This book addresses the implications of current thinking on precarity, precariousness and the precariat for the study of International Relations and International Political Economy. Drawing on a broad range of critical theoretical resources including literatures on aesthetics and psychoanalysis as well as feminist, Foucauldian, Marxian and postcolonial social theory, it explores the implications of precarity thought for three concepts: Sovereignty, Solidarities and Work in International Relations. Does precarity re-inscribe or undermine the logic and practices of sovereignty? As a common condition and point of mobilization, does precarity represent a new labor activism or does it find ethical grounds for solidarities that destabilize identities? How is precarity located, practiced and occluded in work relations? Running counter to the contemporary impulse to grasp precarity and processes of its proliferation in homogenized terms as either being ensconced in national imaginaries, or as ushering in a condition of global precarity and a global precariat class, the book also underscores the entanglements of the global, national and local in the discursive and material production of precarity and precariousness in the present conjuncture.
Author(s): Ritu Vij, Tahseen Kazi, Elisa Wynne-Hughes
Series: International Political Economy Series
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 336
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Praise for Precarity and International Relations
Contents
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction
Prologue
Precarity and Sovereignty
Precarity and Solidarities
Precarity and Work
References
Part I Precarity and Sovereignty
2 Notes on Abandonment
Works Cited
3 The Global Subject of Precarity
Introduction1
Precarity as a Liberal Analytic
Ontological Precariousness: A Liberal Backstop?
Concluding Remarks
References
4 Precarity at the Nexus of Governmentality and Sovereignty: Entangled Fields of Power and Political Subjectivities
Precarities
Precarity Across Space
Precarity Over Time
Explaining Precarity
Governmentality and Conceptualizations of Power and Resistance
Questioning the Finality of Sovereign Power
Transformative Processes and Dual Expressions of Power
Precarity and Diverse Subjectivities
Everyday Subjects and Shades of Objectifying Precarity
Conclusion
References
Part II Precarity and Solidarities
5 Irregular Labour and the ‘Life of the State’: Precarity, Citizenship, and Sovereignty in Decolonizing Africa
Introduction
The Political Relations of Force
Class and Nation in Decolonizing Africa
Internationalizing the Politics of Precarity?
Conclusion
References
6 Struggling with Precarity: From ‘More Jobs’ to Post-work Politics
Fordism as Exception, Precarity as Norm
Post-Fordist Precarity: Between Discipline and Pleasure
A Post-work Approach to Precarity
References
7 Disability Counter-Communities: Resisting Precarity with Friendship
Introduction
The Ethic of Responsibility: Precarity
Community and Society
The Welfare Reform as Good Governance
Countering Responsibilization: (A New) Collectivity
Precarity and Resistance: Current Disability Narratives
Counter-Community and the Performance of Friendship
Conclusion
References
8 Precarity and Judith Butler’s Ambivalent Social Bond. What Is the Value of Ettingerian Transconnectedness?
Exclusion as Central to ‘How We Are’
Logics of Differentiation
Butler’s Ambivalent Social Bond
Bracha Ettinger’s Expanded Account of Subjectivity
Ambivalent-(yet Transconnected) Social Ties
Staying with Critique, Cultural Translation, and Ambivalent-(yet Transconnected) Ties
References
Part III Precarity and Work
9 Precarity Unbound: Insurrectional Migrancy and Citizen Precarity in a Globalized World
Introduction
Migrants as Mirrors to Pervasive Precarity Around the World
An Unravelling: The Tale of States, Citizen Privileges, and Migrant Precarity
Conclusion: Liberating Rights from Statist Sovereignty
References
10 Within the Factory of Mobility: Practices of Mexican Migrant Workers in the Twentieth-Century US Labour Regimes
Introduction
The Capture of Turbulent Migrations
The Circulation of ‘Bonded’ Workers
Refusal in the Factory of Mobility
Conclusion
Bibliography
11 The Aesthetics and the Politics of Precarity: Three Films
Defining Precarity
The Time and Space of the Precarious Subject: Insides and Outsides
The Time and Space of the Precarious Subject: Temporality and Rhythm
Body and Artefact
Conclusions
References
12 Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness: Unauthorized Migrant Workers in Japan
Introduction
Precarity and the Politics of Global Labour Migration
The Production of Unauthorized Migrant Workers as Precarious Subjects in Japan
The Everyday Struggles of Unauthorized Migrant Workers Against Precariousness
Conclusion
References
Index
