Resisting, Navigating, Zig-zagging: Activists’ Challenges to and Reproductions of Power Relations in Squatting Movements for People on the Move in Brussels

By looking at practices of resistance practiced by activists in emergency housing in Brussels, this research came across an interesting, complex and unexpected practice, emically identified as ‘zig-zagging’. This was the onset of a larger qualitative investigation on ‘zig-zagging’ as a mode of resistance for activists working in a squatting movement, bearing important questions of definition, design, implementation, ethics, and pitfalls. In the complex context of the Belgian systéme d’accueil of protection seekers, actors with different goals, modes of action and powers, namely within institutional organizations and grassroot movements, weave unlikely relationships amidst often contradictory positionalities. Research participants approached ‘zig-zagging’ in different ways across their practices, employing it as a manner of describing movements that are disruptive, subtle and even illegal at times, as well as hopeful, inevitable and necessary.

Analysing the entanglements between the Belgian state, institutions and a squatting movement in Brussels from the perspective of activists allowed the exploration of ‘zig-zagging’ on different scales. This article showcases the existence of gaps, overlaps and differences that characterise state and non-state entanglements, as well as the ways in which activists overcome the shortcomings of the welfare state through creative and unpredictable manoeuvres, which can involve passing between modes of resistance in ways linked to activists’ various positionalities.