Introduction: Citizenship, migrant activism and the politics of movement

Abstract

This book investigates the possibilities and impossibilities of migrant activism in the context of securitised sovereignties and regimes that restrict mobility. As implied by the title, our aim is to bring together three major themes into a critical dialogue: the forms of citizenship that have emerged in the context of transfor­ mations in the global migration regime; the forms of migrant activism that have emerged to contest this migration regime; and the implications these two pro­ cesses have for how we theorise and conceptualise the politics of movement. We have asked each of the contributors to reflect, in their own way, on these themes in their individual chapters. The result is a rich collection of empirically grounded and theoretically attuned analyses of migrant activism in different con­ texts around the world. Our aim in this Introduction is to elaborate on the three themes and explain how each chapter addresses them. We start with the theme of citizenship because it has become such a focal point of debates about borders, sovereignty and migration. Anxieties over the fate of national citizenship in the context of global migrations have led to stricter rules on conferring citizenship, such as the spread of citizenship tests and innovations in legal (and extralegal) ways of revoking citizenship. The accompanying discourse – i.e. that Western states are being overrun by migrants and refugees from the Global South – is remarkable for how often, quickly and effectively it can be mobilised. This is despite the fact that the right to mobility within and between rich countries has been overwhelmingly granted to citizens of other rich countries. A major empirical study of visa con­ trols has confirmed this bias and concludes that access to the mobility regime is highly uneven and differential (Mau 2010). Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that many have concluded that citizenship is no less than ‘a conspir­ acy against the rest of the world’ (Hindess 2000: 1489; cf. Shachar 2009; Stevens 2009). While we acknowledge the importance of this, our primary inter­ est in these regimes that restrict mobility and citizenship does not lie with the exclusions they generate. Rather, we wish to emphasise how the practice and experience of mobility – even when restricted – is itself productive of new forms of citizenship and of being political. The focus on how political subjectivity can be enacted in various ways in the context of the global mobility regime is the second major theme of the book.