Digital citizen humanitarianism: challenging borders and connecting weak ties

ABSTRACT

This article explores how informal, citizen-led solidarity with migrants is practised digitally and discusses how we can conceptualise such acts. The study draws on digital observations, semi-structured interviews and one field visit. Citizen humanitarians, who are informants in this study, supported migrants from Afghanistan who had been rejected asylum in Norway. Support included facilitating unauthorised migration, transit, residency within the Schengen area, financial help, and caregiving. By analysing these acts, the article discusses scholarly debates on citizenship regarding who enjoys the right to stay and access social rights in Europe and humanitarian ideals of ‘saving lives’ of migrants threatened by deportation. The article show that citizen humanitarians use digital acts to carry out borderwork that were depended on and enabled by weak social ties. These practices fostered communities between citizen humanitarians and enabled them to claim rights for themselves and others. Based on the analysis, I develop the term ‘digital citizen humanitarianism’, which allows us to be more precise about different forms of citizen humanitarianism facilitated by the digital.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen humanitarianism
• digital networks
• borderwork
• acts of citizenship
• digital citizen humanitarianism

Introduction

Since 2015, informal solidarity practices with migrants in Europe have challenged citizenship criteria by questioning who counts as an insider/outsider and ideas of borders (Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016; Sandberg and Andersen 2020; Della Porta 2018). Studies have emphasised how informal migrant solidarity networks are shaped and transformed by digital practices (Sandberg et al. 2022; Jumbert 2021) and that solidarity practices and migration cannot be separated from the techno-digital actors that enable it (Galis, Jørgensen, and Sandberg 2022). Other studies have emphasised how social movements and activists operate in the digital sphere by looking at visual aesthetics and how digital protests emerge, connect, and challenge authorities (Tufekci 2017; McGarry et al. 2019). Following these debates, this article explores how ordinary citizens use the digital space to challenge ideas of citizenship, borders, and migration control. I argue that digital acts enable citizen humanitarians to engage in forms of borderwork. They do this by engaging in digital acts of sharing, connecting, and witnessing that is developed in, and depend on, weak social ties. In the analysis, I demonstrate that engaging in these forms of digital borderwork results in new communities primarily consisting of citizen humanitarians connected via weak ties, enabling them to claim rights for themselves and others.

This article offers new insight into the digital practices of informal support to migrants¹ in Europe, by analysing how informal support to migrants is extended through the internet and discussing how we can conceptualise such acts. The study draws on digital observations of informants’ Facebook profiles and three different chat groups, alongside semi-structured interviews and one field visit with two informants who supported a migrant. The citizen humanitarians, who are informants in this study ,² offer personalised support to migrants from Afghanistan who have been rejected asylum in Norway. Support includes facilitating unauthorised migration, transit, residency within the Schengen area, financial help, and caregiving. In the view of the citizen humanitarians, they save migrants’ lives because they fear forced return of migrants to Afghanistan will be dangerous and potentially life-threatening. Hence, central to this article is how citizen humanitarians use digital acts and citizen-privileges to prevent the deportation of migrants, based on humanitarian ideals of protecting migrants from suffering.

In this article I use the concept, ‘citizen humanitarianism’ which contrasts traditional forms of humanitarian action as it involves ‘ordinary’ citizens extending support (Jumbert and Pascucci 2021). The language of humanitarianism is relevant because it speaks of informants’ moral imperatives to extend support: a conviction that a shared humanity brings an obligation to help those in need. However, apolitical humanitarian action can also victimise subjects and lead to the depoliticization of issues and the reproduction of power asymmetries (Fassin 2012). Inspired by other studies that explore digital practices of informal citizen humanitarianism (Sandberg and Andersen 2020), this article moves on from focusing on the critique and deconstruction of humanitarian action. Instead, I explore digital citizen humanitarian practices, how they evolve, and how they bring about change.

In combination, the analysis draws upon ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin 2008, 2009). With this approach, citizenship is understood not only as a legal status but also how citizenship is performed through acts (Isin 2009, 18). By focusing on the acts of citizenship, we can understand the acts of non-citizens as political subjects with an agency in society and, at the same time, acts extended by already citizens who support migrants (Rygiel 2011). Further, ‘acts of citizenship’ challenge the binary notion of citizenship as members/non-members of a nation-state: citizenship involves social rights and solidarity for those on the inside and simultaneous exclusion for non-members. Through the analysis I show that citizen humanitarians challenge this binary notion of citizenship by using digital acts. This entail that they utilize privileges as citizens of a nation-state to claim the rights of those excluded. They claim that the migrants have a right to stay in Europe, seek asylum and live. Indeed, they use their own rights to claim the migrants’ ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 2004). Focusing on ‘acts’ that subjects do, such as claiming rights, causing rupture or change, allows us to see subjects as political subjects regardless of their legal status. This relates to the Foucauldian notion of ‘subjects of power’: when a subject submits to authority as a citizen who recognises rights and regulations and simultaneously becomes a subject of power by being able to disobey authority and perform acts that challenge such regulations (Isin and Ruppert 2020, 11).

