Performing “Professionalism” in Grassroots Refugee Support: How Logics of Capital Enable Anti‐Migrant Hostility

ABSTRACT In Rotterdam, the Netherlands, grassroots organizers with a forced migration background provide support to recent refugees. These organizers try to sustain the informal character of the work they do, while, at the same time, they seek to institutionalize their organization by entering into collaborative government arrangements that are structured by neoliberal funding instruments. Based on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, this article does three things. First, it reveals modes of affectivity in settings in which society and the state are imbricated with neoliberal market‐oriented logics. Second, it shows how right‐wing populism feeds into fantasies and rituals of statecraft. Third, it demonstrates how refugee support is situated in hybrid and diffuse webs of governance. I argue that competitive tendering as a way of sponsoring and regulating civil society organizations not only supports capitalist and neoliberal ideologies by following the logics of capital but also enables the proliferation of racism and anti‐migrant hostility. To demonstrate their “professionalism,” civil society organizations are faced not only with the impossible job of implementing a degree of bureaucracy to show that they are non‐bureaucratic, but also that they get to speak the language of capital—that in an extreme right‐wing conjuncture becomes easily tangled up with anti‐migrant hostility.