Making and Unmaking Global Citizenship: Lived Experiences of Precarious Migration

by Vicki Squire

Overview

How do lived experiences of precarious migration generate claims to rights, belonging and accountability? To what extent does global citizenship in the making provide an analytical framework that helps to make sense of such claims? And in what ways do claims in situations of precarity trouble conventional ideas of citizenship and ‘the international' This book draws on research conducted over two decades with people experiencing the violence of contemporary governing practices first-hand. Based on case studies including the Mediterranean, the Mexico-US border region, sub-Saharan Africa and the UK, it charts a multiplicity of ways through which claims are enacted in situations of precarity. The book highlights the potential and the limits of global citizenship in the making. Vicki Squire concludes that theories of coloniality, racial capitalism and abolition provide critical insights for a migrant-oriented perspective on the politics of precarious migration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399545150
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2025
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Vicki Squire is Professor of International Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements


Introduction: The Politics of Precarious Migration: Citizenship, Claims and Global Politics


Part I: Refusals

1. Global Citizenship in the Making? Claims to Rights, Belonging and Accountability

2. Claims Making in Precarity: Diverse Types and Forms of Claims


Part II: Disruptions

3. Making Claims Through Things: Dehumanisation and Dispossession

4. Claiming Data Through Frictions: Coloniality and Epistemic Violence


PART III: Alternatives

5. Enacting Mutual Support: The ‘Hostile Environment’ and Ambient Racism

6. Building Abolitionist Bridges: Intimate Politics and Non-Reformist Reforms

Conclusion: The Making and Unmaking of Global Citizenship: Horizons of Research and Politics


Bibliography

Appendix: List of claims represented in Figures

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

Vicki Squire's exploration of how precarious migrants assert their political subjectivities is a powerful and deeply reflexive reconfiguration of our usual frames of reference. In revealing the multiple ways that migrants navigate the constitutive violence of their condition – sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly, always carefully – she opens up new ways for all of us to consider what it means to be a political subject.

Debbie Lisle

In this important book, Vicki Squire upends our understanding of the international by asking who and what constitutes the political. Decentring states and citizens, Squire provides an alternate account of political subjectivity that is grounded in the lived experience of migrants, their struggles but also their refusals, resistance, and demands for a politics otherwise.

Nivi Manchanda