The analysis demonstrates how citizen humanitarians use the digital acts of ‘connecting’, ‘sharing’ and ‘witnessing’ to connect weak social ties and perform borderwork. As explored more in-depth below, these three digital acts (sharing, witnessing, and connecting) are ways subjects can act through the internet as ‘digital citizens’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020). The analysis first shows how informants perform borderwork by using digital acts of sharing, witnessing, and connecting. Then, I show how the same three digital acts are essential aspects of how informants connect ‘weak ties’. To clarify these concepts: with ‘weak ties’, I refer to how the weakness or strength of social ties depends on ‘the time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterise the tie’ (Granovetter 1973, 1361). Research on digital migration networks shows that social media facilitate and nurture weak ties and create information sharing between migrants and non-migrants (Dekker and Engbersen 2014). The second concept, ‘borderwork’, refers to how civil society can challenge, create, or subvert different types of borders (Rumford 2008). ‘Borders’ are understood not only as territorial ‘lines in the sand’ but as manifold and performative (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012). Borders do not need to be recognised by all to exist, and they are not experienced equally by all. To paraphrase Chris Rumford: ‘What constitutes a border to some (the migrants) is a gateway to others (citizen humanitarians)’ (2006, 159). For citizen humanitarians, the Schengen area consists of opportunities and is ‘without borders’. For the migrants, the same geographical space is confined by external borders and filled with intangible, less visible borders they must challenge to stay.

Drawing on and combining the above outlined concepts, I explore and nuance debates on citizen humanitarianism, borderwork and acts of citizenship. I discuss acts of citizenship by European citizens on behalf of others and by asking: whose citizenship rights do the informants in this study claim the rights on behalf of, their own or the migrants’ rights? I argue that citizen humanitarians use digital acts to exercise their privileges as citizens with their rights to protest, assemble and free speech while simultaneously claiming that migrants should have the ‘right to have rights’. Furthermore, I demonstrate practices of digital borderwork: showing how citizen humanitarians use the internet to utilise weak ties, and digital acts of sharing, witnessing, and connecting, which is needed to organise and sustain digital networks and to claim rights. Last, I argue that by focusing on how citizen humanitarians perform digital acts, we can explore new aspects of citizen humanitarianism, which I present as ‘digital citizen humanitarianism’.

The article proceeds as follows: First I explore the analytical concepts: ‘citizen humanitarianism’, ‘acts of citizenship’/‘digital acts’ and ‘borderwork’. Second, I present the methodology. Third, the findings show how citizen humanitarians do borderwork through the internet using digital acts of sharing, witnessing, and connecting. Then I demonstrate the emergence and sustaining of digital networks with weak social ties and how citizen humanitarians use the digital to claim rights for themselves and others. Last, I discuss the need for digital citizen humanitarianism as a term and argue that this term allows us to be precise about how digital acts facilitate different forms of citizen humanitarianism.

Citizen humanitarianism, acts of citizenship and borderwork

Scholars studying pro-migrant citizen-led support emerging after the so-called 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ have pointed out how this support takes various forms and uses various labels to describe them.³ The notion of ‘subversive humanitarianism’ is relevant here because it describes how acts primarily motivated by humanitarian ideals go against the will of authorities and immigration policies (Vandevoordt 2019). As noted, this study uses the term ‘citizen humanitarianism’ (Jumbert and Pascucci 2021), which differs from traditional understandings of humanitarian action involving professional aid organisations, neutrality principles and assistance with ‘biological’ suffering such as medical aid in crises and emergencies. With citizen humanitarianism the relationship between volunteers and migrants is altered as it can facilitate caring for biographical life: humanitarian assistance goes beyond immediate life-saving support and include giving those helped a future (Brun 2016).

Using the concept of citizen humanitarianism begs the question of how it seen in relation to other concepts such as solidarity and political activism. Solidarity is a multifaceted concept: as a pre-established and exclusive community and a broader type of solidarity that arises through the mediation of differences concerning legal status, class, race, and gender, as well as political positions (Schwiertz and Schwenken 2020, 408). Political activism is associated with a temporal focus on the future: aiming to work for a different future and demand legal, political, or cultural change (Vandevoordt and Fleischmann 2021). However, as Della Porta and Steinhilper (2021) argue: a focus on disciplinary distinctions between humanitarian action, activism, and social movements can divert attention from their actual meaning and practices. Hence, in citizen humanitarianism, politics may be a part of the underlying motivations; however, these practices rely on the ideals of siding with the most vulnerable. Recognising this hybridity, I apply the concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin 2008, 2009) to analyse citizen humanitarians’ acts of solidarity with migrants. The language of citizenship draws attention to the binary aspect of citizenship and the privileges that already citizens have in relation to non-citizen migrants who are territorially present in the same space, city, or community (Rygiel 2011). Moreover, as Schwiertz and Schwenken point out: ‘acts of solidarity by citizens belonging to the dominant society may facilitate an extension of citizenship, too’ (2020, 416).

