ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how attitudes to the geographically dispossessed and politically disenfranchised have shifted in the recent “refugee and migration crisis” that has shaped public debates and political developments in the European Union since 2015. I shall demonstrate how anti-migration rhetoric and the rejection of refugees are intertwined with both the capitalist crisis and neoliberal forms of governance. These are characterised by shifting of risk onto individuals (Martin, 2002; Haiven, 2014), transnational expulsions (Sassen, 2013), and new forms of precarity for a growing number of people around the world. My argument is that deregulatory capitalism and crisis are forging new political realities and subjectivities, leading to lower solidarity with uprooted people and higher exploitability of migrants (Cholewinski & Taran, 2009). While anxieties surrounding the inequalities and dislocations of globalisation exacerbate the real and imagined threats posed by newcomers, support for compassion toward refugees coexists alongside these anxieties in many societies. I draw on feminist psychoanalytic approaches to the shared precarity that is foundational to the human condition to propose an ethics of relationality. These approaches, developed by Judith Butler (2004), Jessica Benjamin (2004) and Bracha Ettinger (2006), offer a political solution allowing us to consider ways in which we are inextricably linked with others, and with all lives.
