‘I take care and the state sabotages from the beginning to the end!’: tracing ‘volunteering’ in European provision arrangements for refugees and asylum seekers

ABSTRACT In the spring of 2015, the citizens’ initiative ‘We Welcome’ in a small municipality in Western Austria published a manifesto to announce that it had invented and granted ‘municipal asylum’ to two asylum seekers, to protect them from deportation by national authorities. In this article, I follow the logics of the extended case method as I discuss the initiative We Welcome as an extraordinary example of volunteering in the asylum regime. Recent literature on the role of volunteers in refugee reception fails to historically situate volunteering as part and parcel of provision arrangements for asylum seekers and refugees. I address this gap by looking into the emergence of ‘volunteering’ as an object of knowledge production and policy-making since the 1980s. I further show that the experiences of the initiative’s participants run counter to hegemonic discourses, which picture ‘volunteering’ as a means to produce trust and social cohesion. Instead of eliciting their trust, their experiences as volunteers deeply alienated them from the nation-state, and their citizenship was unsettled.


Introduction
'I get involved as a volunteer, I put a lot of time into this to take care and the state sabotages from the beginning to the end! How come that I take on this task voluntarily (ehrenamtlich), for which the state is actually responsible, only to be sabotaged while I am doing it?' Anton 1 sits at the table opposite me. I am not sure whether he is aware of the fact that he is almost shouting. I for my part know that the accusing look with which he stares at me is not really meant for me, and yet I feel helpless. He is angry and I am at a loss, not knowing how to respond to his anger. Avoiding his eyes, I fixate on the audio recorder between us. It is a warm summer's day in July 2018 and we find ourselves in the cool shades of the arbor at the back of Anton's house. The sun's golden light warmly embraces the soft green hills with their fields and woods around us and starkly contrasts with the atmosphere at our table. I am visiting Anton at his home for the first time.
Three years ago, the citizens' initiative We Welcome in the Austrian provincial state of Vorarlberg declared that it had invented and granted 'municipal asylum' to two Syrian men in order to protect them from deportation by national authorities. Anton had spearheaded the initiative with a handful of others, building on the support of about 140 loosely associated individuals. The two asylum seekers in question had arrived on a snowy winter's night earlier that year, together with two other Syrian citizens. The four refugees had reached Austria together, after they had escaped police custody in Hungary, where the police had forced them, through physical violence, to leave their fingerprints and to ask for asylum. A few weeks after their arrival in the municipality, each one of these four men received the asylum court's decision on his asylum case. Two of the men were to be deported to Hungary. Their entry into Austrian territory had been judged illegal according to the Dublin Regulation, whose legal framework further allocated the responsibility for the men's asylum cases to Hungary, the state through which they had first entered the European Union. The other two refugees were granted asylum in Austria, despite the fact that they had shared the same trajectory as the two 'deportees'.
When the two deportation notices arrived, the participants of We Welcome were bewildered. For some, it was the first time they ever heard of the Dublin Regulation. They decided to take public action by publishing their manifesto on various social media channels and by mailing it to the president of the Austrian republic, the Austrian parliament, and the minister of interior affairs. In its manifesto, the initiative argued that its decision to protect the two asylum seekers through 'municipal asylum' constituted 'civil obedience', since they were preventing the Austrian state from breaching international legal frameworks of refugee protection with their non-refoulement principle, 2 which the Austrian state had ratified. After a failed deportation attempt, both men eventually received refugee status in Austria.
In my conversations with the initiative's participants, they recalled their reactions upon hearing the affected men's news. Among them was Anton, whose statements contrasted with my expectations. He felt that the initiative had been misunderstood since they had never intended to oppose deportations per se: 'If they [the concerned asylum seekers] had come from a safe state and were being deported back to it, then that was not going to be a problem for us. (. . .) The first sentence of the manifesto, the very first, which many critics probably haven't read or understood, it says that we are not against deportations, but legal norms have to be complied with'. I thus realized that the initiative's indignation had not only been a response to what they had perceived as unjust decisions on the asylum requests of the refugees accommodated in their municipality. They had also taken issue with how 'the state' 1 had treated them as volunteers. Their manifesto had thus also been a claim to their right of taking on responsibility in different ways than the state had envisaged.
