Challenging who counts as a citizen. The infrastructure of solidarity contesting racial profiling in Switzerland

Schilliger, Sarah (2020). Challenging who counts as a citizen. The infrastructure of solidarity contesting racial profiling in Switzerland. Citzenship studies, 24(4), pp. 530-547. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/13621025.2020.1755176

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In urban spaces, racial profiling is a widespread police practice that dramatically reveals who is not considered a citizen of the nation. As the so-called majority society tends to see racial profiling as an indispensable police measure to maintain ‘order’ and ‘security’, initiatives of solidarity with people experiencing this form of institutional racism are rare. Nevertheless, a movement against racial profiling has emerged in Switzerland since 2016, protecting People of Color against local border policing and challenging the racialized boundaries of national citizenship. To analyze the convergence of differing solidarity practices, I propose the concept of ‘infrastructure of solidarity’. As I show in the empirical analysis, this ‘infrastructure of solidarity’ contesting racial profiling consists of a diverse set of actors deploying various forms of (counter-)knowledge and different political, social and spatial registers: from being involved in direct actions within urban citizenship struggles to artistic interventions and activist research to highly professional strategic litigation; and from solidarity as intimate, friendship-based care relationships to more strategic political relationships.

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