Neoliberalism, securitization and racialization in the Irish taxi industry

Abstract

The Irish taxi industry was deregulated in 2000 during an era of neoliberal reform and record economic growth. Driving a taxi became a popular occupation for new immigrants, and the industry came to be associated with racial tensions. Today, the taxi industry is undergoing a process of re-regulation that includes a variety of security and identification measures. This article explores contested trends in governance, contemporary interventions that make use of new technologies and processes of subjectification such as racialization. We draw on several years of ethnographic research on the integration of African migrants in Ireland, which includes an exploration of labour integration, and extend this work here. We retrace the political rationalities behind deregulation and re-regulation and show the specific ways in which security interventions manifest themselves. We also look to the ways in which racialization processes operate within the industry and are nested in the modes of governance and (in)securitization.

Ontological (in)Security and African Pentecostalism in Ireland

“…But structural transformation alone offers insufficient insights and runs the risk of 'always and forever only revealing truths that are merely sociological' (Kulick 2014: 26). Rather, Comaroff (2009;2012a), for example, attends to particular cultural histories together with the broader conditions of late modernity, and the dynamism and creativity of Pentecostalism itself. That said, if one is to propose that Pentecostalism and its practices exist in a 'cheerful fellowship with the spirit of neo-liberal capitalism' (Comaroff 2009: 18), then one must ask: how is that fellowship composed in specific instances?…”

“…This chimes with Michel Foucault's well-known observation that the processes that subsist behind neo-liberalism include the apotheosis of a concept of a competitive market capable of socialising individuals and enabling their continuous selfstyling. The market, thus configured, becomes a 'permanent economic tribunal confronting government' (Foucault 2008: 247; see also Maguire & Murphy 2014). 7.…”

“…You see in Nigeria things like this don't happen because people pray, people pray and things always get better' (Fieldnotes 2011). Our illustrative description below draws loosely from an ethnographic vignette presented in our larger work (Maguire & Murphy 2012a). Hereafter, we sift our ethnographic material for insights into matters of ontological (in)security.…”

“…Most had migrated from volatile and/ or conflict-torn regions of Africa, especially Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some were already energetic Pentecostals while a great many others converted in Ireland and became active in churches as they tried to carve new lives as taxi drivers, parents, activists or business people in a nation-state perceived as Catholic and capitalist yet (oddly) secular and economically bankrupt (see Maguire & Murphy 2012b). Most of these persons, regardless of their country or origin or conversion experience, held in common experiences of asylum, of long periods warehoused on the edges of life and inevitable threats to their individual credibility and their future security.…”

“…Recent work by Comaroff (2009;2012a) offers a useful companion to Brahinsky's meditations on Pentecostal body logics. Comaroff rebels against treatments of Pentecostalism that frame its growth and spread in terms of faiths transposed from one local tradition to another without due consideration of et hnos, 2015 (pp.…”