Reorganization of borders, migrant workers, and the coloniality of power.

Author(s)

Ayse Caglar

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries introduced measures to restrict mobility, both cross-border and internal. Nevertheless, people employed in certain sectors and designated as ‘essential workers’ were allowed to bypass these mobility restrictions. In this article, I take essential workers’ seemingly paradoxical assemblage of rights and value as a fruitful entry point to scrutinize both the tensions present in citizenship arrangements governing mobility and people and the contradictions of today’s labor and migration politics. Expanding on these contradictions, I argue that what appear to be ambiguities of citizenship–ambiguities which became more visible during the COVID pandemic–can actually be seen as contradictions inherent to citizenship itself. These ambiguities and contradictions reveal the coloniality in today’s nation states and their citizenship regimes. In short, we can relate them to colonial forms of power producing governable subjects and regulating mobility closely connected to processes of accumulation.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Journal

Citizenship Studies

Volume

26

Pages

401-410

No. of pages

10

ISSN

1362-1025

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091220

Publication date

2022

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504017 Cultural anthropology, 504021 Migration research

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Geography, Planning and Development, Political Science and International Relations

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/e1be6dd5-d0cb-4818-8031-7f937c6024a5