By the time the initiative We Welcome published its manifesto in 2015, Europe had seen a number of political protests against deportations and asylum policies driven by people categorized as asylum seekers, refugees, illegal migrants and citizens (Kirchhoff 2020;Pirkkalainen 2021). However, through my fieldwork on the initiative We Welcome in 2017, I learned that the initiative's citizen participants did not conceive of themselves as the anti-deportation activists I had imagined them to be. Instead, they referred to themselves as Ehrenamtliche (honorary or voluntary workers), or freiwillige UnterstützerInnen (volunteering supporters). Further, they understood their efforts to support the arriving refugees in terms of 'volunteering', 'just helping' or 'caring for others' through activities which, at the beginning, were devoid of any explicit political intention, but congruent with their beliefs as faithful Catholics. Most of them were experienced professionals close to their retirement with a background including higher education, who purposefully deployed their social standing on the refugees' behalf in encounters with state officials and the media.
The practices, which 'the volunteers' lumped together in the category of 'volunteering', entailed activities like paying the refugees regular visits, helping them to learn German, supporting them in getting acquainted with the region and its residents, accompanying them to interviews with asylum officers or assisting them in dealing with a variety of bureaucratic requirements not only related to their asylum cases, but also to other aspects of their daily lives, like organizing childcare, enrolling older children in school and extracurricular language classes, filling out paper forms to secure their health insurance, and so forth. Through these activities, the volunteers provided easily accessible support and fulfilled tasks which were similar to those of paid professionals working for refugeesupport organizations. They thus took over a central role in ensuring that the asylum seekers in their neighborhoods got access to the institutional support they were entitled to.
In this article, I take my research partners' insistence on having wanted to 'take care' as 'volunteers' seriously. I thus follow the logic of the extended case method (Burawoy 1998), by investigating the activities of We Welcome as an outlier of volunteering practices in European provision arrangements for refugees and asylum seekers. As suggested by the extended case method, I take both local particularities and broader tendencies and dynamics around 'volunteering' into view and I situate my engagement historically. I thus use the initiative We Welcome as a case in point to investigate the evolving relationship between 'the state' and 'volunteers' and their practices as part and parcel of contemporary provision arrangements in what is commonly referred to as 'the asylum system'. For this exploration, I rely on ethnographic data which I collected over the course of two years of extensive fieldwork on 'volunteering' schemes in Vorarlberg after 2015. This material includes informal conversations and interviews with institutional, state and non-state actors who had been involved with the initiative (ranging from the local priest and the local minister of security affairs to representatives of NGOs in refugee reception), and sixteen of its participants. In line with the extended case method, my analysis is framed by existing theoretical lenses (Eliasoph and Lichterman 1999) on the subject of volunteering. These lenses forward two conceptual repertoires, associated with 'unwaged labor' on the one hand and with 'citizenship' on the other.This approach allows me to look at volunteering practices and the dynamics of their governance across different spatial and temporal scales, while attending to the experiences and processes of meaning-making of volunteers in refugee reception. I am thus able to address existing shortcomings in newly emerging literature on volunteering, which does not sufficiently account for the historical dimensions of volunteering and often pays little attention to the actual experiences of people who volunteer, as I will show in the next sections.

Literature on 'volunteering' in refugee reception and its shortcomings
During recent years, the body of literature on the role of volunteers in responding to the crisis of European politics of migration and asylum during 'the long summer of migration' (Hess et al. 2017) has grown considerably, providing accounts of the manifold ways through which volunteers 'made up' for the failure of state agencies across the EU to provide for the arrivals (Mayer 2018;Boersma et al. 2019; see e.g. Feischmidt, Pries, and Cantat 2019; van der Veer 2020). By and large, volunteers are considered to have been 'doing good' in situations in which it has been extremely difficult to maneuver (Sandberg and Andersen 2020). The political ambivalence of their humanitarian actions and their potential complicity with depoliticizing strategies of the state through the reduction of the situation of refugees to one of humanitarian emergency is one of the focal points of the emerging debate (Fleischmann 2019;Sinatti 2019). These accounts, however, often appear with no historical context, as they shed little light on how existing arrangements of provisioning to refugees and asylum seekers came into being, and on the evolving place of volunteered, unwaged labor within these arrangements.
