Human Waste? Reading Bauman’s Wasted Lives in the Context of Ireland’s Globalization

In Wasted Lives, Zygmunt Bauman suggested that the border politics of globalization categorizes many people as human waste — dumped into the refuse heaps of asylum systems, refugee camps or urban ghettoes. As this chapter shows, with reference to Europe and particularly Ireland, proof of the wisdom of Bauman’s analysis is not hard to find. This is a world of exclusionary migratory practices, legitimating discourses of migration as threat’ and ‘dumping grounds’. Yet, Bauman’s argument is determinist and debilitating, squeezing out human agency by exclusionary globalization. By paying attention to how people strategize their migration in response to migration barriers and refuse to be silenced, even when consigned to the dumping grounds, this chapter argues that human beings should never be categorized as human waste.