ABSTRACT
The plausibility of a cosmopolitics derived from the experience of migration and post-coloniality is the main aim of this chapter, which argues that the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabe of the 1970s and the Sans-Papiers movement of the 1990s render visible a new use of politics, one that blurs the long standing division between “life” and “politics.” The chapter deconstructs the conventional understanding of the problems associated with the mass movements of people – the humanitarian one – as opposed to being political. In this context, humanitarianism ought to be understood as a strictly biopolitical phenomenon, that is, one concerned with the care and management of biological life as such. By isolating human life for care, control, and discipline, humanitarianism reproduces the longstanding division in Western culture between life and politics, with all exclusions of the Western politics.
