Countering anti-Asian violence in a Parisian banlieue: Defensive familism

Introduction

On a Wednesday night in November 2011, Claire Ang, a French-Chinese nurse, drove into her building’s underground parking facility as she returned home from work in Paris to Champ-Haut, a disadvantaged, multiracial banlieue. As she reached the lift, Claire was gagged by a hooded man while a second, holding a gun, demanded she lead them to her apartment. The gunman forced Claire and her elderly parents to lie on the living room floor as his accomplice searched their home. After 10 minutes, the burglars left with 300 euros in cash and some inexpensive jewellery. The Angs immediately called the police, only to be told to report their case at the commissariat the next day. This was Champ-Haut’s fifth armed robbery in a month, following a similar pattern each time: the crime targeted the area’s Chinese residents, was perpetrated by Arab or Black young men, and went unresolved by police.

How do racialized minority citizens protect themselves against violence when the police fail to do so? Sociologists have recently considered this question with regard to the upsurge of anti-Asian violence in diverse cities across the world, focusing on minority-based mobilization as a response to under-policed, racially motivated crime (Hatziprokopiou & Montagna, 2012; Liu, 2020; Ramírez & Chan, 2020). In France, this phenomenon sheds light on the ambiguous interaction between the rhetoric of French-Asians as a ‘model minority’ and the ‘Republican’ ideology of citizenship that disavows the existence of racial minorities and inequalities. The ‘Republican’ ideology envisions citizenship as a direct relationship between the state and morally autonomous individuals, one that transcends the threat of ‘ethnic’ communautarisme (Favell, 2022, p. 71). It is especially hostile to race-based mobilizations that contradict the principle of colour-blindness, central to France’s self-image as a universalist nation that has overcome ethnic and racial divisions and broken with the traumas generated by slavery, colonization and postcolonial migrations (Amiraux & Simon, 2006, p. 193). In this context, activation of the model minority rhetoric illuminates disavowed racial hierarchies and confers upon French-Asians an intermediate position between white French citizens and stigmatized (post)colonial immigrants (Chuang, 2021; Wang & Madrisotti, 2024).

The model minority rhetoric that elevates French-Asians symbolically, also obstructs police intervention in anti-Asian violence, leaving the seemingly successful and cohesive community to self-organize protection. But whilst police disengagement has provoked a sense of second-class citizenship amongst French-Asians, previous research claims that anti-violence mobilizations have also functioned as a crucial site for unifying the Asian minority, incorporating its members into mainstream political processes, and broadening ‘Republican’ citizenship’s normative horizons (Chuang et al., 2020; Chuang & Merle, 2021).

In this article, we argue that minority political mobilization only partially captures the defensive practices of French-Asians living under threat of racialized violence, and their citizenship-related outcomes. Given the majority of French-Asians live outside of ethnic enclaves (Attané et al., 2023), it is urgent to broaden research from ethnic enclave areas to multiracial neighbourhoods. We advance such scholarship by exploring how French-Asians respond to insecurity when support from public authorities and co-ethnics is unavailable. Our research uncovers a set of family-centred defensive practices: patrolling the neighbourhood’s perimeter, communicating through social media, and escorting individuals through the hostile urban environment. Considering family ties as a mobilization base, we explore how gendered power relations, not race alone, shape citizenship experiences amongst victims of anti-Asian violence.

Based on ethnographic research in Champ-Haut, we develop the notion of defensive familism to describe how kinship ties are recalibrated for crime-deterring purposes and to evaluate what the replacement of police protection with family-based defence means for citizenship. To do so, we interweave two complementary analytical perspectives. First, we adopt an open-ended, relational approach to citizenship’s renegotiation through anti-violence action. We analyse the configurations of societal and interpersonal relations in which kinship emerges as a principle of protection to French-Asians, and in which the promise of individual ‘Republican’ citizenship is weighed against that of intergenerational family solidarities, an important principle of social organization in Chinese society and diaspora (Barbalet, 2025; Yan, 2021). Second, we develop an intersectional analysis of the ways in which multiple systems of inequality overlap and affect the societal dynamics and individual experiences that anti-Asian violence brings to the fore. Our focus is on the dialectics between racialized violence and gendered responses to it, with an emphasis on the contradictory locations (Anthias, 2021) which familist self-defence constructs for French-Asian women. Essentially, we argue that while defensive familism might protect women against racially motivated violence, it may also, at least momentarily, reinforce gendered power relations that prevent their autonomy.

We start by grounding our study in relation to extant work, stressing the importance of analysing non-minority focused mobilizations and considering gender dynamics. We then present the Parisian context of Asian migration and outline our methodological approach. The first analytical section examines how defensive familism problematizes French-Asians’ citizenship, while the second studies how this practice links to ongoing negotiations of intergenerational obligations within the family. Finally, we consider how defensive familism adds complexity to work on anti-Asian violence and how ‘Republican’ citizenship’s egalitarian principles are opened for critical examination from within the private realm of French-Asian families.

