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The article explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons, and narrow nationalism. The authors contribute to social theory by linking questions by critics of “post-politics” to precarity studies on changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods. They discuss an ambiguous constitution of precariat movements in the borderlands between “civil” and “uncivil” society and “invited” and “invented” spaces for civic agency, and posit that contending movements of today are drawing intellectual energy from past movements for democracy, recognition and the common. The paper discusses the issue of an urban justice movement in Sweden emerging from the precariat in this formerly exceptionalist welfare state’s most disadvantaged urban areas. With its vision of reconstructing commons with roots in the working class movement, it has put forward claims for an egalitarian and non-racial democracy while confronting politically grounded frames of institutional conditionality.

Until recently, comparative social policy research remained strongly influenced by methodological nationalism (i.e. an approach equating social boundaries with state boundaries) and has rarely considered immigration-driven changes in welfare states. Yet, over the past decades, immigrant populations have grown in size and become increasingly diversified, both in terms of origin countries and in terms of integration patterns, in all Western countries. Immigrants are a more visible, but also contested, presence in Western societies, which affects also the development of the national labour market and welfare systems. This chapter focuses on the link between immigration-driven ethnic diversity and welfare state development by considering four interrelated issues: (1) how the patterns of immigrants’ labour market incorporation in host societies affect the social rights they are entitled to; (2) how increasing international migration contributed to the reconfiguration of care arrangements; (3) the implications of immigration-driven multiculturalism for welfare state sustainability; and (4) the connection between immigration and public support for the welfare state. Then, we narrow down our analysis by providing a more detailed account of recent development of migration policies in some European countries. Based on the analysis of the country cases, we put forward the argument that recent institutional developments point to an ‘Americanization’ of European migration policy and, therefore, to an increasing ‘racialization’ of European welfare states.

The paper focuses on an anti-austerity and anti-racist urban movement, emerging from themultiethnic precariat in Sweden’s most disadvantaged metropolitan areas. It has catalysed thereinvention of a common space with roots in the labour movement of the late 19th century, ThePeople’ House, a meme for contemporary community centres, loaded with hopes of contestingracial stigma and structurally conditioned precarity of citizenship and labour. Scrutinising a specificcase, the authors address the ambiguous emplacement of a People’s House in a Stockholmwrought by financialisation, polarising processes of segregation, the commodification of welfareinstitutions and interventions by competing NGO coalitions in a post-political age. Funding: The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: We appreciate the research funding by FORTE, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (grant number 2006-1524), by FORMAS (grant number 250-2013-1547), and by the Swedish Research Council (grant number 721-2013-885). Urbana rättviserörelser

The special issue contributes to the exploration of transversal solidarities counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand and a xenophobic populism on the other. It tracks contours of a multifarious countermovement, traversing ‘race’, class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the common and the renewal of democracy. The emphasis is on the understanding of contending urban justice movements, welcoming communities and their liaisons in a multiscale (local, national, transnational) perspective. A collection of theoretically informed papers discusses cases from urban contexts of Europe and the United States, all riveted by schisms of class, ‘race’/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the ‘migration’ issue and challenged by contending movements for social cum environmental sustainability. Exploring examples of social movements and forms of mobilisation in different contexts, the overarching aim is to retrieve options for transversal solidarities transcending identities while focusing on commonalities.

This article discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscian perspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonic neoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the People’s Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space for civic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and Common Space (CSD/CS) is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may be influenced by its formalised representation within the GFMD. It posits that the PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activist counterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy and being captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated ‘invited space’ for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardises its impact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theories of transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.

The article focuses on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. It discusses the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralised management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy, to a post-apartheid state of precarity, driven by ‘flexploitation’. The nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a duality of flexibility linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly flexible. The author connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of hegemony confronting looming labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor. The argument revolves around precarity as representing a rallying point for resistance as well as a social condition. Funding agencies: FORTE; Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [2006-1524]; Swedish Research Links grant from the Swedish Research Council [2013-6682]

The current special issue examines the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. These take different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain characteristics in terms of conditions and capacity for agency. Contributions to this volume testify that precarity may be a political proposition as much as a sociological category that offers an analytical description of current transformations. The selection of articles has the ‘politics of precarity’ as a frame of reference. It describes the political economy of neoliberal globalization producing institutionally embedded precarization of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, but also resistance against the systemic structuration within which it is embedded.

