MACMILLAN Precarity and International Relations (International Political Economy Series)

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 as ushering 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. Review “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 volume provokes 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 From the Back Cover This book addresses the implications of current thinking on precarity, precariousness and the precariat for the study of International Relations and International Politi