This blindness has its conceptual roots, when the practices of volunteers are read solely through the lens of civic participation and its associated debates about civil society's involvement in processes of democratic governance. This conceptual framework turns our attention away from questions about how volunteering is reshaped in the image of waged labor and increasingly entangled with changing welfare policies, institutional arrangements, and practices of provisioning (see Read 2020). I address this shortcoming in the first part of this article by looking at 'volunteering' practices as unwaged labor to situate them in their evolving political-economic context. This theoretical lens enables me to discuss the changing role and function of unwaged, volunteered labor in provision arrangements more broadly within European welfare states, and the different policies that these states have developed towards volunteering since the end of the 20 th century. These policies were accompanied by the proliferation of hegemonic discourses which glorify 'volunteering' as a central contribution of 'active citizens' to social trust and cohesion. I then take a closer look at unwaged labor in refugee care by zooming in on its position within the changing constellations of the Austrian asylum regime, 3 which was also affected by field-specific trends. Many European states started to accommodate asylum seekers across the whole of their respective national territories and in remote areas, rather than concentrating them in urban capitals (Österreich 2004;Findlay, Fyfe, and Stewart 2007;Larsen 2011;Challinor 2018). These dispersal policies were accompanied by governmental calls directed at voluntary organizations to participate in the delivery of provisions and social services to asylum seekers and refugees. The resulting emerging reception regimes involve highly heterogeneous arrangements of public provisioning within nation-states and their administrative units. I argue that it is important to critically investigate these arrangements, which requires engaging not only with gateway cities but also with remote areas, and is crucial to shed light on the governance of people who are subjected to high-level state interventions due to their legal categorization as asylum seekers and refugees (Malkki 1995).
In the second part of this paper, I return to the initiative We Welcome to discuss the narratives of its participants about encounters with 'the state', focusing on the tensions between their narratives and dominant discourses on the effects of volunteering. Contrary to the 'integrating effects' time and again attributed to volunteering activities (Bundesministerium für Arbeit 2008; Bundesministeriums für Arbeit 2015; Bundesministerium für Soziales, Gesundheit, Pflege, 2019), the participants' experiences as volunteers unsettled the imaginations of 'the state' that they had previously entertained and undermined their trust in state agencies.

'Volunteering' through the lens of unwaged labor
Dynamics on various scales of governance led to the constitution of volunteered, unwaged labor as a solidified object of politically organized management efforts during the last decades (Shachar, von Essen, and Hustinx 2019). In response to the fiscal austerity shaping the reconfiguration of welfare-state institutions across the globe since the 1980s, public debates on the importance of voluntary engagement for the delivery of public services gained salience (on Chile see Paley 2001; on the UK see Taylor 2005; on Japan see Ogawa 2009; on the US see Eliasoph 2015). In this context, state governments conceived of 'the voluntary sector' as a potential 'third way' to re-envision governance processes between neoliberalism on the one hand and strong state regulation on the other (Giddens 1998(Giddens , 2000. Voluntarism, interpreted as a mode of active participation and civic engagement of the 'civil society', would respond to concerns over the erosion of citizenship and 'social capital'. In addition, however, involving non-profit organizations with their networks of volunteers in the provision of welfare would make provisioning more efficient and enable states to cut costs by retreating from their direct involvement in the delivery of social services (Milligan and Conradson 2006;Muehlebach 2012;Rozakou 2016;Grootegoed and Tonkens 2017).
Within these dynamics, scholarly literature on 'volunteering' began to emerge, driven by the interests of policymakers seeking to promote volunteering among different social groups (lately, 'immigrant populations' are to be found among these). Respective studies on volunteering are thus carried out as applied research and are informed by policymakers' needs to scientifically ground their strategies. This nexus between knowledge production and policymaking brought forth discourses which glorify volunteering as a 'route for participating in civic life and contributing to the public good'. The associated literature aims to understand why people volunteer and how it benefits them, but people's actual experiences as they volunteer remain under-researched (Shachar, von Essen, and Hustinx 2019).