Resisting racialized violence, transforming Republican citizenship

The attacks in Champ-Haut echo the emergence of anti-Asian violence since the 2000s in Paris and in diverse cities globally (Hatziprokopiou & Montagna, 2012; Liu, 2020; Ramírez & Chan, 2020), intensifying further during the Covid-19 pandemic (Li & Nicholson, 2021; Wang & Madrisotti, 2024). Involvement in professional sectors and ceremonial practices involving carrying cash (Chuang et al., 2020), along with perceived physical weakness, legal precarity and poor language skills (Chan, 2021), have contributed to making the Asian minority appear a low-risk, profitable target, unlikely to report crimes. In France, ‘doing a Chinaman’ (se faire un Chinois) has become a rite of passage in organized crime and a viable source of income for precarious young men surviving on urban economies’ margins (Du, 2020; Merle, 2024), with the perpetrators of anti-Asian crime often themselves belonging to other racialized minorities (Chuang & Merle, 2020; Merle, 2024).

More fundamentally, the phenomenon of anti-Asian violence uncovers an important but understudied racialization dynamic in France. It draws attention to the ambiguities of the rhetoric that depicts French-Asians as ‘living examples of the republican model of integration’ (Chuang et al., 2020, p. 160), analogous to the representation of Asian Americans as champions of the ‘American Dream’ (Chou & Feagin, 2016). The model minority rhetoric produces an essentialized picture of French-Asians as a successfully integrated ethnic community, functioning simultaneously as a source of praise and prejudice.

When French politicians publicly praise French-Asians’ economic success, as for instance the then presidents of the Republic Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy have done, they reinforce the image of French-Asians as a minority group admired and favoured by public authorities (Chuang, 2021; Geisser, 2010). Yet at the same time, French-Asians’ perceived success lends itself to discriminatory discourses that ‘merge the ancient fear of the “yellow peril” with an anxiety over Chinese neo-imperialism’ (Chuang, 2021, p. 132). Perhaps most importantly, the elevation of the Asian ‘model minority’ comes at the price of stigmatizing Black and Arab immigrants and their descendants as permanent outsiders to the national community.

In France, the model minority trope is a double-edged rhetorical device serving simultaneously to silence concerns over racial injustices and legitimize racialized minority citizens’ differential treatment by state powers. It reproduces racist stereotypes feeding into inter-minority tensions whilst obstructing effective policing of racially motivated crime. Research with the French police shows commitment to colour-blindness obstructs their work (Chuang et al., 2020; Chuang & Merle, 2021), with officers refraining from acknowledging racialized crime patterns for fear of accusations of racist stereotyping, essentializing French-Asians as ‘victims’ and Arab and Black French as ‘predators’, and favouritism if mobilizing in the Asian minority’s support. Yet concurrently, authorities’ perception of the Asian minority as a cohesive community with abundant resources leads them to adopt a laissez-faire stance, leaving French-Asians to defend themselves (Du, 2020; Merle, 2024). This is a complex task in France where minority-based political actions are discredited as ‘communautarisme’, a term used to disqualify ethnic minority solidarities as a threat to ‘Republican’ values of universalism, colour-blindness and secularism (Haapajärvi, 2022).

Given these tensions, scholars working at the intersection of political sociology and migration studies have paid close attention to minority-based anti-violence mobilizations. Previous work shows how in economic enclaves, such as Belleville or Aubervilliers, French-Asians have pooled resources to acquire surveillance technology and recruited co-ethnics into street patrols to deter crime, with an allegedly unifying effect on the heterogeneous Asian minority (Chuang & Merle, 2020; Trémon, 2013). In multiracial areas, Asian civic associations have forged alliances with non-Asians, forming neighbourhood-based anti-insecurity coalitions, bridging the gap between the Asian minority and mainstream French institutions such as the police, municipal authorities and non-ethnic civic associations (Chuang & Merle, 2020; Du, 2020; Merle, 2024). As local initiatives scale up to associative synergies and collaborations with public authorities these mobilizations have been thought to at once socialize French-Asians into mainstream repertoires of political action and nudge those repertoires into being more inclusive (Chuang, 2021; Chuang et al., 2020). In essence, anti-violence mobilizations are seen as significant arenas for French-Asians to question ‘Republican’ social order, negotiate their position within it, and construct themselves as political agents.

Defensive familism, between individual experiences and institutional categorizations

Our study develops extant literature in two ways. First, we move away from its categorical focus on minority political mobilizations (Chuang et al., 2020; Ramírez & Chan, 2020), and to a more open-ended, relational reading of anti-violence initiatives. While relationality lends itself to many definitions (Roseneil & Ketokivi, 2016), we understand it as awareness of dynamic interdependencies between categories and relations underlying social life. Given this, we see insecurity as a particular relationship between the French state and the Asian minority. Anti-Asian violence does not exist in and of itself, but reflects complex relations between the French state and the differentially racialized minorities inhabiting poor urban areas. Such violence should be studied as a classed and racialized phenomenon, emerging at the contact point between processes of urban relegation (Wacquant, 2010), and that of French-Asians’ racialization into the ambivalent model minority position that fuels racialized hostilities and their under-policing (Chuang & Merle, 2020, 2021).

Defensive familism factors into this picture as an understudied mediating mechanism between these broad social forces and Asian minority citizens’ experiences of state neglect. It draws attention to how negotiations of state–citizen relations are not limited to the political arena, but also take place within families. Studying such negotiations requires alignment with scholarship that does not conceive social entities from the perspective of fixed properties, but from the processes through which they gain meaning in relation to one another as well as to surrounding people, places and events (Roseneil & Ketokivi, 2016). Here, our focus is on the mutual constitution of citizenship and family through the substitution of police protection with kin support in a state-neglected urban area and in a kin network comprising three generations of socially mobile racialized minority citizens.

