Infrastructural hospitality from below: coping with state abandonment in Lithuania

Abstract

This article examines forms of shelter provision that took shape in Lithuania in summer 2022 following the mass release of illegalised migrants from detention centres and their arrival in the cities of Vilnius and Kaunas. Focusing on the grassroots initiative Sienos Grupė (Border Group), it traces how temporary housing was assembled through improvised coordination among activists and volunteers: hosting at private homes, finding safe flats and informal rentals, and organising a short-term emergency shelter. I conceptualise this system as infrastructural hospitality from below: networked material-relational arrangements that assemble shelter outside formal reception systems. These infrastructures mediate migrants’ survival, movement, and presence while remaining shaped by processes of migrant illegalisation. Such counter-infrastructures operate alongside the public-facing dimensions of advocacy and are oriented less toward claims-making than toward the ongoing care labour and social reproduction of migrant lives under conditions of state abandonment and precarity. Because migrant trajectories in Lithuania were not linear, with some people remaining, others moving onward, and some later returning, infrastructural hospitality from below unsettles territorially bounded notions of rights and citizenship by sustaining forms of presence across trajectories of dwelling, waiting, and onward movement.