The images of two US American citizens (Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti)) standing up in solidarity for their neighbours on the frontline of Minneapolis streets, and shot by ICE agents (e.g. military-lookalike hunt of migrants) in January 2026 brings into focus that the legal and symbolic boundary between a supposedly safe status of a citizen (who does have the right papers) and the ‘eternal migrant’ (who does not have at all or not the right papers) is violently blurred. The binary of ‘citizen vs. migrant’ does not hold in the 21^st century where transformation and globalisation have changed the social fabric in different places across the world. Black citizens and their criminalisation (e.g. remember the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement) have also illustrated for decades that the legal status of being a citizen only guaranteed relative safety and a notion of belonging to those of us who are white and privileged and not deemed ‘criminal’.

Against this hope-lessness scenario the vision of a postmigration Europe and their transnational (ising) societies across Europe and its borderland opens the debate to look beyond the binary construction of citizens and migrants.

The paper is based on the core argument developed in my monograph (‘Loss and Liquid Citizenship in Europe: the postmigration condition in an Age of Populism’, 2025) proposing that we need to deepen our conversation on the ways liquid citizenship has eroded established boundaries between these legal (and socially constructed) categories. We should positively engage with a vision of European postmigration societies. The concept of the postmigration as well as ‘liquid’ (in line with Z Bauman’s concept) will be explained while illustrating with findings of two different empirical studies how the paradox of in-between (‘liminal’) citizenship post-migration unfolds.

Europe stands at a crucial crossroads, where geopolitical tensions, digital transformation, migration governance and internal fragmentation render methodological and theoretical questions in critical European studies more urgent than ever. This paper proposes an innovative framework for understanding Europe’s evolving political, social and global dynamics by foregrounding digital border technologies as key sites of governance and contestation. Rather than viewing borders as fixed territorial lines or migration as external pressure, it conceptualises Europe as a technologically mediated political space constituted through data practices, infrastructures and everyday forms of expertise.

Drawing on securitisation theory, the paper shows how digital border systems, such as biometric databases, interoperability architectures and algorithmic risk tools, do not merely respond to security narratives but actively generate knowledge about mobility, risk and illegality. Through these systems, migrants are rendered knowable as data objects, and borders are enacted far from the physical frontier, embedded in administrative routines, police cooperation and information infrastructures. This shifts securitisation from exceptional political moments to continuous, technocratic practices, challenging core assumptions within both securitisation theory and European studies. By foregrounding the criminalisation of migration as a product of digital governance rather than solely punitive law or political rhetoric, the paper challenges dominant narratives of European border management as either humanitarian or rights-based. Instead, it shows how Europe is increasingly known and governed through preventive, risk-based and automated forms of control that blur distinctions between security, administration and law enforcement.

Methodologically, the paper combines critical security studies and European studies to propose a relational and process-oriented understanding of Europe. Europe is approached not as a bounded entity but as an assemblage of practices, infrastructures, and forms of knowledge that stretch across borders and scales. This allows for a rethinking of agency, responsibility, and power in European governance, particularly in relation to migration and mobility.

Overall, the paper contributes to critical European studies by demonstrating that contemporary border management is not simply an empirical field to be studied, but a methodological challenge that calls into question how Europe is conceptualised, analysed and critiqued. It argues that rethinking securitisation, borders and digitisation together opens new ways of knowing Europe as a dynamic, contested and technologically mediated political space.

During the Second World War, the Yugoslav refugee camp El Shatt in the Egyptian desert emerged as an unexpected spatial and political formation in which refugees organized schools, cultural life, and systems of collective care beyond the logics of emergency relief. A decade later, socialist Yugoslavia transformed the spa town of Banja Koviljača into a refuge for displaced people within the Non-Aligned Movement’s commitment to anti-colonial solidarity. Situated at Europe’s shifting geographical, political, and ideological margins, these sites, despite their internal asymmetries, materialized alternative spatial imaginaries of migration and humanitarianism grounded in internationalism, collective autonomy, and shared responsibility rather than crisis management or securitized containment. Their dismantling and marginalization produced uneven archival remains that mirror broader asymmetries in how Europe’s past and future are narrated.

This paper reads these sites as disappearing archives that unsettle dominant spatial narratives of Europe. Wartime displacement across colonial territories, non-aligned solidarities, and infrastructures of care organized outside Western humanitarian frameworks reveal how certain geopolitical positions remain unevenly incorporated into contemporary imaginaries of Europe’s past and future.

Returning to these sites through film and architecture, I argue that materiality and cultural production can function as a speculative archival practice. Ivan Ramljak’s El Shatt: A Blueprint for Utopia (2016) and the remains of the modernist Banja Koviljača refugee center mobilize archival fragments to reopen questions of how Europe might be spatially and politically otherwise. I approach these sites and related cultural productions as speculative archives, suggesting that they transform archival absence and spatial asymmetry into conditions for imagining Europe’s futures beyond fortress imaginaries, toward alternative forms of mobility, care, and solidarity.

How does political resistance persist after mass protest movements fail to achieve their immediate goals? Existing scholarship on civil resistance has focused predominantly on mobilisation, escalation and success or failure, often treating repression and demobilisation as analytical endpoints. This paper challenges that perspective by shifting attention to the afterlife of protest and examining how political agency is sustained beyond institutional politics once collective mobilisation has been violently suppressed.

The paper develops the concept of digitalized creative resistance after protest failure, understood as a set of symbolic, aesthetic and communicative practices through which oppositional actors preserve political subjectivity, collective memory and moral legitimacy in conditions of repression. Rather than disappearing, resistance is transformed: it relocates from streets to digital spaces, from mass mobilisation to dispersed and everyday practices, and from overt confrontation to creative forms of visibility and remembrance.

Empirically, the analysis draws on illustrative cases from Belarus after 2020 and Iran after the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, with a brief comparative reference to Hong Kong after 2020 as a global echo. These cases share three key features: large-scale protest mobilisation, severe repression resulting in political defeat, and the subsequent migration of resistance into digital and symbolic domains. Using online protest archives, visual materials, social media practices and digital commemorative initiatives, the paper traces how symbols, humour, gendered imagery and aesthetic narratives continue to circulate after protest failure, enabling forms of political engagement that evade institutional channels and formal participation.

Conceptually, the paper contributes to critical European Studies by rethinking political participation beyond institutional success and failure, and by questioning Eurocentric assumptions that equate political agency with formal democratic mechanisms. By foregrounding post-failure practices, the analysis highlights how resistance challenges dominant understandings of political temporality, legitimacy and visibility. Digitalized creative resistance emerges not merely as a residual or defensive strategy, but as a productive space in which new political meanings, solidarities and identities are forged.

Ultimately, the paper argues that studying resistance after failure offers a critical lens for understanding contemporary politics under authoritarian and semi-authoritarian conditions, as well as the limits of institutional approaches to political participation. In doing so, it proposes a shift from asking whether protests succeed to examining how political agency survives, adapts and reconfigures itself in hostile political environments.