The emergence of volunteering as a global policy field
In 1992, the action program Agenda 21 of the United Nations, which was adopted by 178 national governments, further contributed to enhancing the importance of volunteered and unwaged labor globally. With its paradigmatic turn towards the 'participation' of a broad range of local stakeholders in the struggle for sustainable development and environmental protection, Agenda 21 triggered the articulation of numerous projects implemented by volunteering citizens in cooperation with NGOs, and administrative and political bodies on the municipal scale worldwide (United Nations Sustainable Development 1992; Bundesministeriums für Arbeit 2015). In many so-called 'developing countries', the 'active participation' of the 'civil society' was invoked by international donors in order to strengthen the local community's stake in 'their own development'. At the same time, structural adjustment programs were introduced with the hope that participatory programs would reduce local resistance against these. As shown by Paley (2001), the push for participatory approaches to development programs was thus not only guided by the hope to avoid the failures of top-down development policies by strengthening the local community, but was also motivated by the intention to outsource public services to the private sector. Likewise in the Global North, participatory programs encouraged local residents to 'take action' and to contribute to the 'common good' in their respective neighborhoods. Volunteers were increasingly involved in social-service sectors other than local or urban redevelopment, such as education, elderly and health care. In Austria, the framework of Agenda 21 led many municipalities to design their first integration policies targeted at migrant populations, hinging on the involvement of volunteers (Gruber 2014).
In 1997, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the year 2001 as the International Year of Volunteers. With this initiative, the General Assembly recognized '(. . .) that voluntary service makes an essential contribution in addressing social, economic, cultural, humanitarian and peacebuilding issues (. . .)' and sought to improve the facilitation and promotion of volunteering, further strengthening the idea that volunteering was something to be managed according to the logic of efficiency ( UN Volunteers 2011). The notion that policymakers needed to approach 'volunteer work' according to managerial principles proliferated and left its imprint in the International Labour Organization's Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work, published in 2011 (International Labour Organization 2011), which argued: 'What is not counted cannot be effectively managed' (p. 7). With this manual, the International Labour Organization responded to the call of the United Nations General Assembly, encouraging governments to increase knowledge production about volunteering. By then, 'volunteer work' was recognized as being of 'considerable economic value' 4 and had attracted the attention of a variety of actors, ranging from the United Nations to the European Parliament (International Labour Organization 2011).

Volunteering and social-service delivery in Austria
Following global and European trends of conceiving of volunteering as a social field for political intervention, Austria passed its legal framework on voluntary engagement (freiwilliges Engagement) in 2012 with the proclaimed aim of supporting and promoting volunteering practices towards strengthening 'societal and social responsibility' (Bundesministerium für Arbeit 2008; Bundesministeriums für Arbeit, 2015; Bundesministerium für Soziales, Gesundheit, Pflege 2019). This law seeks to formalize the rights and duties of people volunteering within voluntary organizations, institutionalizes arrangements of volunteer labor including the 'voluntary integration year' for refugees and migrants under subsidiary protection, and establishes modes of monitoring volunteering in Austria (Österreich 2020).
However, when it comes to the delivery of social services, volunteered labor has a long-established position within provision arrangements in Austria, where early forms of welfare delivery were predominantly carried out by voluntary groups with close affiliation to the Catholic Church. The non-profit organizations into which these voluntary groups formalized have thus long built upon substantial public support, and by now a large proportion of their staff are regularly employed. As the authors of 'Global Civil Society' found in 2003, the public sector accounted for over 50% of the revenue of those non-profit organizations in Austria, which were primarily engaging with the delivery of services in education, health, and social services (Salamon, Sokolowski, and List 2003).
Due to the federal structures of the Austrian state, the landscape of welfareprovision arrangements is quite diverse across provincial states. Despite this heterogeneity, analysts have diagnosed common trends. In the first two decades of the 21 st century, public-private partnerships between state agencies and non-profit organizations have become more formalized and subject to increasing competition, as subsidies were gradually replaced by performance-related payments, pushing 'professionalization', 'accountability', and principles of 'public management' in the third sector (Neumayr et al. 2008;Österle and Heitzmann 2019). Current approaches taken towards volunteering and the relationalities between third-sector organizations and public funding authorities thus clearly display neoliberal traits. These approaches are accompanied by discourses which picture public authorities as incapable of responding to the growing need for social welfare, which is attributed to immigration and the demographic developments of an aging population. Dominant ideas about how to tackle these societal challenges propose to activate 'the population's potential for voluntary engagement', and emphasize the positive effects of volunteering on those who do it (Muehlebach 2012;Feistritzer 2016).