Resumo O artigo discute a precariedade como um ponto de convergência para a resistência, assim como uma condição social ligada à transição da elite na África do Sul pós-apartheid. Concentrando-se nas forças sistêmicas que impulsionam pobreza, desigualdade e meios de subsistência precários, o artigo aborda a transformação da força de trabalho da África do Sul e seu sistema migratório desde uma gestão centralizada de trabalho não-livre pela burocracia estatal do apartheid para um Estado de precariedade pós-apartheid movido pela “flexploitation”. O nexo entre trabalho precário e uma cidadania dividida é visto como um "dualismo da flexibilidade" que liga práticas de emprego e controle do trabalho a áreas como benefícios sociais, status de cidadania, participação política e meios de subsistência informais. Isso é aplicável tanto aos migrantes como aos nativos, sendo os migrantes particularmente "flexíveis". O autor conecta a questão da precariedade com a política da xenofobia, vista como um estratagema para a manutenção de uma hegemonia política pós-apartheid no enfrentamento das desafiadoras lutas laborais e uma cidadania insurgente dos pobres. Abstract The paper discusses precarity as a rallying point for resistance as well as a social condition linked to elite transition in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods, it discusses the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralised management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy to a post-apartheid state of precarity driven by ‘flexploitation’. The nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a ‘duality of flexibility’ linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly ‘flexible’. The author connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of a post-apartheid political hegemony in confronting looming labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor.

The current special issue examines the development of an emerging globalgovernance on migration and the spaces, roles, strategies and alliancemakingof a composite transnational civil society engaged in issues of rightsand the protection of migrants and their families. This question is connectedwith how different actors – the United Nations, international organizations,governments and a wide variety of civil society organizations and regionaland global trade unions – perceive the root causes of migration, globalinequality and options for sustainable development. The contributionsincluded in the special issue interrogate from different perspectives thepositionality and capacity of civil society to influence the Global Forum forMigration and Development. They examine the opportunities and challengesfaced by civil society in its endeavor to promote a rights-based approachwithin international and intergovernmental fora engaged in setting up aglobal compact for the management of migration and in other global policyspaces. Funding agencies: Migration, civil society and global governance: an introduction to the special issue

Within the EU, the so-called “refugee crisis” has been predominantly dealt with as an ill-timed and untenable financial burden. Since the 2007–08 financial crisis, the overarching objective of policy initiatives by EU-governments has been to keep public expenditure firmly under control. Thus, Sweden’s decision to grant permanent residence to all Syrians seeking asylum in 2013 seemed to represent a paradigmatic exception, pointing to the possibility of combining a humanitarian approach in the “long summer of migration” with generous welfare provisions. At the end of 2015, however, Sweden reversed its asylum policy, reducing its intake of refugees to the EU-mandated minimum. The main political parties embraced the mainstream view that an open-door refugee policy is not only detrimental to the welfare state, but could possibly trigger a “system breakdown”. In this article, we challenge this widely accepted narrative by arguing that the sustainability of the Swedish welfare state has not been undermined by refugee migration but rather by the Swedish government’s unbending adherence to austerity politics. Austerity politics have weakened the Swedish welfare state’s socially integrative functions and prevented the implementation of a more ambitious growth agenda, harvesting a potentially dynamic interplay of expansionary economic policies and a humanitarian asylum policy.

The paper explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons and narrow nationalism; movements counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand, and a neoconservative xenophobic populism on the other. Applying ‘rainbow coalition’ as generic concept it points at contours of a globally extended countermovement for social transformation, traversing ‘race’, class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the commons and indicating how they could be repossessed and democratically ruled; that is ‘reimagineered’). A multisited enquiry explores how actors express their claims as activist citizens under varying conditions and constellations, and if/how discourses and practices from different locations and at different scales inform each other. It interrogates whether there may be an actual equivalence of outlook, objective and strategy of ostensibly homologous contending movements which develop under varying local, national and regional circumstances in contemporary communities riveted by schisms of class, ‘race’/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the ‘migration’ issue and challenged by popular demands for social sustainability. The paper contributes to social theory by linking questions posed by critics of ‘post-politics’ concerning contingences of pluralist democracy and revitalised politics of civil society, to precarity studies focused on globalisation and the changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods.