Second, while prior work centres on racialization processes uncovered by anti-Asian violence (Chuang & Merle, 2021; Lee, 2021), our focus on the family calls for the conjoint consideration of gendered dynamics. This is urgent in the French context where ideas of gender equality are an important element of the nation’s self-image as a progressive liberal democracy, and a marker of difference with regard to non-Western societies where gender equality is understood to be absent (É Fassin, 2010). The normalization of a civilizational opposition between the ‘West and the Rest’ on differences in gender ideologies is, of course, highly criticizable, just as is white Western scholars’ tendency to view feminist theory as their prerogative and to ignore other traditions (see Bastia et al., 2022; Yurdakul et al., 2025), such as Chinese feminism that has been nationally influential and internationally connected throughout the 20th century (Barlow, 2004).

In this article, we approach gender from the social-constructivist ‘doing gender’ tradition (West & Zimmerman, 1987), meaning we see gender as a dynamic between categorical expectations individuals face and their attempts to perform accordingly in everyday interactions. In keeping with this, we approach defensive familism as a particular mode of ‘doing family’, one that momentarily modifies what is expected from men and women in terms of intergenerational family solidarities.

We build on current debates on Chinese familism’s adaptation to the social forces of marketization, migrations and state-led family policies inclusive of the Cultural Revolution assault on ancestor worship, the one-child strategy and more recent familism-reaffirming social reforms (Barbalet, 2025). Specialists of Chinese society and diaspora suggest that familist social norms have not vanished but morphed into ‘neo-familist’ configurations articulated around the maximization of (grand)children’s well-being through post-patriarchal arrangements of intergenerational care (Yan, 2021). These changes are closely related to patterns of gender relations, with mixed results on men and women. In broad lines, Chinese men have been better positioned to simultaneously pursue individual success and family solidarity, while women face difficulties in balancing family obligations and individual aspirations (Song & Ji, 2020).

So, what happens to family obligations when French state authorities leave Asian minority citizens to self-organize against racialized violence? To answer this, we study how defensive familism interacts with pre-existing negotiations of gender relations in a family context where collectivist and patriarchal social norms associated with traditional Chinese familism coexist with more individualistic and egalitarian ideals characteristic of European societies (Barbalet, 2025; Yan, 2021). This cross-examination inevitably implies studying not only the meaning and practices, but also the power dynamics that collide when family ties are called upon to repair citizenship’s fault lines.

We draw inspiration from Floya Anthias’s work that stresses relationality, processuality and spatio-temporality in the social relations in which social inequalities are produced. Anthias (2021, p. 10) argues that ‘processes relating to the workings of categories are intersectional and translocational, articulating in concrete social relations and operating across place, scale and time’. We find this to be a fertile starting point for analysing situations where people’s movements produce encounters between what Anthias calls ‘oppressive structures’ that stretch themselves over multiple locations and are ordered by different axes of power. Among such structures, we focus on citizenship and family, and on what happens to the meanings and interrelations of these categories when people move in place, time and multiple hierarchies of power. Following Anthias’s multi-level approach, we interpret the Ang family members’ experiences of racialized violence in light of the specific locations they occupy at the intersection of the multiple axes of difference that structure family and citizenship in migration – of race, class and gender, but also of those related to generation.

Our intersectional approach can be summarized as one that studies how multiple axes of differentiation produce specific forms of marginalization that cannot be understood following a simple additive logic, and explores these forms from the angle of differentially located individuals’ attempts to navigate ‘from below’ the complex systems of categorization defined ‘from above’ (Scuzzarello & Moroşanu, 2023). For us, intersectionality is both an analytical approach, and a form of critical praxis, intended to ‘reveal complex social inequalities and mechanisms of power that haunt our everyday lives’ (Yurdakul et al., 2025, p. 7). Given this, our purpose is to shed light on French-Asian women’s experiences, often overshadowed in race-centred work on anti-Asian violence. To achieve this, we examine the contradictory locations (Anthias, 2021) defensive familism produces for French-Asian women, potentially favouring them along one axis of difference (race), whilst disadvantaging them along another (gender, generation). We thus juxtapose the family sphere to the political arena as an important site for renegotiating ‘Republican’ citizenship.

Chinese migration to Paris and neighbourhood change

How the Ang family, our key informants, ended up in a declining banlieue is tied up in two important processes of French-Asian migration: the first from former Indo-China to France; the second from Paris’s ethnic enclaves to its once middle-class suburbs. For clarity’s sake, we use the terms ‘French-Asians’ and ‘Asians’ to refer to France’s Asian minority, reflecting the diversity of this group’s geographical origins, motives and moments of migration (Attané & Merli, 2024; Wang, 2021). We use the term ‘Chinese’ when we discuss the Angs’ experiences as this is how our informants self-identified.

Born in the 1950s to a prosperous Chinese merchant family in Phnom Penh, Yoan and Mei Ang, siblings, fled the Khmer Rouge to extended family in Hong Kong. In 1975, Mei married a Cambodian-Chinese exile, migrating to Paris with the help of her husband’s family. A year later, Yoan followed his sister. Arriving in France during an economic boom, fused with positive perception of Asian refugees (Meslin, 2011), they obtained asylum in a matter of months, quickly finding employment and housing through ethnic networks. All three settled in the 13th arrondissement, Paris’s largest French-Chinese neighbourhood during the 1970s (Guillon & Taboada-Leonetti, 1986). Mei and her husband worked in the food business. Yoan found work in the automobile industry, married a seamstress from Guangzhou, and started a family in this Chinatown setting.

