Precarity Unbound: Insurrectional Migrancy and Citizen Precarity in a Globalized World

Abstract

This work explores ‘insurrectional migratory movements’ and the conditions of precarity they reveal among both migrants and citizens. Mix-migrant populations composed of refugees, asylum seekers, forced migrants, economic migrants, and exiles fuel the insurrectional exhilarations of human displacement, particularly in the proverbial ‘West’. I define insurrectional movements broadly ‘as those movements that have shown extraordinary capacities to pressure “modernity” as the single hegemonic measure for political authenticity, social order and governmental conduct’ (Soguk in Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007; Globalizations 12(6):829–833, 2015). I characterize contemporary migrant movements as insurrectional in terms of a ‘surging politics of normative defiance vis a vis the “modern territorial mode”’ that organizes the international order. Migrants lives are at once conditioned by an existential precarity and transformative capacity within the territorial order. On the one hand, at every level, they encounter attempts to plunder their time and alienate their bodies from politics and rights. On the other hand, however, migrants only tolerate the unequal power relations and the associated vulnerabilities by redefining their own subjectivities from those who obey to those who strategically defy the normative ideals of modernity and governmentality. They defy the ideals around which modern, nation-statist territorial orders are constructed and justified, including those ideals undergirding the countries and national communities as well as the international state system. As they do so, they emerge as the existential mirrors on which citizens’ extant and future precarities are revealed. In the last three decades, the citizen/nation/state form has been under unprecedented pressure. Even in the West, the balance of power has shifted in favour of global political-economic forces beyond the control of states and citizenry. As philosopher Paul Virilio observed, modern citizenship has become a process leading to a disappearance of the right-bearing citizenship; where the citizens and others appear as little more than the ‘living-dead (mort-vivant)’ or ‘raw materials’ in the service of transpolitical capitalism and anational states.