Rethinking Asylum, Rethinking Citizenship: Moving Beyond Exclusionary Politics

Abstract

The exclusionary politics of asylum would seem to be symptomatic of an ambiguous state of affairs. Marked by the logic of selective opposition which, in an alternative form, functions as a logic of differential inclusion, exclusionary politics play a central role in reconstructing a territorial order in the face of its dissolution. Indeed, it is often in the very process of this reconstruction that deterritorialising processes of governance and belonging emerge as internal disruptions of the territorial order. The territorial political community is thus precariously reconstructed through the exclusionary politics of asylum, the latter of which emerges in reactive ideological terms against those ‘turbulent’ migratory processes that precede and exceed governmental control. Whether such ‘turbulences’ are conceived of in economic terms (as labour) or in social terms (as mobility), this book suggests that exclusionary politics can be interpreted as a reactionary form of politics that produces scapegoats for ‘problems’ that are, in a sense, the sovereign state’s ‘own’.