http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1814-526X
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ABSTRACT
The protests by migrants and refugees are a new form of activism on the global political stage. The most articulated approaches of migrant activism point to the ways in which migrant activism reconfigures citizenship through acts of citizenship. This paper argues that migrants’ acts of citizenship are inherently cosmopolitan since protesting migrants reject the monopolization of political subjectivity by the nation-state and take back the legitimate political subjectivity, liberating it from the confines of the nation-state and launching it for the use in the world as a whole. Without a cosmopolitan perspective, the scholars of migrant activism are condemned to an endless acknowledging of a paradox of migrant activism: migrants contest the citizenship of the nation-state, but their requests for papers and legalization reinforce the authority of citizenship. However, the failure is not only of migrant activism but also of political theories that do not offer alternative, non-statist ways of understanding and addressing migrants’ claims. Framing migrant protests as acts of cosmopolitan citizenship could already be a form of pre-institutionalizing cosmopolitanism, and migrant activism could be seen as instituting new forms of acting beyond the nation-state.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Refugee Action Coalition Sydney, ‘Protest, Self Harm Escalates on Manus Island,’ 16 January 2015. http://www.refugeeaction.org.au/?p=3652.
3. Hunger strikers in ‘The Jungle’ in Calais, ‘Hunger Strike Finished – Struggle Continues,’ 26 March 2016. https://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/hunger-strikefinished-struggle-continues/.
6. See ‘Libya migrant “slave market” footage sparks outrage’ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42038451.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tamara Caraus
Tamara Caraus is a researcher at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest. Her area of research includes continental political philosophy and political theory of cosmopolitanism. She contributed with articles to various academic journals and edited volumes, published four books, and co-edited Cosmopolitanism and the Legacy of Dissent (Routledge, 2014), Cosmopolitanism without Foundations (Zeta Books, 2014), Re-grounding Cosmopolitanism. Towards a Post-foundational Cosmopolitanism (Routledge, 2015), Cosmopolitanism and Global Protests, a special issue of Globalizations journal (2017), and Migration, Protest Movements and the Politics of Resistance: A Radical Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism(Routledge 2018).
