Narrative negotiation over migrant agency: framing fire, resistance, and criminalisation in the #FreeTheMoria6ampaign

People on the move are often represented either as victims in need of protection or as security threats in need of control. Both constructions challenge efforts to publicly articulate migrant political agency, particularly in relation to disruptive forms of resistance. This article tackles these challenges through a frame analysis of debates on the 2020 Moria fire and the trial of the so-called ‘Moria 6.’ Drawing on #FreeTheMoria6 campaign publications and communication by Greek officials, it reconstructs competing interpretations of the fires and their effects. Governmental messaging presented the fire as an apolitical catastrophe, framing the return to order as inevitable. By contrast, campaign actors engaged in careful narrative negotiation, seeking to portray people on the move as political agents while simultaneously emphasising the innocence of those accused of arson. The oscillation of the #FreeTheMoria6 campaign between depoliticisation and repoliticisation emerged precisely from the need to operate across different arenas of struggle and accommodate their countervailing logics. Our findings caution against treating contentious migrant action as analytically mute, whether as senseless violence or as self-evident acts of resistance. Instead, they suggest that migrant agency should be studied as a precarious public achievement produced through legal, media, activist and humanitarian infrastructures.