Autonomy of Asylum?

Abstract

Amidst so many global-scale disruptions, we have witnessed a multitude of ensuing political spectacles of "crisis" choreographed within the frameworks of nation-states, reanimating nationalist projects, and commonly articulating themselves in the idiom of one or another reactionary populism from the genocidal pogroms against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar/Burma to the unabashed mass murder of alleged "drug addicts" in the Philippines, from the recurrent assassination of Vladimir Putin's political rivals and critical journalists in Russia to the sweeping repression following the attempted coup in Turkey, from the anti-refugee show trials in Hungary to the Kenyan government's moves to forcibly evacuate and shut down the Dadaab refugee camp near the Somali border, from Britain's referendum vote to exit the European Union (EU) to the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.In various forms, state authorities or those aspiring to state power have promulgated "emergency" measures as authoritarian remedies for one or another "crisis," by means of which "the people" must be protected (see De Genova, this volume).Interlaced with these hegemonic discursive formations of "crisis" and the effective staging of "crisis" across the world, and resulting more or less directly from the manifold states of exception that they have unleashed, countless real crises for the preservation and social reproduction of human life have ensued.These human disasters themselves have been rendered apprehensible to varying extents within hegemonic "crisis" formations as irruptions of one or another "humanitarian crisis" (Tazzioli et al. 2016).Such "humanitarian crises" are not uncommonly produced as cynical spectacles of misery for the further authorization of political manipulations and military interventions, even as they are derisively deployed to obfuscate other parallel human catastrophes altogether.In this special issue, we are interested in interrogating this proliferation of crises and "crisis"formations from the specific critical vantage point of the autonomy of migration.As the broad conceptual rubric for a heterogeneous field of critical inquiry and debate, pursued since the late