From the 1980s onwards, the French-Chinese became more spatially dispersed and integrated with other minorities (Pan Ké Shon & Verdugo, 2014). This exodus from the centrally located enclaves was driven by two factors (Attané et al., 2023): (1) the search for inexpensive housing by a new, precarious wave of Chinese migrants; (2) the desire to find more spacious accommodation on the part of households with children. The Angs belonged to the second group. Although the 13th arrondissement was useful, they began to perceive the enclave as an obstacle to incorporation into French society. In the early 1980s, both Mei and Yoan’s families bought apartments in the brand-new neighbourhood of Champ-Haut, the spatial anchor for their endeavour to join the urban middle class and obtain an autonomy rarely offered in tight-knit enclave settings. The entire family was naturalized as French citizens in the late 1990s and the future seemed bright for the Angs and their children.

By the 2010s, Champ-Haut had changed substantially. With urban developers failing to attract public organizations and private companies to Champ-Haut, entire blocks of flats were transformed into social housing and property prices plummeted. Middle-class families started to depart in a French equivalent to ‘white flight’ (Rathelot & Safi, 2014), being replaced with more precarious newcomers. Twenty percent of Champ-Haut’s residents were unemployed and 20% below the poverty line. The absence of professional opportunities led to the rise of an underground economy of drugs and petty crime conferring on Champ-Haut the reputation of a no-go zone. Half of the area’s inhabitants were immigrants, predominantly from North and West Africa. Unlike areas of the Seine-Saint-Denis district where anti-Asian crime has been studied (Chuang & Merle, 2020; Du, 2020; Merle, 2024), Champ-Haut was home to a small, scattered Asian population. It exhibited, high levels of internal diversity regarding time of arrival, geographic origin and degree of legal and economic security (Attané & Merli, 2024; Wang, 2021), alongside rapid residential turnover in the area’s social housing.

Put simply, a gradual process of urban relegation, assignment of socially and racially marginalized individuals in undesirable urban locations (Wacquant, 2010), turned Champ-Haut from what the Angs regarded as a safe, ‘French’, middle-class area into an ill-reputed banlieue concentrating economically and racially marginalized households. Champ-Haut was equally witnessing a level of institutional withdrawal, unusual in the French context. Whilst many similar banlieues were revitalized by public investment during the 1990s and 2000s, Champ-Haut missed out on funding and gradually saw the disappearance of public facilities. Although the police station remained close by, similar to other underprivileged areas (D. Fassin, 2013) police presence in the area grew scarce from the 2000s onwards and morphed from community-based practices into a punitive style, fuelling distrust between residents and law enforcement agencies.

Methods and data

This article is based on ethnographic research Linda Haapajärvi conducted between 2011 and 2015 as a part of a larger project on the implementation of urban renewal programmes in the Paris area. She participated in activities and events organized at a community centre located close to Champ-Haut, and came into contact with a large number of locals. Presenting herself as a foreign student with an interest in France’s urban policies, she was received with curiosity by the centre’s staff as well as locals, both eager to share their view on French society and politics with a newcomer. The same attitude was applied to Bartholomew Konechni, equally a foreign PhD student, when he later came to visit the area. We felt that our being outsiders to France and to the local networks helped downplay power hierarchies and build trust. Being white Northern Europeans, located in the privileged part of the hierarchy of whiteness (Krivonos, 2017), also meant that experiences of discrimination were not disclosed to us prior to developing durable engagements with some research participants and acknowledging the limits of our own standpoint and the complexity of French race relations (see Kostet & Verschraegen, 2025).

Prolonged proximity to informants, in situations they were willing to share, was important for us in terms of research ethics. ¹ This feature of ethnography allowed us to gradually discover what mattered to informants living under the threat of violence. It helped with managing the unpredictability inherent in producing knowledge on conflict and violence by discussing preliminary hypotheses with informants and collaboratively reiterating the research’s scope (Kostovicova & Knott, 2022). Centring on defensive familism directed our work towards family-based self-protection practices, away from trauma-reactivating accounts of violence.

Linda Haapajärvi conducted 12 recorded interviews with the community centre’s staff and municipal officers. These interviews centred on perspectives of the territory, of problems identified and solutions envisaged. As she has demonstrated elsewhere (Haapajärvi, 2020, 2022), while the professionals did not altogether disregard a structural diagnostic, they mobilized a culturalized reading of the neighbourhood’s decline, attributing its perceived deficit of civic spirit to an excess of communautarisme. The 35 interviews with local residents told another story. While some residents were vocal about the increased number of migrant households, most described how they felt the public authorities were failing to invest in local infrastructure and ignoring the problem of insecurity.

In November 2011, Linda Haapajärvi was alerted to cases of anti-Asian violence by the janitor of the Angs’ residential unit. This was the starting point of our study, evolving into a ‘focused ethnography’ (Knoblauch, 2005), characterized by intense production of data on the specific matter of racialized violence over a limited period of time. The janitor thought studying the issue would advance Haapajärvi’s understanding of intergroup relations in French banlieues. He set up a first meeting between the ethnographer and Yoan Ang, with whom he was a family friend. The Angs appeared to be motivated to participate in the research by hopes of drawing attention to the problem of anti-Asian violence. Over 2011–2012, Yoan and his wife Sue often invited Linda Haapajärvi to their home, their church, and trips to Paris’s Asian enclave areas where they shopped, met friends and volunteered in ethnic Chinese associations. In Champ-Haut, Yoan introduced her to their family and persuaded his son, brother-in-law, nephew and niece to be interviewed. The interviews centred on our interlocutors’ involvement in the defensive efforts as well as on their individual biographies, family arrangements and accounts of neighbourhood change.

