{"id":10585,"date":"2026-03-11T10:27:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T09:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/?p=10585"},"modified":"2026-03-11T10:27:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T09:27:06","slug":"migration-crisis-and-the-view-from-the-margins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/migration-crisis-and-the-view-from-the-margins\/","title":{"rendered":"Migration, \u201cCrisis,\u201d and the View from the Margins"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1974, Britain appeared to move from one crisis to the next: fuel shortages, miners\u2019 strikes, IRA bombings and rolling power cuts dominated the headlines. Politicians warned of a country on the brink. Yet from the perspective of London\u2019s migrant communities, the story looked different. What was framed as a national \u201ccrisis\u201d often appeared instead as the continuation of inequalities that had long characterized everyday life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Once we begin to read history from the margins, \u201ccrisis\u201d dissipates. It blends and dilutes into longer threads of passion, pain and protest.<\/p>\n

Dominant histories are produced through rupture. There is always a before crisis and an after crisis. Everything else falls in between and is thus determined by this divide of crisis. Take, for example, the formulaic \u201cprewar,\u201d \u201cpostwar,\u201d and \u201cinterwar\u201d periodization.<\/p>\n

Migrating Away from \u201cCrisis\u201d Narratives<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Media commentators, politicians and academics commonly link migration to crisis. In migration studies, migrants, especially since 2015, have increasingly been portrayed, both deliberately and unintentionally, as motors of \u201ccrisis.\u201d From a well-intended humanitarian crisis narrative to an ill-meaning refugee crisis narrative, migrants are often cast either as the victims of crisis or its instigators. In the process, historical nuances are lost, and everyday human experiences of resistance and radical optimism are often ignored.<\/p>\n

Deconstructing \u201cCrisis\u201d Narratives <\/strong><\/h5>\n

In 1974, London appeared to be facing crisis after crisis. A petrol embargo triggered fuel shortages, miners\u2019 strikes disrupted daily life, IRA bombings linked to the Northern Ireland conflict shook the city, and power cuts left large parts of London in the dark. At the same time, global conflicts and governmental change fed a growing sense of national instability. As the dominant narrative goes, the \u201cBig Smoke\u201d was quite literally burning out.<\/p>\n

Yet this narrative assumes a shared national experience of crisis. In a city marked by migration, by people often considered \u201cnon-natives\u201d (see Akala, 2019), the idea of a single, homogeneous crisis becomes much harder to sustain.<\/p>\n

Moving Toward Counternarratives<\/strong><\/h5>\n

First-generation migrants whose papers routinely denote a foreign identity, second-generation migrants whose foreignness competes with a British identity, and undocumented persons all lived through 1974, alongside other Londoners.<\/p>\n

Seen from the perspectives of the marginalized, the story of 1974 looks different from the dominant narrative of crisis.<\/p>\n

Oral histories and migrant community newspapers reveal how politically active migrant groups experienced London in 1974.<\/p>\n

Reevaluating \u201cCrisis\u201d Narratives from the Margins <\/strong><\/h5>\n

Crisis narratives are dictated by the privileged (Strolovitch, 2003).<\/p>\n

Firstly, state-sanctioned crises are experienced differently by those already living with structural inequality based on nationality, migration status, race, ethnicity, and religion.<\/p>\n

Shortages in energy, employment, housing, and public support may intensify during moments labeled as crisis, but such precarity has long been part of everyday life within unequal and racialized systems. For marginalized communities, such realities do not therefore radically alter daily life in the same way they do for the social elites who primarily define and narrate these events as crisis.<\/p>\n

Secondly, moments described as crises can be windows of opportunity for migrant activism. Periods of heightened political tension can generate momentum for organizing and resistance. Broader social discontent may be mobilized to challenge everyday discrimination highlighted by crisis narratives.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the public focus on large-scale crises can divert attention from smaller activist groups, allowing them to organize, gather resources, and build networks largely unchallenged and undetected. Such moments can also foster intergroup and intercultural solidarity building along the lines of political affinity.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, the diasporic connections influence how a crisis is perceived and interpreted. For many migrants, experiences in London were and still are closely connected to global political developments. Being attentive to events abroad could create distance from what was happening on a national and local level.<\/p>\n

For many politically engaged migrant-led movements, activists, and grassroots newspapers, this often fostered skepticism toward official narratives of crisis and an intentional distancing from Britain as a former colonizer.<\/p>\n

It could also encourage sympathy or understanding for actions of other groups scapegoated and villainized by the state, such as Irish freedom fighters, oil-producing states involved in the embargo, or striking miners framed as part of a broader struggle against economic injustice.<\/p>\n

Reassessing Crisis Narratives and Writing More Rounded Histories <\/strong><\/h5>\n

What does it look like to re-imagine a history outside the confines of crisis narratives?<\/p>\n

Migrant voices can help bring into view experiences that have often been marginalized or simply erased from historical accounts.<\/p>\n

Dominant discourses have historically failed to acknowledge the importance of transnational ties and diasporic identities, while also conveniently ignoring the colonial contexts that shaped these experiences. \u00a0When events are examined from the margins rather than the center, crisis narratives become far less straightforward.<\/p>\n

The perspectives manifested in newspapers established by migrant groups, and in interviews conducted by me or featured in alternative literature, paint a more colorful and complete picture of London in 1974: one lived through resistance to systemic discrimination and the building of social movements. They reflect an embodied experience of being rejected by a place \u2013 London, Britain \u2013 and rejecting it, along with its \u201ccrisis\u201d narratives, in return.<\/p>\n

Narratives left out of the mainstream historical record disrupt and resist the simplification of crisis.\u00a0 Counternarratives challenge the very construction of crisis and invite us to reconsider a past too often considered as a single, monolithic story of crisis.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration: Jonas Raeber<\/p><\/div>\n

Note: All migrants I interviewed were from prior British colonies and born citizens of the UK (this includes Irish and Caribbean).<\/p>\n

Carol Pierre<\/a>\u00a0is a Doctoral Researcher at the\u00a0Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies<\/a>, at the University of Neuch\u00e2tel, and a fellow of the\u00a0nccr \u2013 on the move<\/a>: \u00a0A passion for communicating people\u2019s histories is born from the desire to contextualize, with nuance, current socio-political realities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1974, Britain appeared to move from one crisis to the next: fuel shortages, miners\u2019 strikes, IRA bombings and rolling power cuts dominated the headlines. Politicians warned of a country on the brink. Yet from the perspective of London\u2019s migrant communities, the story looked different. What was framed as a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":10513,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1421],"tags":[949,843,1435,997,1420],"coauthors":[1105],"class_list":["post-10585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-narratives-on-migration-in-times-of-crisis","tag-crisis","tag-history","tag-marginality","tag-migration-2","tag-narratives"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10585"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10592,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10585\/revisions\/10592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10585"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}