Movements of migration within and beyond citizenship

ABSTRACT

The article takes the lively discussion of citizenship in the 1990s as its point of departure, focusing in particular on the works by Étienne Balibar and Engin Isin. The author shows how the (illegal) migrant emerged as a paradigmatic figure in that discussion in the wake of the struggles of the sans-papiers in France and elsewhere in Europe. What characterizes the discussion of citizenship and migration since the end of the 1990s is an attempt to theoretically grasp the multifarious tensions between processes of deprivation and dispossession on the one hand and migrants’ agency and even the autonomy of migration on the other hand. It is working within this field of tensions that many scholars focused their analysis on the blurring of the boundary between inclusion and exclusion, pointing to migrants’ capacity to open new spaces of citizenship. Borders – external as well as internal – came therefore to play an increasingly important role in the debates surrounding citizenship and migration. In the last section, the article discusses the ongoing conjuncture of crises, underscoring both the persistent predicament of migration to and in Europe and the crucial role of migrants in the building of coalitions for social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• migration
• borders
• struggles

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Sandro Mezzadra

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is adjunct research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society of Western Sydney University. In the last decade his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is an active participant in the ‘post-workerist’ debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade (www.euronomade.info). With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019).