Fieldnotes form the basis of our data, produced through participant observation of the Angs’ responses to violence during winter 2011–2012 and contact with them thereafter. These notes describe the practice of defensive familism, experiences of participating and in-group relations. At the analysis stage, Haapajärvi associated with Konechni who had previously researched violent crime in London (Konechni, 2020). Our attention was caught by the family-based nature of the Angs’ anti-violence initiative, setting it apart from minority-based mobilizations observed elsewhere. We were also struck by the initiative’s gendered division of labour. At the project’s start, Yoan seemed proud to invite Haapajärvi to join the patrol, to demonstrate first-hand ‘how the work was done’. However, as the Angs realized we were interested in regular observation, Yoan ushered young female ethnographer Linda to join the women at home.

The analysis started with closely reviewing fieldnotes and interview transcripts, progressing by deriving initial determinants of a family-based response to violence from empirical materials, then refining them by linking to extant research. Concretely, we started by forming a timeline of anti-Asian violent crime and responses to it in Champ-Haut, examining local level barriers to institutional and co-ethnic support. We then analysed the features of family networks that allowed turning kinship into a tool of self-defence, and the impact on intrafamilial power relations of anti-violence mobilization. We refrain from making causal arguments about defensive familism’s direct effects on family and citizenship as our data do not allow for a systematic pre-post comparison. In the following sections, we present our findings on defensive familism’s emergence and family and citizenship ties’ subsequent reorganization.

Recalibrating kinship ties for self-defence, recovering generational divides

When families are left to protect themselves against violence, they learn that the state cannot be trusted to enforce citizens’ rights – here the right to security regardless of ethnic minority status. The officer who took Yoan’s call on the night of the burglary refused to dispatch police due to alleged lack of manpower. The municipal deputy, whom the Angs solicited after the incident, squashed their ideas of installing cameras or organizing a resident-based patrol emphasizing it was illegal for private individuals to operate such technologies and patrolling should be left to police.

Like French-Asians elsewhere (Chuang & Merle, 2020, 2021; Du, 2020), the Angs were left with little choice but to take matters into their own hands. Unlike their counterparts in ethnic enclaves, they could not rely on a broad co-ethnic mobilization in their racially diverse area. The Angs tried to call an organizing meeting after the burglary, but it was attended by only a dozen men. Three were non-Asian neighbours who came to express solidarity with no serious intention of participating further. Six were fellow French-Asian families that moved to the same condominium as the Angs in the 1980s and who the Angs knew well. Only three recent Chinese migrant men living in the adjacent social housing unit offered to participate in the Angs’ patrol: Mei’s son-in-law and two men who attended the same church as the Angs, one of whom had fallen victim to an armed robbery himself. The lack of co-ethnic mobilization left Yoan bitter: ‘Almost one hundred Chinese people live there. I’m sure they are scared but only two of them take part in the patrol. This leaves us doing the work for them, like the police leaves theirs to us’ (Fieldnote, 13/12/11).

The Angs’ attempt at minority mobilization boiled down to an initiative that remained in the scope of pre-existing family solidarities. We conceptualize their anti-violence practices as a case of defensive familism. By defensive familism, we mean self-reliant defensive practices drawing on place-based kinship and intergenerational obligations. Concretely, the Angs elicited participation in a ‘surveillance patrol’ (patrouille de surveillance) from their local kinship network. From seven o’clock onwards, a group of two to five men were posted on the private residence’s front steps, monitoring the courtyard while smoking, chatting in Khmer or Cantonese, browsing their phones. Every hour, the men would walk around the building’s entrances, checking staircases and underground parking facilities. If suspicious individuals were spotted, the men turned to their second key practice: communicating danger through a WeChat group inclusive of patrol members, their families and close friends in Champ-Haut. Short messages were sent out in Chinese, for instance, as translated by Mr Ang: ‘8.25pm. Two men by the south entrance’ or ‘10pm. Group of young men with scooters by the playground’. The third practice, escorting, also made use of WeChat. Group members sent arrival-times and pick-up locations, typically the local railway station, where they were met by the patrol who accompanied them home. During the initiative’s two-month run, no further armed attacks were committed against Champ-Haut’s Asian inhabitants, at least to the Angs’ knowledge.

For defensive familism to compensate for state authorities’ withdrawal, three conditions must be met. First, it requires pre-existing, place-bound kin relations. Defensive familism was an option for the Angs, whose family network was anchored in Champ-Haut and followed a ‘neofamilist’ organization. While the network did not obey principles of patrilocal post-marital residence, it was patterned by strong intergenerational ties, with parents and children living as neighbours in separate but proximate households, in ‘dual-core’ familist configurations (Xu & Huang, 2023). Yoan and Sue Ang’s first-born son Julien and his family lived in the same building, as did Mei Ang’s eldest son. Yoan’s two middle sons, on the contrary, had moved out of Champ-Haut, and Mei’s daughter, Nathalie, settled in a nearby social housing unit with her husband and children. The consanguinity-emphasizing familist principles were relaxed to count as kin the family of a man who had lived as Yoan and Mei’s neighbour in Phnom Penn, fled to France, and followed the Angs to Champ-Haut. All in all, their local kin network comprised six first-generation immigrants, their five French-born children and five small grandchildren.

