Land of strangers

Abstract

This paper summarises a core theme running through the author's book Land of Strangers selected for discussion in this symposium. It examines the politics of intolerance towards minorities and migrants in multicultural and multiethnic Europe. It dissents from the prevailing view that this politics is symptomatic of a breakdown of social cohesion, in need of correctives of community, contact and border closure. Instead, the paper locates this development in a new ‘catastrophist’ biopolitics of risk and uncertainty that descends on the figure of the stranger, tapping into an ingrained vernacular of phenotypical racism. Accordingly, the paper argues for a politics of the commons that makes space for, and publicises, rituals of cohabitation, the shared commons, a welfarist biopolitics and other collective interventions that might strengthen civilities of indifference to difference.

Keywords:

• racism
• xenophobia
• Europe
• biopolitics
• civility
• commons