Volunteering and the Austrian asylum regime
Volunteering within the field of provisioning for refugees and asylum seekers in Austria serves as a case in point for the broader dynamics sketched out above, and displays interesting particularities. The following account brings into view the local constellations in Vorarlberg within which the initiative We Welcome became active. These constellations were shaped by failing dispersal policies on the national scale and growing numbers of volunteers who became active in the asylum regime in various localities.
Provision arrangements for asylum seekers in Austria constituted a major point of conflict between the national government and the nine Austrian provinces, who were reluctant to provide for asylum seekers and to share the costs incurred for their reception. In 1989, a report of the court of auditors testified to serious deficiencies of Austrian provision arrangements for asylum seekers, including the inefficient use of financial resources, resulting in violations of asylum seekers' rights. The subsequent efforts of the national government to restructure provision arrangements however were not so much motivated by human-rights concerns, but focused on decreasing costs by deterring asylum seekers and by sharing competencies and costs for provisioning with provincial states (König and Rosenberger 2010). The resulting political squabbling between the national and provincial governments carried on for decades, time and again leading to malfunctioning preliminary provision arrangements, which were compensated by volunteers and civil-society organizations (see König and Rosenberger 2010 for further information).
In 2004, the Basic Welfare Support Agreement was passed to regulate responsibilities between the Austrian national government and the provincial states in relation to asylum matters (Langthaler and Trauner 2009). Before its adoption, provisioning for and accommodation of asylum seekers had been the exclusive responsibility of national agencies; the costs of these services were thus covered through the federal budget. With the Basic Welfare Support Agreement, a division of competences between the federal and provincial states was finally installed, but again met with resistance, and was deficiently implemented.
Up until today, although the national government is responsible for the first reception and registration of asylum seekers, the accommodation and support of asylum seekers for the duration of their asylum processes rests with the nine provincial states (Rosenberger and Müller 2020). Each provincial state has to take in asylum seekers according to a quota of 1.5% of asylum seekers per capita (Haselbacher 2019). However, various municipalities continued to oppose the opening of refugee shelters in their villages (Rosenberger and Haselbacher 2015), which lead to overcrowding in the federal reception centers, among them the facility in Traiskirchen. In the beginning of 2015, this reception center, designed to host 1,750 individuals, was accommodating 2,500-3,000 asylum seekers. At the same time, Vienna was the only provincial state fulfilling its quota requirement. 5 These unresolved conflicts between authorities on the scales of the nation-state, the nine provinces, and the municipalities thus were constitutive for the failure of reception policies in 2015 and for the vast need for volunteered labor to provide for the arrival of refugees that resulted from it (Rosenberger and Müller 2020).
In order to implement the Basic Welfare Support Agreement, the provincial government in Vorarlberg contracted the Caritas Vorarlberg and its department for refugee care (Caritas Flüchtlingshilfe) as the only organization to implement the provincial system for basic welfare support to asylum seekers. While the Caritas in Austria underwent professionalization processes which also led to the increasing wage employment of trained professionals, it continues to draw on volunteers as a major pool of labor, especially in times of crisis, as illustrated in 2015 (Bittschi, Pennerstorfer, and Schneider 2015;Simsa 2017).
Back then, the Caritas Vorarlberg reached the limits of its capacities and could not provide accommodation to all of the arriving refugees. Meanwhile, the number of volunteers supporting the Caritas acquired new dimensions. While the number of volunteers associated with the Caritas doubled from 2003 to 2013, the volunteers directly working for the Caritas Flüchtlingshilfe 6 almost quadrupled within one year between 2014 and 2015, from 80 to 313 7 (see Simsa 2017). Further, the cooperation with municipalities and numerous volunteers like those of the initiative We Welcome, who became active without formal association with the Caritas but engaged locally with asylum seekers in their vicinity, became a crucial element of refugee care.