The winds of xenophobia hovering over Europe have swept the moral politicalfoundations of an inclusive Swedish migration policy into the dustbin of history and twistedan enlightened left-right consensus on an open and humanitarian asylum policy into its mirroropposite. Lured by advances of the extreme right the main political parties have, since2015, come to indiscriminately embrace the view that immigration, etno-cultural diversityand an open-door refugee policy is detrimental to welfare and, in consequence, curbing migrationhas become the all dominant political strategem in vying for votes. The authorschallenge this widely accepted narrative by arguing that the sustainability of the Swedishwelfare state has not been undermined by migration but by consecutive Swedish governments'unbending adherence to austerity politics since the beginning of the 1990s. Austeritypolitics have, step by step, weakened the Swedish Model's socially integrative functions andprevented the implementation of an ambitious agenda, harvesting a potentially dynamic interplayof expansionary economic and social policies and a humanitarian asylum policy. La sombra de xenofobia que se cierne sobre Europa ha arrojado al cubo de basuralos fundamentos morales de una política inclusiva de migración en Suecia y ha tergiversadoun consenso de izquierda y derecha sobre una política de asilo abierta y humanitaria hacia suextremo opuesto. Desde el 2015, atraídos por los avances de la extrema derecha, los principalespartidos políticos han aceptado indistintamente que la inmigración, la diversidad etnoculturaly la política de puertas abiertas para refugiados van en perjuicio del Estado de bienestar y, comoconsecuencia, frenar la migración se ha convertido en la estratagema política dominante parala obtención de votos. Los autores desafían esta narrativa ampliamente aceptada al argumentarque la sostenibilidad del Estado de bienestar en Suecia no ha sido socavada a causa de lamigración sino a la firme adherencia hacia políticas de austeridad por consecutivas gubernaturassuecas desde comienzos de los 1990. Las políticas de austeridad han debilitado, poco apoco, las funciones socialmente integradoras del Modelo Sueco y han impedido la implementaciónde una agenda ambiciosa que reúna una interacción potencialmente dinámica de políticaseconómicas y sociales expansionistas, así como una política de asilo humanitaria.Palabras clave: Modelo Sueco, Estado de bienestar, políticas migratorias, solidaridad social.

Este articulo discute temas de migracion, precariedad y movimientos sociales entre los pobres. Aborda la reproduccion de la pobreza y el trabajo no-libre en la Sudafrica post-apartheid como via para cambiarlas alianzas de clase y raza y dar paso a la construccion de una hegemonia politica bajo cambiantes condiciones historico-estructurales. Describe el desarrollo del sistema migratorio sudafricano como itinerario de un regimen de migracion laboral dirigido centralizadamente desde el apartheid hacia un regimen neoliberal post-apartheid regido por politicas de «flexplotacion». Un controversial enigma de «xenofobia» emerge en torno a los conceptos de nacion y ciudadania en la reconstruccion de la hegemonia en una sociedad excesivamente desigual, donde los movimientos de los pobres crean espacios para una «insurgencia ciudadana» que trasciende las posibilidades de alcanzar una gobernanza neoliberal. El autor se pregunta: ?una reconstituida izquierda sudafricana, con el Tratado Libertario de la coalicion anti-apartheid como memorandum para los conflictos en curso, sera capaz de propiciar un renacimiento del «poder popular» en una coyuntura donde la migracion, la xenofobia y la creciente lealtad de un precariado rebelde se han convertido en estratagemas crecientemente significativos? Palabras clave: Sudafrica, migracion laboral, neoliberalismo, movimientos sociales, extractivismo

Contemporary welfare state restructuring in Sweden has led to increased ethnic and residential segregation in larger cities but also to the emergence of urban unrest. Following violent youth rebell ...

This collection of essays offers a critical analysis of neoliberal transformation as it has unfolded in Sweden, long regarded as exemplary in terms of social welfare, equality and an inclusive mult ...

In Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences, edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jørgensen, the contributing authors look into precarity. Precarity has become a buzzword in as well academia as among activist. The book depicts precarity as being both a condition and a mobilizing force for resistance. The volume asks questions that investigate conditions and resistance across diverse cases such as first generation urbanites in China, migrant pensioners and unemployed youth in Sweden and Spain, refugees in Germany, irregular and regular migrants in Southern Europe, Turkey, Russia the United States and South Africa.

In Politics of Precarity: Migrant Conditions, Struggles and Experiences, edited by Carl-Ulrik Schierup and Martin Bak Jorgensen, the conditions of precarity caused by neoliberal globalization are linked to migrant struggles and experiences across the globe.

This essay discusses systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. It focuses on the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralised management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy to a post-apartheid state of precarity driven by ‘flexploitation’. The present day nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a ‘duality of flexibility’ linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly ‘flexible’. The paper connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of the dominant post-apartheid political hegemony at a moment of deepening social crisis and popular upheaval. For labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor the anti-apartheid movement’s legendary Freedom Charter is a critical memorandum and a present day rallying point for ‘people power’.

El regimen surgido en el mercado laboral mundial de las ultimas tres decadas se ha caracterizado por precarias condiciones de trabajo que afectan sobre todo a los inmigrantes irregulares. A traves de una serie de movimientos sociales y politicos a todos los niveles, se han generado estrategias y discursos de cuestionamiento que enfatizan la importancia de los derechos universales y colectivos. En relacion con estas iniciativas, se abordan en este documento los temas de la rendicion de cuentas y contingencias que se refieren a la instrumentacion de los derechos de los migrantes y del Programa de Trabajo Decente (DWA) de la Organizacion Internacional del Trabajo (OIT). Se argumenta que la creacion de un modelo viable para la institucionalizacion de las normas laborales no puede dejarse en manos del actual y asimetrico regimen de gobernabilidad mundial. Se destaca el papel fundamental de las organizaciones sindicales, asi como otras organizaciones de la sociedad civil (OSC), en el establecimiento de un enfoque basado en los derechos migratorios, las normas laborales y el desarrollo dentro del contexto de una globalizacion justa

Any consideration of global migration in relation to work and citizenship must necessarily be situated in the context of the Great Recession. A whole historical chapter—that of neoliberalism—has no...

The homeless, the feminisation of poverty – a consequence of deteriorating quality of life for single parents; youth poverty and unemployment; the concentration of disadvantaged people in socially and culturally divided residential areas; a permanently out-of-work part of the population, whose income is decreasing at the same rate as unemployment benefits and social welfare: these are but a few aspects of what is known as the ‘new poverty’ and social vulnerability that is spreading over the economically stronger blocs of the world. In recent decades, this has increasingly been named ‘social exclusion’ Simultaneously, this ‘weight of the world’ – as Pierre Bourdieu (1993) put it in his mammoth work about the dark side of globalisation – became a shared political concern within the European Union, from Kiruna in the north to Malaga in the south. It is a vulnerability that has grown in parallel with the expansion of sectors of informal labour that are characterised by low wages and professional restrictions, outside the scope of national labour market regulations and social insurance systems. It is also about the spreading of discrimination, segregation, social unrest and criminalisation in the socially polarised, segregated and ethnically divided cities over the past three decades. One dramatic expression of this development can be seen in the riots among young generations in Europe’s major cities: Paris 2005, Copenhagen 2008, London 2011 and Stockholm 2013. As a result, by reflecting institutional practices and forms of social vulnerability, most of these – and many more – contemporary forms of social vulnerability and ‘new poverty’ have manifested traits of racialisation or ethnification. This particularly affects immigrants and minorities from outside the dominant countries of the global economic order. These are, in other words, expressions of institutional discrimination, which in public discourse is often explained and justified in terms of ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’ or ‘culture’ (see Chapter 6, Racism). This has contributed to a European Union-wide creation and cementing of a new social hierarchy based on an increasingly dense intertwining of traditional social markers such as class, gender, race and ethnicity. It has become one of the most important grounds for social stratification and subordination in our time.

