‘Solidarity not alms’: Civil rights movements contesting the evictions and denial of social rights from vulnerable European Union citizens in Sweden

The chief aims of the Swedish municipality-based Facebook network SEM, ‘Solidarity with EU migrants’ [Solidaritet med EU migranter!] are to fight for better conditions and humane treatment of migrants primarily from Romania, who came to Sweden in hope of finding work and the ability to provide for their families. The site is to transmit relevant news, actions, organise money collections, political actions and alike. Those volunteers active in the group believe that ‘righteousness and solidarity’ should apply, even those who are in the grip of European Union bureaucracy.1 Using theories of civil movements in the IT age, I elaborate on how the activists on the site respond to the challenges of the criminalisation of vulnerable European Union citizens, by balancing their engagement between the dimensions of ‘pragmatic voluntarism’ versus ‘subversive humanitarianism’. Furthermore, I explore how the site counteracts hegemonic master narratives on Roma as both idle and victims, who need to be saved from begging, by providing alternative narratives of subjectivities and identities to the Roma men and women they work with and for, seeing them as agents struggling to improve the lives of their families.