While looking at volunteering as unwaged labor enables us to become aware of how volunteering is entangled with austerity policies and the reconfiguration of welfare-state institutions, volunteers do not constitute a pool of unwaged laborers that 'the state' can simply marshal into provision arrangements. The case of We Welcome shows instead that the relationship between 'the state' and 'volunteers' is subject to negotiation and contestation. These dynamics disappear into the background when looking at volunteering through the lens of unwaged labor alone, but they reappear when we look with the conceptual repertoire of citizenship studies. Against the backdrop of historically evolving provision arrangements and the role of volunteering within these, I thus return to the initiative We Welcome, to further explore the relationship between the citizen volunteer and the state in the remainder of this article.

'Volunteering' through the lens of citizenship
In citizenship studies, conceptualizations of citizenship go beyond citizenship as formal, legal status and possession, bestowed upon people by the nation-state. Instead, citizenship is being disentangled from the nation-state as the sole guarantor of rights to also include relationships of people, citizens and non-citizens, with other political and social communities, without ceasing to recognize the state as an important actor. In particular, anthropological studies on citizenship focus on how these relationships of rights and responsibilities are claimed, produced and enacted through practices. Therefore, these studies were able to document existing disjunctions between formal citizenship status and the realization of substantive rights related to it. Rights thus come into view not as possessions, but as something to be claimed and enacted (Holston 2008;Çağlar 2015. Migrant uprisings and solidarity movements have received particular attention and led to the proliferation of debates that have centered on notions of contentious politics and citizenship from below (Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziartot 2008;Rygiel et al. 2015;Ataç 2016). These literature strands locate the political in the disruption of order and focus their analytical interests on empirical cases in which dominant systems of authority are challenged.
In this second part, I make use of the notion of citizenship to interrogate the relationship that evolved between the volunteers of We Welcome with 'the state' and their imaginaries thereof. Public efforts to mobilize potential volunteers contributed to the emergence of discourses in Austria which glorify the figure of 'the volunteer' in nationalizing terms as 'the backbone of society', and produce Austria as 'a nation of volunteers' (Bundesministerium für Soziales, Gesundheit, Pflege 2019). Challenging this hegemonic discourse, I will show in the following that the encounters of We Welcome's participants with state officials led to experiences and imaginations of 'the state' which run contrary to public depictions of volunteering: their citizenship, understood here as the relationship between them and the state, was shaken and unsettled.
During my interviews with the initiative's participants, their accounts gravitated around the events which had followed the publication of the manifesto and most importantly the involvement of state institutions in those events. They vividly remembered how a convoy of police cars with a total of 16 policemen reached the village, trying to detain and deport one of the refugees. Since the delegation was unable to get hold of the man in question, the attempt remained unsuccessful. Subsequently, the 'volunteers' started to accommodate the refugees in constantly changing private households, since the latter no longer felt safe in the refugee shelter. They also recalled the day when they first spotted cars slowly circling through the village which belonged to no-one they knew, and which suddenly disappeared, only to reappear a few days later. Through an informant, they eventually learned that they had been placed under surveillance. From then on, they were sure, their phones had been bugged. The members of the initiative started to take precautions, consciously deciding when and where they would meet.
While other accounts of the state's involvement in the events of the long summer of migration in 2015 have testified to the state's formal omission of policing and managing the arriving refugees at train stations and along transit routes (Picozza 2021), the initiative's members portray the presence of state agencies in the village and their active attempt to control both the refugees' whereabouts and their 'volunteering'. For some, their 'activities' thus began to acquire a political dimension and they contextualized their engagement as opposing the migration policies of the Austrian state. Others continued to think of their actions as 'help', even as they hid the refugees in their houses. These differences in how the participants framed what they were doing support calls to overcome simplistic binaries between 'helping' and politically motivated 'solidarity', which instead need to be viewed as situated along the same continuum (Picozza 2021, 4).
