Prologue
By Ritu Vij
‘Precarity’, a three-channel video installation by the London based academic and filmmaker, John Akomfrah,1 explores risk, hybridity, and the unfathomable through the cityscape of New Orleans and the life of a jazz musician. In the cinematic cuts that assemble the montage of images that comprise the film, transience, impermanence, and the fragility of things dominate. A second three-channel film, ‘Vertigo Sea’2 an audio-visual essay on genocidal practices, focuses on whale-hunting, the slave trade, and contemporary migration flows in which scenes of African bodies washed ashore reprise the bloody violence of dismembered whales. Exhibited alongside ‘Vertigo Sea’, J. M. W. Turner’s nineteenth-century Biblical painting, ‘The Deluge’, summons to mind his other iconic painting, ‘The Slave Ship’ (Zong), that depicts the intentional drowning of deported but insured African slaves, an early memorialization of the ‘necrogeopolitics’3 of profit and death. Yet another video installation entitled ‘Precarity’, by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker,4 offers to the viewer a five-screen installation of multiple contexts that render global health, the relationship to labour rights and economic survival, precarious. Finally, combining the two etymological registers of the term ‘precarity’, prayer (precor) and debt (precarius), the figure of ‘San Precario’, a man on bended knee with hands folded in prayer, the fictitious patron saint of precarious workers, offers a counter-point to the devaluation of labour and the depredations of neoliberalism. Seen together, these artworks foreground a pervasive consciousness of insecurity and unpredictability, capturing the heightened sense of vulnerability and ambient anxiety that characterizes contemporary life in ‘capitalist ruins’ (Tsing 2015).
Precarity, precariousness, precariat—a cluster of words that invoke the state of permanent instability, vulnerability, and dependency depicted in the artworks introduced above, have entered the lexicon of critical social theory in recent times. Capturing the zeitgeist of the present moment, these terms join a growing list of words—disposability, risk, uncertainty, abandonment, and resilience—that together name a generalized apprehension about the coagulation of various crises in our times: global health pandemics, food, housing, water and job shortages, the rise of right-wing populism, civil strife, displacement of populations, a swelling tide of refugees and asylum seekers, and environmental crisis, to name but a few. ‘We are all precarious now’ Ulrich Beck (2000) notes, gesturing towards a new all-enveloping condition.
Variously understood as a politically generated condition, a state of insecurity that leaves people without access to socio-economic networks of solace, the work of scholars like Judith Butler, Isabell Lorey, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, Guy Standing, and Anna Tsing has generated a wide-ranging inter-disciplinary discourse in the humanities and social sciences on both the concept and implications of precarity for our times. Anna Tsing’s early focus on the submerged relationalities that can capacitate new modes of sociality in a time of economic and environmental crisis, for instance, is fortified by Judith Butler’s (2001, 2004) Levinasian inspired notion of precariousness as an ontological condition in which social relationality is both foundational to being and necessary to thriving. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter’s (2008) influential early text on precarity as a politically produced effect, on the other hand, outlines the contingency of employment security during the phase of Fordist exceptionalism (when wages and jobs both grew) under a Keynesian instituted order, and the production of (labour) precarity in an era of post-Fordism. The withdrawal of the welfare state, the gradual erosion of social protection in the era of financialized neoliberal capitalism, has occasioned the (re)emergence and recognition of the (always, Marxists contend), fragile and precarious condition of workers in capitalist social relations. In the most widely circulated rendition of the term, however, Guy Standing’s (2011, 2012, 2014) sociological formulation of the ‘precariat,’ a loose conglomeration of workers in zero-hour contracts in the ‘gig economy’, including highly paid fashion designers as well as cleaners in the service sector, has captured the popular imagination. The precariat, a potentially ‘dangerous class’ portends crises of social cohesion that occasion a Polanyian double movement, a re-imagining of social protection for the twenty-first century. Departing from labour and employment centred precariousness, finally, others draw attention to its politicization and the self-constitution of precarious workers themselves. As the lines between work and life become blurred, performative and affective aspects of work re-constitute modes of being such that new forms of self-organisation and resistance can lead to the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious (Lorey 2011, 2015). Precarity here names not only a crisis of employment, but rather calls into question the normative basis of social order and its central legitimating principles (the work-ethic or possessive individualism, for instance).
This collection brings together scholars working with the triptych of precarity/precariousness/ precariat, albeit in different theoretical registers, to begin a conversation about implications of debates around precarity for International Relations (IR). Despite the ubiquity of the concept of precarity and precariousness in a growing literature in the humanities and social sciences, IR, curiously, has yet to offer a sustained engagement with ongoing debates. In light of precarity’s presumed universality as a generalized and generalizable affliction of contemporary life, the silence of a discipline that takes the international, the global or the world as its object is, to say the least, puzzling. Occasioned by the observation that the concept has been taken up only sporadically by IR scholars interested in specific aspects of precarity discourse (labour, migration, and governance, for instance), this collection aims to initiate a wider conversation about the implications of ‘precarity talk’ (Puar 2012) for central concepts in IR. Building on the work initiated in a small earlier collection on ‘Precarity and the International’5 (Aganthangelou 2019; Neilson 2019; Opondo and Shapiro 2019; Suliman and Weber 2019; Vij 2019), and the work on precarity done by individual scholars in International Political Economy (IPE) (Moore 2018), governance (Bernards 2018; Duffield 2019), migration (Jorgensen and Schierup 2016), and bordering practices (Huysmans and Squire 2009; Schierup et al. 2015), the essays in this volume explore the implications of the concept of precarity for IR. How does precarity intercede in IR? Does it offer a vital intervention that speaks to who we are as embodied subjects in the modern international, to modes of inclusions/exclusions that call into question settled notions of relationality in a predominantly—and problematically—state-centric IR?
Organized thematically, the volume directs attention to the implications of precarity thought for three concepts in IR: Sovereignty; Solidarities; and Work. Each section begins by mapping the terrain of extant scholarship on precarity as it relates to the concept under review and then proceeds to presenting the various contributions chapters make. Our aim in organizing the volume around these three self-standing sections, each written by one of the co-editors (‘Sovereignty’ by Ritu Vij, ‘Solidarities’ by Elisa Wynne-Hughes, and ‘Work’ by Tahseen Kazi), is to enable a sustained conversation about what precarity thinking brings to the table on these key topics in IR. As the community of scholars investigating precarity within the discipline grows, works that explore precarity’s implications for other concepts in IR will likely appear.
Describing his artwork, ‘Precarity’, as an attempt to “reflect the notion that a spirit of predictability no longer governs our sense of time and place”, the painter and teacher, Ian Burcoff’s aesthetic of disjointed images endeavours to speak to the ‘fragility of our current times’. Recently opened (on 6 March 2020) at the Strand Center for the Arts in Plattsburgh, New York, the exhibition closed only two short weeks later as New York City went into lockdown, joining cities across the world in a desperate bid to slow down the deadly effects of the fast-moving global coronavirus pandemic that has infected close to 2.4 million people in 211 countries and killed 165,000.6 As the ongoing spread of COVID-19 rapidly lays bare the fragility of public health inf...