For too long the movement of labour and the labour movement have been studied in splendid isolation. This volume addresses their intersection. Karl Polanyi’s intuition that history moves through a double movement of disembedding under market rule followed by re-embedding under societal control underlies the overall argument. In different, but complementary, ways the book’s 15 chapters address migration and precarious work along with diverse social movement responses beyond ‘North’ and ‘South’. An interdisciplinary and comparative approach emphasizes the complexity of historically grounded social relations. The first part of the book presents five complementary perspectives on the political economy of migration, labour and citizenship. Part two analyses labour unions’ historical relations with migrant workers and the current changes in their orientation and approaches to organisation of, with or by migrants, immigrants and new ethnic minorities. Part three discusses alternative global norms and institutional propositions by international organisations as they relate to an incipient global framework for the governance of migration. It examines states’ and regional organisations’ subscriptions to international human, labour and migrants’ rights and it discusses these powerful actors’ accountability for the actual implementation of these rights. Its four chapters explore, in detail, the standpoints of trade unions, migrant organisations and other organisations and movements of civil society vis-a-vis an emerging normative framework for the global governance of migration, and enquire into the actual possibilities of civil society impacting on the implementation of human rights claims and codes of corporate social responsibility.

This introductory editorial chapter paints the background to current issues of international migration, unfree labour, racialization, and changing frameworks of citizenship. The theoretical basis for this chapter is drawn from a modified view of the writings of Karl Polanyi. Using the notion of ‘precarity’ as a central concept, the editors analyse the prospects for a contemporary ‘double movement’ which challenges the commodification of labour under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The introduction summarizes and discusses the content of the book’s fifteen chapters in the light of this perspective, and posits a discussion of human rights as a stratagem for today’s labour movements. It makes a case for bringing the labour movement back in, through debates on migration, migrants’ working conditions, the organization of labour, and the utopia of social justice in a post-neoliberal era.

This article attempts to provide a critical understanding of the dual signification of “precarity”. It explores what “precarity” as a concept may potentially offer to studies of the changing contemporary political economy of migration. It discusses shifting trends in global migration and point to tendencies for a possible convergence between “South” and “North”, “East” and “West”. Based on a review of current advances in research, it discusses, with reference to the classical work of Karl Polanyi, the potential for a contemporary “countermovement” which would challenge the precarity of migrants. Bringing forward the issue of the “space for civil society” the article addresses a still lingering democratic deficit in the global governance of migration. Policy ImplicationsThe article is relevant to policymakers, trade unions and civil society organizations. It contributes to the understanding of policy making processes in emerging multilevel global governance and focuses on issues of precarization, migration, and the implementation and accountability of human, migrant and labour rights.

This article examines the 2013 riots in Stockholm in the context of other urban rebellions across disadvantaged metropolitan neighbourhoods in the North-Atlantic region over the past three decades of neoliberal transformation. The authors discuss the consequences of securitisation and police repression, institutional racism, the corrosion of citizenship and the structuring of inequality in Swedish cities. Beyond the violence of the recent riots, contemporary Sweden reveals the emergence of an autonomous, non-violent and organisationally embedded movement for social justice among young people contesting urban degradation and reclaiming the nation in terms of an inclusive citizenship, social welfare and democracy. The article asks whether the Stockholm uprising could possibly be read as a sobering moment of self-examination in Swedish politics that could open space up for new political voices.

`America has a negro problem', the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal stated in the introduction to his modern classic, An American Dilemma, first published in 1944. Half a century later, the so-called `immigrant problem' is moving to the top of the political agenda of EU Europe. To speak about a European dilemma in this context means to relate established European values of social solidarity and social responsibility to an increasingly ethnicised and racialised social inequality in European cities. How can the dilemma be made transparent? How can we transcend the disjunctures between `creed' and reality? Along these lines, the paper debates potentialities for transethnic alignment in the US and EU Europe exposed to a common condition of globalisation.These ideals differ in no respect from the ideals of that European civilization of which we all today form a part. And therefore our watch word today must be Social Solidarity, Social Responsibility. W.E.B. Du Bois (1900)... in modernity only those institutions can be stabilized that allow for accumulating political experience as well as for continuous appeals to greater social and political justice... But apart from the technological version there is no longer a future-oriented social fantasy in the lands of Europe. Grand narratives of another, better future in politics, social questions, or anything else, are no longer forged there. Redemption is deemed undesirable, and sociopolitical progress ridiculed... The old Europe resembles a corpse whose hair and nails, wealth, and cumulative knowledge are still growing, but the rest is dead. Agnes Heller (1992)