Between safety and vulnerability: the exiled other of international relations

Abstract

Inspired by the idea of safe citizen, articulated by Weber (2008) this article queries the possibilities of safety in an age of securitization. It challenges the cosmopolitan worldview and its iteration of a global cosmopolitan citizen. It champions an account of affective citizenship, narration and attends to the trauma of exile. It offers an account of exile before suggesting an institutional design premised on politicization. This design, it is argued, facilitates moments of storytelling fostering individual empowerment. This unorthodox rendering of agency allows the traumatized exile to negotiate the world as it is, not as it could be, as a potential 'safe' citizen.

Bordering intimacy

“…The best of this work historicises and challenges how intimacy and family are defined and managed in northern immigration regimes (Bonjour and Hart 2013;D' Aoust 2014D' Aoust , 2018 by tracing the particular relationship between family and exclusion. Such studies have sought to understand how 'family unification' is policed (Bonjour and Block 2016;Carver 2016;Wray 2016), the relationship between family, love, heteronormativity and citizenship (White 2014;D' Aoust 2018), and the treatment of family in detention/deportation regimes (Martin 2011(Martin , 2012Gupta 2014;Beattie 2016). This book deepens and broadens this work, and in doing so speaks to the enduring silence regarding postcolonial rule in modern Britain.…”

Vulnerability and the Politics of Care: Transdisciplinary Dialogues

“…All of this allows for a different engagement with topics that have always been central to International Relations, such as security, global ethics and rights, war, and foreign policy, and also more recently climate change and migration (see e.g. Aggestam et al 2019;Beattie and Schick 2013;Beattie 2016;Gammon 2013;Gregory 2016). 22 The work of Judith Butler on vulnerability warrants particular mention in this survey, given the level of influence that texts including Precarious Life (2004), Frames of War (2009) and Vulnerability in Resistance (Butler et al 2016) have had upon revised notions of vulnerability and care in various intellectual contexts.…”

“…The model of constitutive, shared, intercorporeal vulnerability associated with Butler and others has been taken up in various directions across various disciplinary sites, to think through issues including human rights and legal personhood (Fineman 2008;Fineman and Grear 2013;Matambanadzo 2012;Turner 2006), climate change (Gammon 2013), migration (Beattie 2016), war (Gregory 2016), food justice (Gilson 2015), sexual violence (Gilson 2016b) and mass incarceration (Gilson 2016a;Guenther 2013). At the same time, however, some important questions have arisen over the past few years concerning the political risks that the apparent 'ontologisation' of vulnerability entails (Gunaratnam, this volume).…”