ABSTRACT

On 18 March 1996 324 irregular migrants occupied a church in Paris, calling themselves the Sans-Papiers (literally ‘without papers’). Some of the SansPapiers were asylum seekers and some were long-term working residents of France whose status had been made irregular as a result of legislative changes. This initial action prompted collectives of Sans-Papiers to organize across the country and was followed by further church occupations, hunger strikes, demonstrations and petitions.1 The Sans-Papiers demanded the right to stay in France and the right to regularised status. They contested a particular account of political belonging through which they were positioned as outsiders. That account of belonging and the practices that challenge it are the subjects of this article. The term ‘political belonging’ captures the connections between political com-

munity, political identity and political practice. It encompasses the physical and conceptual shape of polities, the status attached to members of a political community relative to non-members, and the means through which political claims are asserted and legitimized. Political belonging frames how one is positioned with respect to others and the agency one enjoys in that context. At different points in history, particular accounts of political belonging have become naturalised, entrenching particular relations of privilege and marginalisation as matters of ‘common sense.’ At present, the Westphalian state system prevails as the dominant frame of

reference through which political belonging is represented. On this basis, belonging has been linked to a fixed relationship between state, citizen and territory. The notion of irregular migration is deeply implicated in this particular account. Irregular migrants, like the Sans-Papiers, are non-citizens who have crossed state borders or remain in state territory without the sanction of that state. Yet it is only with reference to the state and its citizens as bounded and territorialised identities that the concept of irregular migration is brought into being and that the policing of borders against irregular migrants is justified. If the spatial basis of political community were to be constructed and naturalised in terms other than territorial ones, then our understanding of citizens and outsiders, irregular migrants amongst them, would necessarily be cast in different terms as well. In this article I examine dynamics of political belonging in this spatial sense. I

argue that as state agencies pursue Neoliberal agendas their practices generate a

notion of political community which is de-linked from an exclusive connection to citizens and territories and expressed through an alternative spatial configuration. This trend towards deterritorialisation does not suggest the decline of the state, since such a view ignores the state’s active role in this process and relies on an essentialist conception of the state as necessarily territorial. Rather than a loss of sovereignty per se, the shift refers to a spatial reconfiguration of sovereign practices that destabilises naturalised assumptions about political belonging. In this context, I contend that multiple dimensions of belonging, including but exceeding the territorial state, are strategically mobilised for different political purposes. As a consequence, insiders and outsiders to political communities are being constructed in new ways. A focus upon irregular migrants provides insight into these processes. Irregular

migrants are policed as outsiders even though they are economically incorporated into political communities through informal Neoliberal labour markets. Their ambiguous positioning reflects the incorporation of states and individuals into a global political-economy and the resultant patterns of privilege and marginalisation. I ask what happens when irregular migrants become politically active and make claims upon communities from which they are excluded. What is the effect of these claims upon dominant accounts of political belonging? The article begins by establishing political belonging as an anti-essentialist

framework for determining privilege and marginalisation. In this I draw on the work of Engin Isin and his notion of citizenship as a practice which constructs relations between insiders and outsiders. My reading of Isin also establishes the centrality of spatial concepts to the establishment and maintenance of particular frameworks of political belonging. I then consider the spatially reconfigured practices of the Neoliberal state and the implications for irregular migrants. A third section draws upon the example of the Sans-Papiers and discusses the strategies they have employed to stake their claims to belong. I conclude by reflecting on the significance of the Sans-Papiers for a multidimensional conception of political belonging and upon the spatial nuances of such a conception.