My concepts of cosmopolitanism of dissent and post-foundational cosmopolitanism have been tested once more, this time in the migrants’ protests and resistance all over the world, such as Sans Papiers, No One Is Illegal, No Borders, A Day Without Us marches, migrant protests related to Lampedusa and Calais camps, anti-deportation campaigns and others. Since these actions were taking place all over the world and the ‘content’ of their claims – such as ‘No One Is Illegal’ or ‘No Borders No Nations’ – sounded radically cosmopolitan, it became imperative for me to study migrants’ protests. Apart from testing the concepts once more, I had one more crucial motive to study migrants’ movements: to test the hypothesis, deduced from Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism born in the condition of exile and statelessness, that migration and cosmopolitanism are consubstantial and, therefore, every approach of cosmopolitanism has to provide an account of migration. Consubstantiality of cosmopolitanism and migration has a structure which sounds like a syllogism: cosmopolitanism means to be a citizen of the world, with no borders. Migration means to move from one place to another. Thus, migration, without impediments, appears to be the natural starting point for a cosmopolitan view. A syllogism which turns out to be a theoretical impossibility and a scandal both for the current approaches of migration and for cosmopolitanism, and which almost shattered my two ‘novel’ concepts.

MIGRANT PROTESTS AS RADICAL COSMOPOLITICS

To re-establish the consubstantiality of cosmopolitanism and migration, the research turned from the perspective of the citizen, traditional for existing theories of migration, to the perspective of the migrant by analysing migrant protests from the last decades (Caraus 2018a, 2018b, 2018c; Caraus and Parvu 2018). As in the previous research on dissent and protests, at stake was to identify the intersection between this form of protests and cosmopolitanism: are migrants’ protests a political avant-garde, in terms of identifying new possibilities for politics? Is this avant-garde a cosmopolitan one? How are cosmopolitan subjectivities constituted through migrant protests? Is there any link between the alleged illegality of migrants and a cosmopolitan stance? As in the previous analysis of different patterns of dissent, the methodology implied a close reading of discourses produced by migrant protest movements: manifestos, declarations, websites and other texts explaining the necessity of protests.