Abstract
This paper 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. I characterize contemporary migrant movements as insurrectional in terms of a surging politics of normative defiance vis a vis the “modern territorial mode” as the hegemonic measure, hence as a total ideology, regulating and organizing politics around the world. Migrants lives are at once conditioned by an existential precarity and transformative capacity. 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 in their lives and the associated vulnerabilities by redefining their own subjectivities from those who simply 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 and the international state system. As they do so, they emerge as the existential mirrors on which citizens’ extant and future precarities are revealed.
Presenters
Nevzat SogukProfessor of Political Sceince, Political Sceince, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—The World on the Move: Understanding Migration in a New Global Age
KEYWORDS
Migration, Insurrection, Precarity, Global, Governmentality, Rights