Further, I see ‘acts of citizenship’ connected to ‘digital acts’: which describe how subjects act through the internet and become ‘digital citizens’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020). According to Isin and Ruppert, subjects can become digital citizens when they claim opening rights for themselves or others. They can do this by acting through the internet as subjects of power by 1) claiming legal rights (civil, social, or political), 2) acting performatively (protest, resist), and 3) declaring their notion of what citizenship entails (Isin and Ruppert 2020, 21–22). Citizen humanitarians in this study claim ‘opening rights’ for migrants (inclusion, right to life, security) but also claim and use their civil rights as citizens (protest, assemble, free speech and travel). According to Isin and Ruppert (2020), opening rights (human rights, social justice, equality, and acceptance) stand against closing rights (discrimination, racism, exclusion of minorities).

Isin and Ruppert (2020) present different digital acts for analysing how subjects enact themselves as digital citizens. I discuss three digital acts in this analysis: connecting, sharing, and witnessing. Connecting involves social interactions and how subjects use the internet to connect by joining groups, chatting, emailing, and messaging. Sharing is where a subject uses a digital platform and tools to share information, provide transparency and expose issues. Witnessing is both a political act that involves judging what is just and unjust as well as an ethical act. I see these acts as connected, related, and often used simultaneously.

Digital acts are transversal, not confined to the internet as a space separate from the offline physical world. An essential element here is that digital acts can traverse national borders and legal orders in unprecedented ways meaning that although national and regional legislation regulate the internet, digital acts can cross national and international borders (Isin and Ruppert 2020). This ‘moveability’ of digital acts is relevant because the analysis demonstrates how the location of people and their digital acts (that traverse digital and physical spaces) enable migrants to navigate physically.

In what follows I use the concept ‘borderwork’ and how this is enacted through the internet. Therefore, I also refer to it as ‘digital acts of borderwork’. Chris Rumford (2008) describes borderwork as how ordinary people carry out acts of citizenship by constructing and contesting borders throughout Europe. Borderwork emphasises borders’ performative aspect of how citizens, non-citizens and civil society make, challenge, and subvert borders. By looking at borders as ‘performed’, it ‘injects movement, dynamism, and fluidity into the study of what are otherwise often taken to be static entities’ (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 729). Balibars (2004) ‘borders are everywhere’ thesis offers fruitful understandings of borders in this regard, pointing out how borders can exist at multiple sites, mean different things to different people, and have different effects on different groups. Notably, ‘humanitarian borders’ (Pallister-Wilkins 2022) offer contextual and conceptual insights into how borders, borderwork, and humanitarianism are connected and create tension between humanitarian concerns and security concerns of controlling borders. Pallister-Wilkins point out how humanitarian responses to violent border controls and unequal mobility also reproduce injustice and depoliticise violent border regimes because humanitarian responses are based on global inequality and connected to colonial history and white supremacy.

Methodology

The data collection consisted of three parts: First, 29 semi-structured interviews, conducted in the spring of 2020, focused on how informants started helping, how they helped, their personal history, motivation, legality, challenges, relations with migrants, and reflections. Informants’ digital practices emerged organically as topics of discussion in interviews. Second, I visited two informants who were not relationally close but had maintained a connection digitally because they both had a strong relationship with the migrant they helped. The field visit was important as it was the only time, I could observe informants physically and in contact with each other and migrants. Last, using digital ethnography (Hine 2020) I observed the informants’ personal Facebook profiles and the activities of three chat groups. Two of the chat groups were support groups for migrants who, after leaving Norway, had travelled to Paris. The last group was not a real-time observation but a log from a chat group initially set up to facilitate unauthorised migration. The digital observations of these chat groups allowed me to capture the online meaning-making of informants (Hine 2020) as they were developing weak ties and conducting borderwork. To avoid ethical issues concerning storage and collection of online data, I wrote fieldnotes of digital observations resulting in 48 pages of written notes.

I recruited informants using the snowball method. Informants were Norwegian, Danish, and German citizens who supported migrants that had been rejected asylum in Norway. Most informants started their solidarity work after the influx of migrants to Norway in 2015. After Norway introduced stringent asylum policies, mainly aimed at Afghan nationals (Brekke and Staver 2018), many informants experienced that the Afghan asylum seekers they supported received rejected asylum claims. Thus, informants supported rejected asylum seekers even though their activities were potentially illegal (Rabe and Haddeland 2021). The study does not include the digital practices that connect migrants and informants. One reason for this is due to COVID-19 restrictions which made it impossible to travel and meet migrants who lived in various European countries. Having only digital connections with migrants was not an option because of language barriers, privacy, and anonymity concerns.

