Minor Keywords of Political Theory: Migration as a Critical Standpoint. A collaborative project of collective writing

Coordinated and Edited by: N De Genova, M Tazzioli Co-Authored by: Claudia Aradau, Brenna Bhandar, Manuela Bojadzijev, Josue David Cisneros, N De Genova, Julia Eckert, Elena Fontanari, Tanya Golash-Boza, Jef Huysmans, Shahram Khosravi, Clara Lecadet, Patrisia Macías-Rojas, Federica Mazzara, Anne McNevin, Peter Nyers, Stephan Scheel, Nandita Sharma, Maurice Stierl, Vicki Squire, M Tazzioli, Huub van Baar and William Walter

Logistical Borderscapes: Politics and Mediation of Mobile Labor in Germany After the \u2018Summer of Migration\u2019

This article investigates the governmental measures and policies adopted by Germany in the wake of the \u201clong summer of migration\u201d of 2015 to put refugees to work. Starting with a discussion of the autonomy of migration approach against the background of the multiple transformations and crises of the European border regime, the authors focus on shifting paradigms in the management of labor mobility. A short review of the emerging field of \u201ccritical logistics studies\u201d allows them to single out a process of \u201clogistification\u201d of migration regimes, according to a \u201cdelivery\u201d rationality instantiated by the policy goal of a \u201cjust-in-time and to-the-point\u201d migration. This hypothesis is tested with respect to Germany on the basis of research conducted by the authors in Berlin, particularly focusing on the roles played by a complex system and infrastructure of intermediation to manage the "integration" of refugees into the labor market

Minor keywords of political theory: Migration as a critical standpoint

The present exercise is a provisional effort to dedicate serious critical reflection to a variety of keywords operating within contemporary discourses of power and resistance, which nonetheless retain the status of “minor” terms. By minor keywords, we have in mind the sorts of concepts, categories, and other notions that are often widely used in both public political discourse and political theory, which therefore must be apprehensible as undeniably part of the working lexicons of both state power and political theory (hence, keywords), but which remain remarkably under-theorized (at least outside of critical migration studies). In this respect, paradoxically, to the extent that they remain “minor” and thus un-remarkable, these “keywords” tend to retain the status of mere words. Therefore, our task here is to de-sediment these apparently banal and routine fixtures of the dominant political language in order to subject them to critical reflection, to de-naturalize their apparent transparency, and re-politicize the de-politicization that ensues from their mundanity. The criteria we have adopted for selecting these keywords are, first, precisely the ubiquity of these terms within the discourses of politics, alongside the fact that they nonetheless have gone relatively unnoticed by political theory and, second, the relative absence of any extensive political and historical genealogy of these concepts or the practices that they name and describe