vandevoordt and Verschraegen's (2019) oxymoronic term “subversive humanitarianism” to posit that by foregrounding different ways of knowing, some movement actors pursued “subversive expertise.” Their appropriation of expertise was undertaken in order to legitimize knowledges and authority outside—and often against—the neoliberal border regime. Expertise was a way to take back power for these alternatives.
Besides foregrounding alternative knowledges, the other feature setting movement actors apart was a collectivizing politics focused on political and social change. A collectivizing politics in and of itself is not anti-neoliberal—scholars have shown how neoliberal logics govern through collectives such as community (Li 2007) and neighborhoods (Muehlebach 2012). But a collective desire to bring about an end to hostile borders—through efforts to influence the public, and relationships with people seeking asylum—distinguished them from experts and NGOs within the migration system. Yet while movement actors are united against hostile borders, there is still a distinction to be made between a dominant accessible politics seeking to influence the public and politicians, that does not fundamentally reimagine the system; and a more marginalized politics committed to a bolder systemic restructuring based on acknowledgment of colonial wrongdoings and rejection of the settler state. Though in my examples this fault line is racialized, it does not always correspond to racial background—white allies support decolonization, and advocates of color engage in mainstream advocacy. Nevertheless, it is important to note that across the movement there remain points of difference in the ends to which collectivizing politics is targeted.
Conclusion
This article has taken an ethnographic dive into the Melbourne arm of the Australian civil society movement that contests OSB. Engaging with literature on the politics of civil society movements for migrants, I have sought to present a nuanced, intersectional account reflective of the heterogeneity within movements. In doing so, I have foregrounded the reflexivity of movement actors and showcased the power relations in which they engage and may perpetuate/resist.
The conceptual core of this article has been a critical investigation of claims to movement expertise. I have presented ethnographic examples to consider two points: first, the encroachment of racialized neoliberal logics of expertise into movement spaces; and second, the entrenchment of “civil society silos.” I have found traces of neoliberal logics in movement practices through the enforcement of universal norms or technocratic solutions. However, I have also revealed a “subversive expertise” that elevates alternative forms of knowledge, authority, and power. These are relational, embodied, anti-colonial, inalienable, long-term forms of knowledge that stand in opposition to—and could potentially resist—dominant neoliberal paradigms. There is also a common pursuit of collectivizing politics that cuts across silos to unite the movement against the border regime. Yet, within this is a fundamental difference and power imbalance—between a dominant accessible politics seeking to influence the mainstream, and a marginalized decolonizing politics seeking a systemic overhaul.
Ultimately, this article has shed much needed light on dimensions of both border regimes and civil society movements that remain largely hidden. These are the differentiated Australian migration system imposing protracted precarity on boat arrivals, and the power relations within the movement that seeks to assist them. This focus promotes sustained attention on systemic border violence as well as the need for continued ethnographic research on civil society movements to reveal their potential in both replicating and subverting neoliberal bordering.
Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Kulin Nation where my fieldwork was based and pay my respects to their elders past and present as well as emerging leaders. Sovereignty was never ceded. Heartfelt thanks to research participants for time and perspectives passionately and kindly given. Thanks for comments on earlier conference papers including to David Owen, Jack Corbett, and participants in 2018 European Social Anthropology and 2020 Royal Anthropological Society conference panels as well as the 2022 Critical Humanitarianisms workshop—especially Rachel Humphris, Heidi Armbruster, and Mette Berg. Special thanks to Sara Riva, Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Rachel Sharples, and two anonymous reviewers for feedback on article drafts. Fieldwork was supported by UCL Overseas/Graduate Scholarships and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, and write-up by an Honorary Fellowship at the Centre for Political Ethnography.
Notes
Following critical scholars (De Genova et al. 2016), I use the term “long summer of migration” to emphasize the protracted nature of migration flows.
Numbers of bridging visas have since dropped to around 11,000 due to granting of visas, deaths, returns to detention, and departures from Australia (DHA 2022a).
Government-contracted NGOs extend the “grey sovereignty” Rachel Sharples (this issue) details, forming a “shadow carceral state” (Vogl and Methven 2020) enforcing the punitive Code of Behavior for Asylum Seekers.
Names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Other movement actors critiqued lived expertise on the grounds that some people in precarious positions did not have the time, security, or resources to lead movements.
This approach was echoed in other movement spaces, such as a campaign seeking to change asylum policies through common values (Altman 2020).
For a crucial discussion of sovereignty by First Nations scholars, see Moreton-Robinson (2007).
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