The first step of the analysis was a close reading of all the data, followed by coding. Then, I consolidated codes into four themes: opposition to authorities, compassion/morals, purpose/justice, and digital networks/practices. After that, I explored one of the emerging themes: digital networks/practices. I reflected on how the analytical concepts of ‘citizen humanitarianism’ and ‘acts of citizenship’ would help analyse this material. I identified specific categories of digital practices by connecting them to theory: ‘borderwork’ (Rumford 2008) and ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter 1973) alongside examples from the data of the digital acts of ‘witnessing’, ‘sharing’ and ‘connecting’ (Isin and Ruppert 2020).

Digital acts of borderwork

In this section, I demonstrate how citizen humanitarians engage in digital acts of sharing, connecting, and witnessing and how these acts enable citizen humanitarians to undermine various types of borders, which I refer to as ‘borderwork’. Through the analysis, I show that by acting through the internet, with these three types of digital acts, citizen humanitarians do subversive forms of borderwork that would not have been possible otherwise. I highlight three types of borders that citizen humanitarians challenge through the internet: legal, territorial, and economic.

The first type of border that I discuss here is the legal borders that citizen humanitarians challenge: because the migrants do not have legal membership as citizens, their mere presence territorially challenges legal borders set up to exclude them from society. Hence, by using digital acts to help migrants evade deportation citizen humanitarians challenge legal borders set up to exclude migrants. Additionally, because of the criminalisation of facilitating unauthorised migration, transit, and residency within the Schengen area (Carrera et al. 2019), citizen humanitarians also challenge the borders set up to hinder those who facilitate unauthorised migration. One way that citizen humanitarians challenge these legal borders is by engaging in digital acts of connecting in closed chat groups. Connecting involves social interactions and how subjects use the internet to connect by joining groups, chatting, emailing, and messaging (Isin and Ruppert 2020). Informant ‘Astrid’ described in interview how digital acts of connecting enabled subversive act that challenge legal borders:

‘I was in an online forum with others who shared frustration and astonishment at our politicians. Then I realised that we could do something to help them out of Norway. There were more and more of the migrants I helped out. Four of the migrants who were here are now together in Spain. I operated secretly on the internet, where I had a large network of contacts. It is trust between us that helped. For example, I transferred money to a wild stranger in Germany. But it was ok, I knew it would arrive safely. I counted and found that I have sent 16 boys out of Norway’.

By stating: ‘I have sent … ’, Astrid can be said to downplay the agency of the migrant, revealing how she portrays herself as a facilitator of migrants’ journey. Moreover, Astrid describes how she intentionally use digital acts to challenge legal borders set up to exclude migrants from society and the legal border of criminalising acts of helping migrants, set up to deter the facilitation of unauthorised migration. And, as Astrid points out, these acts depend on, and are enabled by, connecting citizen humanitarians with weak social ties.

The second type of border citizen humanitarians challenge is territorial borders. I observed this, particularly in closed chat groups, where citizen humanitarians with weak social ties connected to facilitate migrants’ journeys. They helped migrants evade deportation from Norway, apply for asylum in other countries or live as irregular migrants in Europe. In one chat group, I observed how a Norwegian citizen helped a young migrant evade deportation by driving him from Norway to Sweden and buying him a train ticket to Copenhagen. From there, the migrant travelled via Copenhagen to Hamburg and finally reached Paris. The log from the chat group shows that citizen humanitarians with weak ties are added to the group to facilitate the migrant’s journey. It also shows that the citizen humanitarians use the chat group to share information that helps the migrant travel and that they use the chat group for witnessing the injustice they perceive is inflicted on the migrant. Sharing describes how a subject use digital platforms and tools to share information, provide transparency and expose issues (Isin and Ruppert 2020).

‘Mette’, a Danish informant, was added to the group via a ‘Facebook-acquittance’ who asked her to help the migrant. Once the migrant arrived in Copenhagen, Mette shared a picture of him arriving in Denmark. Other members of the groups commented by saying how much they cared for the migrant, that he was only a child in their eyes and that he deserved to be taken care of. These can be said to be acts of witnessing as it involves judging what is just and unjust as well as it involves an ethical act (Isin and Ruppert 2020). After meeting the migrant, Mette purchased a train ticket for him from Denmark to Germany. The migrant got on the train to Germany, while the citizen humanitarians located in different European cities discussed how the migrant could best travel onward. A German man, ‘Robert’ was added to the group because he was known to have assisted several other migrants. Robert shared information on how the migrant could avoid being stopped by the police and where to meet once he arrived in Germany. While the migrant travelled from Norway, via Denmark and Germany, to Paris, the citizen humanitarians used the chat group to share outrage with authorities and sympathy with the migrant. Hence, enabled by weak ties, the citizen humanitarians challenge territorial borders; they connect and share information that helps the migrant to travel. Also, they witness the migrant’s journey and experience of injustice, and they share ideals of moral imperatives to help others.