The initiative's participants continued to accompany the asylum seekers to their interviews with officials of the Federal Asylum Office, witnessing forms of state harassment and demonstrations of state power they had not fathomed before. Anton recalled: 'They did not allow Renate [another volunteer] to write minutes of what was being said during the interview -how is that possible? Please, this is a fundamental right. I am (. . .) not a jurist, but I know something like that. I would not have accepted that, but Renate put her pen back into her pocket'. He then listed his experiences of unexpected incompetence and inconsistency of state agents with legal provisions to explain how he was pushed towards letting go of previously entertained imaginations of 'the state' he was living in as good and just (Gupta 1995). To him, 'a world crumbled into pieces' (für mich ist eine Welt zusammengebrochen): Reading these (deportation) notices of the Republic, of the BFA and the courts of appeal, in which judges include their personal opinion in an emotional fashion . . . I mean, he [the judge] simply has to follow what's law and order. He [the judge] can't say 'I, as a family father, would not do this.' [leaving his family behind in a Syrian war zone to seek asylum in Europe}. That's his personal opinion, which has nothing to do with a decent court proceeding. When I get to read such a thing, when I stand before court myself, I don't have faith in them anymore. I now see this in a different light. After these experiences, I became very, very cautious. These are my conclusions and I believe, this is a life-changing experience. It has changed my perspective of our state and democracy profoundly.
Anton further told me about how he had suspected that the state was planning another deportation attempt after the first one had failed. He had grown suspicious after the ministry of interior affairs had called him and his wife twice to invite the concerned refugees to a conversation with the Federal Asylum Office and the police. This meeting had been scheduled to clarify what had happened during the first deportation attempt. Several conversations on the phone with the involved government representatives did not suffice to reassure Anton of the officials' good intentions. Before their visit, he had addressed his wife with his concerns and she had told him: 'Things like these aren't done'. However, Anton could no longer share the certainty in his wife's response, about how 'things are', about how the state acts, and when, and what it does to whom.
Prior to his involvement with asylum politics, Anton's ways of knowing and imagining the state had been informed by his situated experience of a white middle-class man from a Catholic family loyal to the conservative Austrian People's Party, with the principle of Christian solidarity guiding his upbringing. Anton had been deeply immersed in imaginations of the Austrian state as politically and socially stable, with domestic security among its most important achievements, all of these being central elements to the construction of Austrian national identity (Wodak et al. 2009, 54). These imaginations were profoundly challenged through his experiences as a 'volunteer' and his trust into this reality he had known, the state he lived in, was broken.
Anton's 'active participation' and 'civic engagement' had thus not resulted in the production of 'trust and social cohesion' attributed to volunteering; instead, it deeply alienated him from the nation-state. During multiple encounters between Anton, a volunteer in refugee care, and involved state institutions, including the immigration police, the ministry of interior affairs, and the Federal Asylum Office, Anton experienced 'the state' in unprecedented ways and witnessed the sinister reality of its arbitrary asylum administration. These experiences were not ordinary and do not constitute 'everyday encounters' through which anthropologies of the state have analysed how imaginaries of 'the state' as a translocal and reified object come into being (Gupta 1995, 214;Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Anton's extraordinary encounters instead were disruptive of a normality in which the behavior of state institutions according to the rule of law is assumed to be a given fact. These experiences were shared by other middle-class volunteers who also told me about their extraordinary experiences of the state as they supported people in a marginalized position.
In their narratives, expressing their situated understanding of the state and of themselves as volunteers in relation to it, imaginations of the state and of the initiative We Welcome come to co-constitute and oppose each other. The initiative's participants, as 'volunteers', together with 'normal mothers with children', were acting 'to do the right thing for the sake of humanity' in the 'small world' of their 'village', intending to do nothing but help. These conceptions stand in stark difference to their representation of the state and further highlight its violence. To them, the Austrian state had acted illegally when deciding to deport the men in question despite the non-refoulement principle, while it was 'criminalizing' the initiative's attempts to care for the refugees. While portraying the state as an oppositional force, these narratives also reproduce hegemonic discourses around 'volunteering' as morally good and reinforce assumptions about the ability of 'civil society' to shoulder major burdens in times of crisis and beyond. The initiative We Welcome thus also claims being able to fulfill the state's tasks, if only 'the state' were to let them. The enmeshment of 'the state' with 'civil society' is thus not only driven by 'the state', but also by initiatives like We Welcome (Picozza 2021).

