Precarity and International Relations

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. Ritu Vij is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Tahseen Kazi is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Georgia Southern University, USA. Elisa Wynne-Hughes is Lecturer in International Relations at Cardiff University, UK.

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Precarity and the Nexus of Governmentality and Sovereignty -- Chapter 3: Biopolitics of Precarity -- Chapter 4: Notes on Abandonement -- Chapter 5: The Internationalization of Precarity? -- Chapter 6: Irregular Labor and the 'Life of the State' -- Chapter 7: Urban Informality and Precarity in the Modern International -- Chapter 8: Financing Precarity -- Chapter 9: Within the Factory of Mobility -- Chapter 10: Fashioning and Contesting Precariousness -- Chapter 11: Disability Counter-Communities -- Chapter 12: Perceptual Precarity and Butler's Ambivalent Social Bond -- Chapter 13: Precarity and the Struggle against Alienated Work -- Chapter 14: Conclusion.