The third type of border that I highlight is the economic borders that citizen humanitarians challenge: they transfer money to migrants which enable non-citizen migrants to circumvent economic borders set up to exclude them. For the informants, who lived in Norway, sending remittances was one way to alleviate the migrants’ situation, however, due to the migrants’ legal status, they could not send money directly to them. Thus, citizen humanitarians used closed chat groups to send monthly remittances. ‘Maria’, lived in Paris, where many of the migrants also lived. In a chat group, Maria became the link between a particular migrant who lived in Paris and citizen humanitarians who wanted to support him but lived elsewhere. Regularly, Maria used the digital act of sharing to update the group on how the migrant was doing, emphasising that he was struggling economically, emotionally and with his health. These are acts of witnessing that create sympathy and speak of the injustice inflicted upon the migrant. After Maria informed the group about the migrant’s situation, they all agreed that they needed to send him money and discussed how much money he needed. This was often a monthly happening, where the citizen humanitarians transferred money to Maria, who then met the migrant and gave him the money. By using digital acts to witness the struggles of a migrant living in another country, Maria calls upon the shared moral imperatives of citizen humanitarians to care for other human beings. In extension of this, the citizen humanitarians collect money with the intention of facilitating the migrants’ ability to live and access necessary items for survival.

Another way that citizen humanitarians transferred money was by providing migrants with credit cards. In the second observed chat group economic transfers was done by providing a migrant who lived in Paris with a credit card, which was legally in the name of one of the citizen humanitarians. They could, therefore, quickly transfer money to the migrant without being physically present in France. The field visit in Spain uncovered a similar process: ‘Anne’, a Norwegian citizen, provided a migrant who lived in Spain with her own credit card. It was convenient; she said, because she could follow his transfers and use of money by logging into the online banking from Norway.

In Europe, migrants without legal residency cannot easily access credit cards due to regulations from banks and the need for migrants to have legal visa documents. Hence, using their privilege as legal citizens to access credit cards and hand them over to migrants, citizen humanitarians subverted legal and economic borders. They did this by connecting weak ties through the internet and sharing information that also witnessed the suffering of migrants and their need for economic assistance. Hence, what is shown in the above analysis is how digital acts enable informants to do borderwork that challenge legal, territorial, and economic borders. These acts are subversive and allow citizen humanitarians to become subjects of power capable of subverting the authorities’ will. Hence, with the help of digital acts, citizen humanitarians show how borderwork is a form of ‘people power’ in civil society and that civil society in this regard may play a role in global politics (Rumford 2008, 7). In the following two sections, I demonstrate how this borderwork creates digital communities with a shared sense of belonging between citizen humanitarians and how they use digital acts to claim rights for themselves and others.

Creating community

As demonstrated in the previous section; informants engaged in digital acts that enabled borderwork. In this section I show how this borderwork created a community and networks with ‘weak social ties’ that traverse borders. Also, I point out how ‘connecting’ ‘sharing’ and ‘witnessing’ are essential elements of how these digital networks with weak social ties emerge and sustain. Importantly, using digital acts to connect citizen humanitarians with weak social ties that were geographically separated created feelings of belonging and a sense of community. Arguably, this aspect of connecting weak ties through digital acts demonstrate how the digital enable specific features of citizen humanitarianism.

In interviews, citizen humanitarians expressed their understanding that their support to migrants counters the political and administrative system and opposes the rest of society. They felt other people, with whom they had close social relations, did not recognise the injustice that they saw and disagreed with them. However, with the digital act of connecting and sharing, citizen humanitarians used the internet to engage in a community with likeminded people. Informant ‘Sonja’ explained:

‘I don’t have many people around me who care as much as I do about these issues. But on Facebook, I do. With people on Facebook, I share my engagement. They are more like me’.

Sonja describes a specific feature of how connecting as a digital act differs from connecting physically and in turn this demonstrate how digital acts facilitate specific features of citizen humanitarianism that would not have been possible otherwise. Moreover, digital observations, uncovered how citizen humanitarians, recruited at different stages and through different processes, turned out to know each other through Facebook, highlighting the importance of weak ties in these networks. An example was ‘Louise’ a Norwegian woman who posted a picture of herself and two Afghan migrants together in Germany. In the commentsection below her picture, I noticed that Robert, the German citizen who was also active in the chat group described above, commented on her picture. Robert shared that he was grateful for the support she gave the migrants. Louise and Robert had been recruited separately, had no physical contact and they lived in different countries. Similarly, I observed that other citizen humanitarians, who only knew each other digitally, connected by sharing humanitarian ideals and witnessing the perceived injustice that migrants experienced. They did this by expressing outrage regarding migration policies by either posting on their own Facebook pages or by liking and commenting each other Facebook posts.

