Contesting Citizenship

A central question in Anne McNevin’s book is how place and space make a difference to political belonging. She examines how contemporary borders and border policing techniques determine the political identities assigned to citizens and irregular migrants. Readers may recognize that this interest in the spatial setting of citizenship regimes has been taken up elsewhere. Indeed, scholars have increasingly shed light on questions of, for instance, the solidification of the state–citizen–foreigner relation of power through criminalizing border crossings, or the rendering of certain members vulnerable to deportation in order to keep the group submissive. Although McNevin’s work complements this body of literature, what makes her book refreshing and particularly important is her examination of diverse counter-narratives emerging from the movements of irregular migrants who wish to challenge the status quo embodied in the relationship between place, space, and political belonging. Indeed, while the first three chapters aptly explain the complex intersections between neoliberalism, border policing, and offshore sovereign practices, McNevin is most persuasive in the later chapters with her analysis of the sans-papiers in France and the boycotts, marches, and sanctuary movements organized by irregular migrants and their supporters in the US. In these chapters, McNevin develops a nuanced spatial framework that takes account of the global impact of neoliberalism and the resulting changes to border control and resistance. This spatial approach demonstrates how these ‘acts of contestation’ provide new opportunities to think through political belonging in liberal states (p. 153). To her credit, McNevin cautions against overstating the practical significance of these disruptions to the status quo: we ‘cannot, of course, read too much into T-shirt slogans, neither in terms of their literal message nor in terms of the broader aims around which demonstrators rally’ (p. 132). The threat of deportation and detention still hangs over all irregular migrants who rally and organize, but they are ‘changing the rules of the game such that illegality no longer equates with illegitimacy’ (p. 144). In this way, McNevin argues that when irregular migrants engage in public protest and resist the identities thrust on them by the state, these acts of contestation enhance migrants’ visibility and subtly transform the parameters of the politics of non-citizens in developed countries (p. 145)

Citizenship · Deportation · Immigration · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Cross-Border Cooperation and Integration · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Gender Studies · Law