Contesting the deportation state? Political change aspirations in protests against forced returns

Deportation of immigrants is a high-ranking issue on political agendas across Europe. Political authorities, however, face a challenge regarding forced returns: affected migrants, organized activists and concerned citizens are standing up for deportees. Do these protests contest the nation state’s sovereignty, expressed in the right to carry out deportations of foreign citizens? How far-reaching are protesters’ ambitions for political changes? Based on a developed typology of change aspirations, this article explores this topic by studying anti-deportation protests in Austria. It combines qualitative data from interviews with protesters with longitudinal data covering protest events from 1993 to 2013. Expanding previous research, the study finds that protests often refrain from demanding fundamental political change, instead they demonstrate overt conformism for tactical purposes. At the same time, protesters develop grievances about deportation policies and practices in the course of protest developments – they have covert reformist ambitions.