Obviously, migration in general and flight in particular are closely connected to global inequalities and colonial continuities. From 2012 to about 2015, Refugees in Germany articulated their protest and resistance against the inhuman asylum system with a formerly unknown strength and visibility. We can see the transnational dimension of that movement: first of all, in relation to the articulation of postcolonial causes and effects as well as climate injustices. Furthermore, some of the intellectuals involved in these protests draw on their political experiences in their countries of origin and other regions they had lived in, and the local political negotiations are conducted between migrant Non-Citizens and local citizens. Finally, the aim of the Refugee Movement (hereafter RM) to achieve freedom of movement is not attached to one territory but needs to be addressed globally. The RM locally articulates global entanglements of inequalities and, by doing this, addresses many pressing problems of our time. On a visit to the RM in Berlin, Angela Davis stated, ‘The Refugee Movement is the movement of the 21st century’ (Movement Talk with Angela Davis 2015).

The following observations are grounded in my PhD project. In 2016 and 2017, I conducted 12 interviews with intellectual refugee activists about the social philosopher, Critical Theorist and Jewish Refugee Marcuse's theory of liberation. Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School, based at the Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt am Main. The institute was set up in 1923 in order to research the crisis of Marxism and develop new, theoretical approaches oriented towards socioeconomic change. Under the director Max Horkheimer, an interdisciplinary group of researchers was formed. Realizing, also from their own research, that there would not be broad resistance to national socialism, the institute went into exile in the early 1930s, first in Switzerland and then in the United States. In Critical Theory, classical philosophy, sociological approaches and psychoanalytic insights are combined. A central element of Critical Theory is its foundation in, but also distinction from, German philosophy, especially Hegel. Western reason, as Theodor W. Adorno and Horkheimer argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 2009), has been sick from its beginnings, enlightenment has become domination and humanity is entangled in barbarism.