Second, defensive familism requires effective respect for intergenerational obligations, something that can no longer be expected in the changing Chinese society and diaspora. While prioritizing individual self-fulfilment over familial well-being remains morally condemned (Song & Ji, 2020; Yan, 2025), parents and children are found to opt out of intergenerational obligations in reaction to family norms’ constraining nature (Goh & Wang, 2018). The Angs hinted at tensions between individualist aspirations and familist expectations, but also referred to intergenerational care as what set them apart from the ‘French’, engaging in care practices as a means of realizing themselves as socially ethical actors (Barbalet, 2025, p. 745). Grandparents cared for grandchildren, allowing their offspring and spouses to pursue dual careers. In exchange, the rather well-earning children provided material support to retired parents with modest pensions.

Third, the Angs could harness kinship ties for defensive purposes because their family networks covered the resources needed: physical force and late-hour availability. The families included a critical number of men – sons and sons-in-law in their forties – better positioned, in the patrol members’ view, to assert authority than their ageing fathers. Intrafamilial upward social mobility mattered too: unlike their fathers, the sons were educated, with professional positions working regular office hours, leaving them free during evenings. In other words, their family network was local and tight, masculine and middle-class enough to substitute the protection withheld by police.

While Yoan seemed proud of the initiative, defensive familism was not the Angs’ preferred solution. It was a coping mechanism problematizing their relationship with the state in ways that varied by generation. The first-generation felt, in leaving them unprotected, that the state authorities violated an implicit contract. Sue explained: ‘France has been good to us. Yes. But we have been good too. My husband has worked all his life. We haven’t made a lot of money. But the money we have made we have put in our home and in our children, so that they will be fine’ (Interview, 06/12/11). Yoan followed suit with his wife’s views: ‘With my wife, we decided early on to put family first. Our children are doing well. One an engineer, the other a nurse. We have lived a quiet life, a good life here, so we think this too needs to be considered’ (Interview, 06/12/11). Sue and Yoan made moral claims to recognition on the basis of conformity with the model minority image of Asian immigrants. They expected hard work, discreet presence and investment in children to be reciprocated by the state, rewarded by access to a stable and safe life in France.

The second-generation, on the contrary, did not expect the state to reward their dutiful behaviour. Nathalie, Yoan’s niece, was vocal in her anger: ‘It’s bullshit really. I’m sorry. But my dad and uncle in the streets at night. My husband doing this after work. It’s bullshit!’ (Interview, 12/01/12). They claimed their rights as French citizens be respected, inclusive of the right to protection, as a reflection of a generational turn, with descendants of Chinese immigrants playing a more active role in anti-racist action (Chuang et al., 2020; Wang & Madrisotti, 2024). They denounced the classed and racialized logics of policing, combining overpolicing of Black and Arab men (Beaman & Fredette, 2022) with ignoring victims belonging to racialized minorities. Julien, Yoan’s son, was resentful at being treated as a second-class citizen: ‘This is our true problem. The taxis don’t always show up. But that’s one thing. That the ambulance doesn’t come, the police don’t come. That’s another. We can do a lot by ourselves. But save lives?’ (Interview, 07/02/12). Nathalie and Julien Ang felt betrayed both as racialized minority citizens and banlieue residents. Their experience of state neglect was underpinned by a spatial logic, melding together race and class as principles of exclusion, and eroding the egalitarian ideals central to France’s ‘Republican’ ideology of citizenship.

The familist backlash and its gendered ambiguities

Defensive familism’s dividing lines were not only patterned by generation, but also by gender. While men were out monitoring the residential space and escorting individuals navigating it at late hours, women supported the patrol from the home. During the two months of intense patrolling, Mei and Sue, the grandmothers, were left with the lion’s share of domestic duties, as their daughters and daughters-in-law all worked outside the home. To manage the extra work load, they pooled tasks and resources, caring for grandchildren together and cooking and serving dinner for patrol members in Sue’s kitchen. From their kitchen, Mei and Sue also coordinated escorting activities through WeChat, making sure no message went unnoticed by the men and that they arrived on time at pick-up locations for those seeking their support.

The practice of defensive familism brought a strict gendered division of labour, ushering men to watch the streets whilst confining women to the home front. The mobilization marked a temporal reinforcement of the gendered opposition between men and women otherwise unobserved amongst the Angs, characterized by blurred gender boundaries between breadwinners and caregivers: retired grandparents of both genders caring for grandchildren and second-generation dual-career couples. While the practice of defensive familism augmented men’s agentic capacities in the public space and compromised women’s autonomy within it, the lived experience of this novel constellation was a complex matter that kindled pre-existing tensions over family obligations between genders and generations.