Migrants benefitted from these connections because citizen humanitarians with weak ties could cooperate on giving them practical support. The field visit in Spain clarified this: ‘Anne’ was a Norwegian grandmother who met a young Afghan migrant at a reception centre in Norway where she was volunteering in 2015. Anne arranged for him to go to Spain when he was refused asylum in Norway. She hoped he could circumvent the Dublin regulation and apply for asylum in Spain. However, upon arrival in Spain, he had difficulties finding somewhere to live. Anne then contacted ‘Thomas’, whom she connected with through a mutual Facebook- friend. Thomas, a Norwegian citizen who lived in Spain, offered to provide accommodation to the migrant. Initially, Anne had reservations about sending the migrant to a middle-aged man she only knew digitally. However, she had no other choice. At the time of the field visit, four years after their first contact through Facebook, the migrant was still living with Thomas, and Thomas and Anne met for the first time physically. Over the years Anne and Thomas had cooperated on helping the migrant apply for work, helping him with health-issues and apply for residency permit in Spain.

Sharing humanitarian values and witnessing injustice gives those involved a sense of belonging, strengthening the connections and making them endure. Considering that citizen humanitarians live in different geographical areas and mainly connect via weak social ties, these acts of sharing and witnessing are specific features of how digital acts enable connections between citizen humanitarians to sustain and endure. In her analysis of digital activism, Zeynep Tufekci points to how weak social ties ‘can maintain relationships that were never strong, to begin with, and relationships that, without digital assistance, might have withered away or involved much less contact’ (2017, 21). While Tufekci points out how weak ties enabled political activism, the findings here show that digital acts enable support based on personal moral sentiments of compassion rather than primarily on political motivations.

Claiming rights

With digital acts of borderwork and utilizing weak ties, citizen humanitarians are not only creating a community based on humanitarian ideals, but they also claim their civil rights and rights on behalf of migrants. This, I argue, is because the citizen humanitarians feared the migrants would be exposed to danger and inhumane treatment if they returned to Afghanistan. In this section I point out how the informants believed that by helping the migrants to stay in Europe, they claimed the migrants’ right to a secure future and to avoid suffering. Additionally, through their digital acts they demonstrate how they claim their civil rights to free speech, protest, and assembly. Furthermore, in this section I also explore how these digital acts instigate questions of potential audiences and how this is a specific feature of digital citizen humanitarianism.

Despite the potential criminalisation of acts of support extended by citizen humanitarians in this study (Rabe and Haddeland 2021), they used digital acts to help migrants evade deportation and enable them to stay. They did this because they saw themselves doing the morally right thing: saving the lives of migrants. The reason for believing that they acted ‘morally right’, and not necessarily ‘legally right’, was in the case of helping Afghan migrants based on a belief that the migrants would be exposed to danger if returned to Kabul. The informant ‘Kristin’ stated:

‘They will be sent back as internally displaced persons to Kabul. One of the world’s most terror-prone cities. A city that very few migrants have any connection to - in a country where relationships are essential for survival’.

The reasoning of doing the ‘right’, but not necessarily ‘legal’, relates to the concept of legal consciousness, used to explore the connection between formal legislation and how people perceive law and legality (Ewick and Silbey 1998). Scholarly debates on the criminalisation of migration have pointed out how bordering practices are contested from ‘below’ (Squire 2010), which is what the findings here demonstrate. Protesting and resisting authorities based on a belief that they are saving lives can also be seen as ‘subversive humanitarianism’ (Vandevoordt 2019) in that these acts do not intentionally set out to break the law but end up doing so due to humanitarian values.

Many observed citizen humanitarians used their Facebook profiles to share pictures of anonymised migrants, showcasing their suffering. This could include pictures of dead bodies, overcrowded reception camps or migrants they knew needed help. While such acts appeal to a sense of common humanity and shared moral responsibility to care for others, it is also a protest and opposition to current policies that cause the suffering of migrants. Hence, the right to openly protest and oppose politics through sharing and witnessing is one of the ways that citizen humanitarians utilise their civil rights. With these acts, citizen humanitarians demonstrate how they used sharing and witnessing to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, aiming to cause change or rupture in society.

Furthermore, using digital acts of sharing and witnessing instigate questions concerning visibility. Because posting pictures of the suffering and injustice of migrants on Facebook does not directly help the injustice inflicted upon the migrants, it is relevant to explore whether citizen humanitarians use digital acts aiming to reach an audience outside their network. I observed ‘Amanda’, a German woman, who regularly shared pictures of the tragic circumstances of migrants in the Mediterranean, including dead bodies, suffering and injustice. Sometimes, she captioned the pictures with a ‘trigger warning’ writing that people who wanted to live in ignorance should not look at her posts because they revealed the truth about the inhumane migration policies of the EU. It is relevant here to question whom Amanda aimed to reach with her posts, as she writes that others who want to live lives in ignorance should not look at her posts. With this statement, she recognises that her digital acts may reach a larger audience outside her network of citizen humanitarians. As Sharon Sliwinski argue: how we choose to present images of those less fortunate can affect how we judge people to be deserving of compassion or rights such as human dignity: ‘Human dignity is not innate but depends on the vicissitudes of human judgement’ (Sliwinski 2009, 25). Also, the potential of reaching an audience with messages of shared humanity and injustice is arguably different when using digital acts compared to calling out injustice in a physical space, such as a graffiti on a concrete wall calling out for rights of migrants in Europe. Mercea and Levy (2019, 233) point out that visibility can be a ‘subaltern tactic employed to reverse an asymmetry of power' for protesters who use digital acts.’