Conclusion
In this article, I conceive of We Welcome as a volunteers' initiative, and I use it as an entry point to discuss the changing role and function of volunteering as unwaged labor, within evolving arrangements of provisioning for people categorized as asylum seekers or refugees in Europe. While volunteering practices have long been entangled with the delivery of welfare services, 'volunteering' emerges as an object of governance in relation to the reconfiguration of European welfare states in the 1980s. The Austrian asylum regime is both shaped by these broader developments and displays particularities. In response to failing asylum policies, the unwaged labor of volunteers has repeatedly functioned to compensate for state agencies' shortcomings by delivering provision to asylum seekers throughout the last decades. In this context, 'the volunteer' is cast as a figure of national pride, ensuring 'social cohesion' in the 'national community'. Similar patterns are also present in other European contexts, where civil-society organizations have taken on the role of 'gap fillers' in light of the absence of the state and of the resulting human-rights violations of people seeking asylum (Mayblin and James 2019;Vandevoordt 2019).
Against this backdrop, the welcome and solidarity initiatives across Europe in the summer of 2015 and the continued efforts of numerous volunteers do not constitute 'sudden upsurges' or 'waves' that appeared 'out of nowhere'. Instead, they become visible as continuities of practices that are firmly rooted within evolving institutional arrangements which increasingly incorporate unwaged labor according to logics of efficiency and cost reduction. I thus contribute to emerging literature on 'the long summer of migration' with a historically situated discussion of volunteering as unwaged labor and as an integral part of the reconfiguring of provision arrangements in asylum regimes.
However, concluding that 'the state' is straightforwardly instrumentalizing volunteers to take over its responsibilities would be misguided. Viewing the case of We Welcome through the conceptual repertoire of citizenship studies allows me to further show that the relationship between volunteers and 'the state' is subject to complex negotiations and contestations. With its provision of municipal asylum, the initiative We Welcome challenged the boundaries of the national community and thus confronted 'the state' in extraordinary ways, through which it also reaffirmed its ability to take over public responsibilities. As a form of civic participation and political engagement, 'volunteering' is said to constitute a pillar of democracy, hinging upon and reproducing trust in political institutions and the rule of law. The experiences of We Welcome's citizen participants run against these elements of hegemonic discourse. Rather than producing their trust, their experiences as 'volunteers' supporting refugees and asylum seekers deeply alienated them from the nation-state.
Looking into the accounts of the members of We Welcome has allowed me to contrast their experiences with existing scholarly and political discourses on 'volunteering', opening up space for a more critical engagement with the evolving relationalities between 'volunteers' and 'the state', and entailed governance processes. Such an engagement is particularly important in the field of provisioning for refugees and asylum seekers, where 'volunteers' and their practices increasingly come to play a crucial role in accessing institutional support that refugees and asylum seekers are entitled to. Notes 1. Throughout the article, pseudonyms are used for both the initiative and individuals associated with it for the purpose of anonymization. 2. The non-refoulement principle prohibits deportations to countries where the deportee would be at risk of torture or inhumane treatment. 3. I deploy the concept of 'asylum regime' to encompass the entanglement of institutional and non-institutional actors, and the discourses and practices, which shape the field of refugee reception and asylum-seeker support (Langthaler and Trauner 2009). 4. According to conservative estimations, volunteers contributed $400 billion to the global economy in 2011 (ILO 2011). 5. The national government responded through a variety of measures, among them the Accommodation and Distribution of Aliens in Need of Aid and Protection Act, adopted in 2015. Through this bill, the Ministry of Interior Affairs is entitled to open shelters for asylum seekers without the consent of the municipalities involved, targeting specifically those provincial states failing to fulfill their reception quota. 6. During the same period, the number of employees tripled. 7. Numbers obtained through the Servicestelle Freiwilligenarbeit of the Caritas Vorarlberg.
their valuable comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Further, I would like to thank the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna for its financial support for this publication.

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Notes on contributor
Katrin Kremmel is a PhD candidate at the Social and Cultural Anthropology department of the University of Vienna, focusing on reconfigurations of citizenship in European asylum regimes. Prior to her PhD studies, she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Law and Sociology in Vienna, where she pursued her research interests in migration and legal sociology.