The women of different generations responded differently to the resurgence of asymmetrical gender relations. Mei and Sue appeared convinced by family-reliant mobilization. When we discussed the matter at the Ang family home, drinking tea under a wall-hanging presenting a rural Cambodian landscape, Mei stressed there was an important lesson to be learned from the police inaction: ‘In France, we can forget the family. The younger ones can forget the family because they haven’t known anything else, like we have. So maybe this wakes them up a little bit’ (Fieldnote, 20/12/11). Mei and Sue stressed familism’s virtues. They attributed the ebb of familism to the French context where the nuclear family was the norm and public services diminished family support’s significance. But the women also referred to their unique family history potentially placing them at the traditionalist end of the familist–individualist spectrum along which East Asian families vary (Barbalet, 2025; Song & Ji, 2020), as does the conceptualization of ‘women’ within Chinese social philosophy in which the term funü provides a familist framing of women as kinswomen and the word nüxing represents women as individualized and sexualized subjects (Barlow, 2004). The Angs originated from a multigenerational family of the Phnom Penh ethnic Chinese community. They had not experienced the family-hostile Cultural Revolution or restrictive family polices, but survived the Khmer Rouge and migrated to France with help from Hong Kong based relatives. Their personal experience told them family solidarities were a robust shield against violent crisis.

The grandmothers also appeared appreciative of the densification intergenerational relations. Both Mei and Sue found the family ‘reunited’: the reciprocal exchange of resources and services, characteristic of their networks in ordinary times, was now complemented with denser everyday interactions. Mei and Sue spent more time with their daughters and daughters-in-law, and they saw more of their sons and nephews during shared dinners. The pursuit of defensive familism provided the grandmothers an opportunity to shape, if temporarily, family obligations in a pattern they understood as beneficial (Goh & Wang, 2018). The female elders seemed to be regaining the parental authority they had lost as their kin relations had come to resemble an ‘inverted family’ (Yan, 2021, pp. 5–6), with their children’s careers and grandchildren’s care dictating the order of family life. Uniting against an external threat seemed to reduce discrepancies in intense practical support and fleeting emotional connection between the generations, a common experience amongst caregiving Chinese grandparents (Goh & Wang, 2018; Xu & Huang, 2023), and a concern the Ang elders voiced discreetly.

At its height, defensive familism required sustained involvement in extended kin relations, a commitment the younger women responded to differently than older ones. In Julien’s family, defensive familism amplified tensions between individualized family norms and the traditionalist, multigenerational ideals between which French-Asians negotiate family arrangements (Wang, 2021; Wang & Schwartz, 2016). Julien, Yoan and Mei’s first-born son, described himself as committed to ‘Chinese values’, which he understood as distinct from his non-Asian peers’ moral commitments, especially with regard to family ethics. In practice, this meant that when he married, the young couple settled as Julien’s parents’ immediate neighbours. Julien’s wife, Jenny, born and raised by middle-class French-Cambodian parents in Paris proper, was initially reluctant to leave the city centre for Champ-Haut. However, she agreed out of respect for her husband’s loyalty to his parents and her in-laws’ commitment to care for grandchildren.

Jenny was a successful professional working long hours in the banking sector. As the defensive initiative lasted, she came home to her in-laws in the evening, had dinner with them, helped clean up, and then returned home with her daughters. Observing their daughter-in-law, Yoan and Sue worried how the problem of Champ-Haut’s insecurity reflected on their son’s household. The anti-violence mobilization took Julien away from his spouse and children, and pressured Jenny to prioritize the extended family’s needs over aspirations towards nuclear family privacy. They knew Julien and Jenny were attracted by Paris and had the financial resources necessary to move. They also knew their son was staying because of family obligations. Yoan described how he and Sue tried to preserve ‘balanced relationships’. The grandparents committed themselves to childcare, yet attempted not to interfere in their son’s relationship, respecting their privacy.

In sociological terms, the Angs cultivated ‘family social capital’ (Pan & Bian, 2025), relational resources that were intended to compensate for the kin network’s precarious economic capital and guarantee the lineage’s survival and success. The family social capital enabling defensive familism was, however, a fragile accomplishment. It relied on individual family members’ commitment to collective goals, something defensive familism put on trial, as exemplified by the mixed response in Julien’s conjugal family. The pursuit of defensive familism burdened the female spouses of the second-generation by ushering them into a ‘second shift’ characterized by more conservative relations between genders and generations. But it also weighed on men and older generations who understood familist social organization’s survival was dependent on viable combinations of intergenerational duties and individual self-fulfilment.

The most pointed evidence of this fragile balance came from Claire, Yoan and Sue’s daughter, left traumatized by the Angs’ burglary. While Claire continued her work as a nurse, all other aspects of her life altered. When home, Claire stayed in her room. Yoan and Sue left their daughter in peace within the family home, but they never left her alone outside. In the months following the assault, Yoan and Sue accompanied their daughter to and from the train station as she went to work; Claire had stopped driving. They let Claire spend her days off at her boyfriend’s place where they dropped her off and picked her up by car. Claire spent her non-working hours either under her parents’ gaze or in the company of her partner.

When Linda reconnected with the Angs in autumn 2015, after two years, Yoan and Sue reported that Claire had married and moved to the United States. The couple were studying to become Protestant pastors and planning to start a family across the Atlantic. While proud of Claire’s choice, Yoan and Sue wondered if that bifurcation in their daughter’s life was associated with the 2011 criminal assault. In their eyes, Claire had not recovered her sense of security in Champ-Haut and was fleeing the area. What the parents didn’t consider – and what we can only speculate on – is that Claire’s emigration may represent a reaction to broader issues: first, to anti-Asian racism ambient in France, which remains poorly addressed; second, to increased parental control in the attack’s aftermath. From this angle, Claire’s emigration can be interpreted as an attempt to restore personal authority over her life, something neither the supposedly women-friendly Republic nor Claire’s parents could preserve.