When using personal Facebook pages to communicate openly on social media it can suggest that citizen humanitarians perceive their rights to freedom of speech and protest not to be endangered or restricted. Instead, they exercise their right to freedom of speech to claim rights on behalf of those who are excluded. Moreover, they use the internet to protest injustice, challenge ideas of who belongs in society, and justify and explain their moral reasoning for subverting official authorities. Hence, with these digital acts of sharing, witnessing, and connecting, citizen humanitarians show how they are ‘subjects of power’ by protesting and resisting immigration policies and challenging ideas concerning the rights of non-citizens who are territorially present in Europe.

It is important to note that citizen humanitarians can claim rights without the digital and that digital acts are only parts of how they cause change and rupture in society. However, what I have demonstrated is how citizen humanitarians claim the rights of themselves and others by using digital acts. And, as I elaborate on below, I argue that based on this analysis, we can benefit from using the term ‘digital citizen humanitarianism’ which provides nuanced terminology for the digital aspects of citizen humanitarianism.

Digital citizen humanitarianism

The term ‘digital citizen humanitarianism’ is introduced here as helpful when we seek to investigate how already citizens, motivated by humanitarian ideals, act through the internet to support non-citizen migrants. Arguably there is a need for such a term, distinct from ‘digital citizen’, ‘citizen humanitarianism’ and ‘digital humanitarianism’. First, digital citizens capture a wide range of actors of political subjects that claim rights for themselves or others, including migrants and citizen humanitarians. Second, citizen humanitarianism does not capture how the digital sphere enables certain aspects of citizen humanitarianism. Third, digital humanitarianism is not precise in describing these acts’ informal and citizen-led aspects. With the term, digital humanitarianism, one could also include the digital acts of professionalised NGOs, which is not what this article is about.

Thus, digital citizen humanitarianism provides terminology that nuance how citizen humanitarianism is practised in digital spheres and sheds light on how individuals use the internet to perform acts of citizenship. That said, digital citizen humanitarianism is not isolated and separated from the physical sphere. Indeed, the help that citizen humanitarians extend is, in many cases, physical: when giving migrants a place to live, meeting them to hand over money, helping them on their way through Europe or guiding them with asylum applications. Nevertheless, as Bak Jørgensen and Galis have pointed out that ‘ … solidarity cannot be separated from the techno-digital actors that enable it. Therefore, we also reach a wider and fluid understanding of solidary acts and alliances that is sociotechnical’ (2022, 7).

So, in what way do the digital acts enable informal support to migrants that would not have been possible otherwise? Based on the analysis, I propose three ways. First, digital acts enable citizen humanitarians to carry out borderwork (exemplified by challenging legal, economic, and territorial borders), which would not have been possible otherwise. These types of digital acts of borderwork are dependent on, and enabled by, weak social ties.

Second, the digital borderwork create a sense of belonging and community between citizen humanitarians with weak social ties who share humanitarian ideals. Also, digital borderwork and utilisation of weak ties enable citizen humanitarians to claim rights on behalf of themselves and others, which would not be possible without digital acts. Due to globalisation, digital communication, and global migration, citizen humanitarians can experience a sense of belonging to a global civil society (Castells 2008). Isin and Turner (2009) speak of an abstract community of humanity where cosmopolitan citizens could experience human rights, one that is mainly open to those engaged in NGOs at a local level. As such, it can be possible to imagine that digital citizen humanitarianism might enable a digital ‘borderless’ community of shared humanitarian ideals. That said, such processes also entail the reproduction of inequality, depoliticization of violent borders and power-structures that is embedded in humanitarian borderwork (Pallister-Wilkins 2022). Hence, with digital citizen humanitarianism we need to consider how such practices reproduce critical aspects such as inequality produced by digital surveillance, unequal access to technology and the effects of less visible, violent, digital borders.

Third, analysing digital acts of citizen humanitarians highlights the potential of new audiences specific to the digital sphere. When sharing and witnessing injustice on their open Facebook profiles, citizen humanitarians reach other Facebook friends who might share their posts. For citizen humanitarians who seek online visibility, such practices can be a way to justify their actions and showcase the migrants’ rights to stay in Europe, rights to dignity and life. Particularly, when they use visual images to expose injustice or call for compassion with the migrants, it can affect whom we (as an audience) judge as worthy of compassion and whom we judge to be entitled to human rights. As Sliwinski points out: ‘Visual images, are aesthetic judgments: although not directly political demands, they provide an affective climate, a “prepolitical foundation” that can give rise to the thought of human rights – or better, to the thought of the “one human right”: a right to the human condition’ (2009, 37). Hence, by using of digital acts to share ideals and witness injustice citizen humanitarians can reach an audience and potentially influence their judgement concerning the migrants’ ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt 2004). By claiming the migrants’ ‘right to have rights’, they demonstrate their legal consciousness: they are doing the right thing, even though their acts can be deemed criminal.

