“Everything Is Just Done Away With Now”: Contentious Practices of Scalar Brokerage Motivated by Narratives of Welfare Nostalgia in Postcolonial Rotterdam

Abstract

According to anthropological theories of brokerage, brokers build bridges, close gaps, make connections, and construct shared norms. In this article, I argue that such structural-functionalist approaches to brokerage do not prove adequate in addressing unsettled and unsettling scale-making practices of refugee-led support initiatives in postcolonial Europe. Refugee advocates of long-term Dutch heritage evoke narratives of nostalgia for a long-lost welfare state to motivate their commitment to social justice and for the inclusion of refugee-led initiatives. However, this article demonstrates that the alleged universality of social security in the postwar caring state is a myth and that fantasies of down-scaled local action cohere with uneasy postcolonial formations. These formations surface in everyday interactions between advocates and organizers with a forced-migration background. Organizers need the support of advocates in dealing with experiences of intersectional racism, but their dependent relationship with advocates is not devoid of power asymmetries either. Inequalities in these relationships culminate in negotiations over scale: whereas advocates are committed to downscaling refugee-led initiatives and weaving together local networks of sociality, organizers seek to upscale their initiative beyond the neighborhood and pursue social mobility. These controversies over scale echo social injustices that are bound up with postwar repair and decolonization.