Conclusion

In this article, we describe and analyse a previously unstudied response to racialized violence: defensive familism. We shift focus from ethnic minority mobilizations in enclave areas to a poor, diverse neighbourhood where neither institutional nor co-ethnics’ support is available. Instead, our informants developed a self-reliant, family-centred approach to keeping themselves and their families safe. To effectively provide shelter from racialized hostilities, defensive familism requires pre-existing place-based family networks, strong commitment to intergenerational obligations, and the presence of male kin available to assert their presence in the residential space, alongside women willing to support the initiative from home.

At its core, defensive familism demands ordinary forms of kin support be recalibrated for extraordinary uses, protection against racialized violence. It therefore disrupts prevailing conceptions of family and citizenship, creating new meaning for these categories and their interrelations.

From our studying the Angs, we forge two contributions to sociological analysis of citizenship in societies shaped by migrations and durable social, racial and urban inequalities. First, our relational analysis, one that confronts citizenship’s normative narratives to its situated practices, highlights how ‘what’ citizenship is for racialized minority subjects depends on complex relations between the French state and its classed, racialized and gendered citizens. We show that when the state fails to protect minority citizens against racialized violence, it erodes normative principles of egalitarianism. Our findings indicate that the Republican ideology of citizenship covers a multilayered reality of what Judith Butler (2004) calls ‘uneven distribution of vulnerability’. Lack of police protection in poor banlieues signals that French citizens’ lives do not matter equally, with the lives of precarious, racialized citizens more exposed to violence than those of white middle-class citizens. Lack of police intervention in anti-Asian crime teaches French-Asians that model minority rhetoric produces a fetishist reality with little power in everyday situations where state support is needed. Police disengagement is particularly troubling from French-Asian women’s perspective given the gendered dimension of violence that feminist scholars have long ago shown to compromise women’s autonomy and self-determination, regardless of racial or ethnic status. When state authorities fail to support racialized minority women, they undermine the individualistic and egalitarian standards they set for themselves. They render vulnerable French-Asian women as women and as minority subjects with little regard to the gender equality related outcomes of compensatory safety measures.

Second, we underscore how family relations mediate institutional categorizations and individual experiences of citizenship. We also show how family obligations are subject to ongoing negotiations between genders and generations in the context of migration. In conceptual terms, we advance intersectional analysis of social inequalities that is at once multi-scalar and translocal, showing how individuals occupying specific locations along different axes of power navigate the categorical expectations of citizenship and kinship that are themselves multiple, dynamic, and often contradictory. Unlike optimistic findings on minority mobilizations’ potential to incorporate Asian minority citizens in the national polity, broadening its horizons, we witnessed how police protection’s replacement with family-focused self-defence severed trust in French state authorities. It restored confidence in familist principles that our informants associate with their Chinese origins, even if not in a uniform manner. Our informants’ experiences of amplified family interdependencies varied by gender and generation, and were interwoven with pre-existing perspectives on intergenerational care. Notably, while immigrant grandmothers’ belief in familist values was revived, their French-born daughters struggled to reconcile the added family duties with their professional and personal lives.

Defensive familism did not uncover a zero-sum game between family and citizenship, with one supplanting the other as a source of protection. It produced a temporal reconfiguration of the two principles of protection that individuals struggled to reconcile from the specific locations they occupied within the French-Asian minority and their family networks. As such, it acted as a spotlight on ongoing negotiations around family obligations in state-neglected minorities, as well as a reminder of how family’s meaning is dependent on the classed, racialized and gendered power hierarchies of citizenship that state policies have the power to attenuate or augment.

Defensive familism underscored that, like the stigmatized Arab and Black minorities, the Asian minority too may be subject to differential treatment by supposedly universalist state authorities, and that they too may need to cover for citizenship’s frailties by family solidarities. This is in fact a common pattern amidst France’s postcolonial minorities, as exemplified by the role played by families of police violence victims in leading claims to truth and justice. Just as the families of Eric Garner or George Flyod, African-American men who died at the hands of the US police, the families of Adama Traoré and Nahel Mezrouk, who died in similar circumstances in Paris, have stepped up to defend the victims and those occupying a similarly precarious position in French society. Although there is an obvious qualitative difference between state neglect and state-sanctioned violence, a common logic of familist compensation for state failure connects these cases and highlights the important structural barriers to individual citizenship amidst France’s racialized minority groups.

Finally, our ethnographic analysis of defensive familism opens up two main avenues for future research. First, future research on anti-Asian violence – or other racially motivated, under-policed crime – should expand the open-ended approach, evaluating the relative salience of defensive familism, minority mobilization and other, yet overlooked, defensive strategies of threatened individuals. Such research should be less focused on singular mobilizations than existing work, including our own, and adopt a longitudinal approach to researching racialized violence and responses to it in a given territory. This would lead to a more systematic understanding of how racialized minority citizens aim to protect themselves in hostile urban conditions and how specific contextual dynamics – institutional and interpersonal – enable or constrain specific modes of protection. Second, our intersectional approach to individual experiences of state neglect calls for more research on how migrants and racialized minorities rearrange elements within the different normative frameworks unsettled by critical situations. Our case study prompts at least two other important questions. First, what precise elements of Republican ideology or Chinese familism do French-Asians reject or retain in the aftermath of family-based anti-violence mobilizations? Second, what do these new semantic configurations mean for their sense of citizenship? Such research should further develop this intersectional lens, scrutinizing over time gender and generation-based differences in how racialized minority citizens re-evaluate the potential of family and citizenship relations to federate their futures.