Conclusion

This article analyses the digital practices of already citizens who extend support to rejected asylum seekers in conversation with scholarly debates on citizen humanitarianism, borderwork and performative citizenship. The article show that citizen humanitarians use digital acts to carry out borderwork that were depended on and enabled by weak social ties. These practices fostered communities between citizen humanitarians and enabled them to claim rights for themselves and others. In this light, the digital acts of citizen humanitarians aim to counter perceived injustice and take the side of the people suffering it, thwarting those believed to cause it. These digital acts are examples of what I present as ‘digital citizen humanitarianism’: a term that allows us to be precise about different forms of citizen humanitarianism enabled by the digital.

The article adds to existing debates on how acts of citizenship are performed by already citizens, on behalf of others, by exploring the underlying question concerning which citizenship the citizen humanitarians are enacting: their own or that of migrants? The digital acts discussed here are ones claiming rights for others (for migrants) and rights for citizen humanitarians themselves. First, citizen humanitarians claimed rights for migrants. The informants acted on their behalf, fearing they would be exposed to danger and inhumane treatment if returned. By helping the migrants to stay in Europe, citizen humanitarians claimed their human right to a secure future and to avoid suffering. Second, through digital acts, citizen humanitarians also claimed civil and political rights to freedom of speech, assembly, protest, and resistance. They exercise their rights as a part of European civil society by using digital acts to protect migrants from the perceived dangers of being deported and, at the same time, also claim their right to act when experiencing injustice. Such ideas call upon the conventional critique of humanitarian action: describing migrants as victims and humanitarian action as apolitical leads to depoliticization and reproduction of power asymmetries (Fassin 2012), that helping others as a ‘humanitarian right’, is connected to ‘imperialist strategies of policing the world’ (Balibar 2013), and that humanitarian action is connected to colonial history, white saviourism and white guilt (Pallister-Wilkins 2022).

Although digital acts performed by citizen humanitarians raise questions of potential power asymmetries and white guilt, they do not tell us about how the migrants themselves use digital acts or how they interact with citizen humanitarians online. As the chat groups analysed in this article do not discuss the migrants’ ability to travel by themselves, it is essential to mention the migrants’ agency at this point. Arguably migrants’ ability to create their futures by challenging borders and legal orders should not be underestimated (De Genova 2017). Irregularised migrants have been proven to be resourceful when exercising mobility and challenging borders (Squire 2010). Previous studies have contributed to such views by looking at how the use of digital technologies influences migrants’ travel methods, how they challenge borders (Tazzioli 2018; Stavinoha 2019) and also how using technology can involve risks of exploitation and surveillance (Gillespie, Osseiran, and Cheesman 2018). However, the focus of this article is not that of the migrants’ agency but that of the citizen humanitarians, their relations and use of digital acts. Thus, when citizen humanitarians use digital acts to facilitate unauthorised migration, it does not erase migrants’ agency. However, digital citizen humanitarianism makes it easier for migrants to move within the Schengen area and removes the need for citizen humanitarians to move physically when facilitating migration. Using digital acts, citizen humanitarians potentially face less risk of potentially being prosecuted for facilitation of unauthorised migration.

That said, this article has sought to move on from critique and deconstruction of humanitarian action. Instead, the focus has been the relations between citizen humanitarians and how their digital acts potentially alter and nuance our understandings of informal, citizen-led support to migrants. Finally, the findings of this study are only aspects and elements of how digital acts can add to our understanding of citizen humanitarianism. Other studies might find additional aspects of how citizen humanitarianism is practised digitally to challenge citizenship regimes. Digital citizen humanitarianism can therefore be understood as digital acts of citizenship performed by individuals who share humanitarian ideals and act on behalf of the most vulnerable in society.

Ethical considerations

All necessary ethical approvals for the data collected in this study have been approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. The migrants described in this article are young, single Afghan men who were denied asylum in Norway. However, many had travelled to other European countries, circumventing the Dublin regulation. Hence, most migrants described had various types and sometimes uncertain legal statuses. The term ‘migrant’ is apt because it describes anyone who has left their residence, irrespective of the reason. It avoids reproducing the migrant-refugee dichotomy, which frames migrants as ‘undesirable leftovers’ (Carling 2017).

2. The informants in this study are referred to as citizen humanitarians because their support not only exists in the digital sphere but traverse digital and physical spaces. However, how they use the internet as citizen humanitarians is what I call digital citizen humanitarianism. That said, I use the term informants in the methods section.

3. Different terms are used to describe informal support to migrants, such as ‘volunteer-humanitarianism’ (Sandri 2018) or ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ as small-scale and less organised modes of helping in everyday life (Brković 2020).