The Contested Politics of Mobility

Reviews / Votes

This volume brings together a team of internationally renowned and promising new scholars around the construction of an innovative paradigm in political theory: that of "irregularity". Such an approach importantly emphasises both mobility and conflict, which allows for an understanding of the paradoxical associations of violence and creativity taking place across and around today's multiple borderzones. As such, the volume makes a critical intervention into debates regarding the emergent conditions of mobile citizenship.




Etienne Balibar, Universite de Paris-Ouest Nanterre, France and University of California, Irvine, USA

This impressive collection traces salient public anxieties about migrant invasions and the elaborate technologies applied to monitor foreign bodies at borders across Europe and North America. ... Irregular migration is ironically becoming the norm, and the authors of this collection theorize this phenomenon in new ways that relate to ontology, govermentality, and exception. Managing disparate streams of visitors - those invited and those not - requires a constantly evolving set of tools and techniques. Theoretically savvy, and politically innovative, this book brings together a stellar lineup of thinkers whose collective work on migration, borders, and responses to state policies is unparalleled.

Jennifer Hyndman, York University, Canada

Herself a leading scholar of citizenship, Squire has assembled a provocative collection on the question of irregular migration and the governance of borderzones. Bringing together North American and European scholarship, the authors analyze the politics of mobility across a number of different sites. These leading scholars bring a very productive variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases into tension to triangulate an important field of politics, analysis, and practice that will shape the field in years to come.

Mark B Salter, University of Ottawa, Canada