Critical Beings

Originally published in 2004. Critical Beings explores the role of such people as the refugee, the immigrant and the subjugated minority, together with their attendant legal regimes, in the persistent but ever unsettled processes of national/global formation. Challenging accounts that would ascribe to them a transitory or incidental place in the establishment of the modern juridical order, the collection argues that these excluded or marginalized people are coming to form a new entity - the global legal subject - comparable in ways to other non-state actors operating in the international legal system. Most distinctively, the collection shows how the global legal subject is integral to and constituent of the processes of state and global formation yet also disruptive of them. It maintains that these global subjects stand as possible precursors to new political ways of being. The book makes an important contribution to debates on law and globalization, and will be of interest to those concerned with law and the movement of people, law and the formation of identities and law and human rights.