Precarity and International Relations

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction

   • Ritu Vij, Elisa Wynne-Hughes, Tahseen Kazi

   Pages 1-33

3. Precarity and Sovereignty

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 35-35

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   2. Notes on Abandonment

      • Philip Armstrong

      Pages 37-61

   3. The Global Subject of Precarity

      • Ritu Vij

      Pages 63-92

   4. Precarity at the Nexus of Governmentality and Sovereignty: Entangled Fields of Power and Political Subjectivities

      • Nancy Ettlinger

      Pages 93-125

4. Precarity and Solidarities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. Irregular Labour and the ‘Life of the State’: Precarity, Citizenship, and Sovereignty in Decolonizing Africa

      • Nick Bernards

      Pages 129-147

   3. Struggling with Precarity: From ‘More Jobs’ to Post-work Politics

      • Wanda Vrasti

      Pages 149-171

   4. Disability Counter-Communities: Resisting Precarity with Friendship

      • Ivanka Antova, Bal Sokhi-Bulley

      Pages 173-201

   5. Precarity and Judith Butler’s Ambivalent Social Bond. What Is the Value of Ettingerian Transconnectedness?

      • Nóirín MacNamara

      Pages 203-228

5. Precarity and Work

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 229-229

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   2. Precarity Unbound: Insurrectional Migrancy and Citizen Precarity in a Globalized World

      • Nevzat Soguk

      Pages 231-252

   3. Within the Factory of Mobility: Practices of Mexican Migrant Workers in the Twentieth-Century US Labour Regimes

      • Claudia Bernardi

      Pages 253-277

   4. The Aesthetics and the Politics of Precarity: Three Films

      • Matt Davies

      Pages 279-302

   5. Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness: Unauthorized Migrant Workers in Japan

      • Hironori Onuki

      Pages 303-324

6. Back Matter

   Pages 325-336

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This book addresses the implications of current thinking on precarity, precariousness and the precariat for the study of International Relations and International Political Economy. Drawing on a broad range of critical theoretical resources including literatures on aesthetics and psychoanalysis as well as feminist, Foucauldian, Marxian and postcolonial social theory, it explores the implications of precarity thought for three concepts: Sovereignty, Solidarities and Work in International Relations. Does precarity re-inscribe or undermine the logic and practices of sovereignty? As a common condition and point of mobilization, does precarity represent a new labor activism or does it find ethical grounds for solidarities that destabilize identities? How is precarity located, practiced and occluded in work relations? Running counter to the contemporary impulse to grasp precarity and processes of its proliferation in homogenized terms as either being ensconced in national imaginaries, or asushering in a condition of global precarity and a global precariat class, the book also underscores the entanglements of the global, national and local in the discursive and material production of precarity and precariousness in the present conjuncture.

• precarity
• international relations theory
• trans-disciplinarity
• governmentality
• biopolitics
• irregular labour

“This book is an outstanding contribution to much needed innovative conceptual work in IR. It engages the debates on precarity to problematize the sovereign imagination that informs, and limits, critical investigations of contemporary world politics. It moves beyond the commonplace denunciations of precarity/precariousness as a concept restricted to the experiences of capitalist social formations of the ‘North’ turning its focus on the multiple and transversal connections that make the fractured space of the international today. Without giving in to universalistic readings of a common global precariousness, the authors in this volume explore paradoxes, complexities, and potentials of different instantiations of precarity in the production of politics of contestation, resistance and solidarity. An indispensable collection for researchers and students invested in reimagining critical IR.”
–Joẵo Nogueira, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

“This volumeprovokes and courageously crafts new ways of thinking about precarity and precariousness and international relations. It challenges the epistemological moves that collapse suffering and the generating of equivalencies between the precarious liberal and the Third World subject, the migrant and the abandoned, the able/disabled, precarity and the subject of aesthetics. Ritu Vij, Tahseen Kazi and Elisa Wynne-Hughes bring together authors and interlocutors that provide us a mode of writing that engages with the forces of precarity—instantiations of how to imagine new forms of life within and against a precarious world.”
–Anna M. Agathangelou, Department of Politics, York University

“Intervening in ‘precarity talk’ across a variety of fields, this important volume brings together critical transnational analyses of the key IR concepts of Sovereignty, Solidarities, and Work. Highlighting precarious working conditions, lived experience, and contracts as politically produced effects the chapters carefully draw out the heterogeneous and ongoing implications of the withdrawal of the welfare state, the gradual erosion of social protection in the era of financialized neoliberal capitalism, the (re)emergence and recognition of the fragile and precarious condition of workers in capitalist social relations. Scholars and students of Critical Management Studies and intersectional decolonisation will equally benefit from close consideration of these fine chapters.”

–Amit S. Rai, Queen Mary, University of London

• Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

  Ritu Vij

• Department of Political Science and International Studies, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, USA

  Tahseen Kazi

• School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

  Elisa Wynne-Hughes

Ritu Vij is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK. 

Tahseen Kazi is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Georgia Southern University, USA. 

Elisa Wynne-Hughes is Lecturer in International Relations at Cardiff University, UK.

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