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"Seeking new forms of democracy, progressive politics raises a fundamental question: what is the alternative to the allegedly coherent, self-contained liberal subject that represents the project of modernity? Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more realistic alternative in the "relational subject": a subject that is inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges and yet distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one else ever has. Recognizing ourselves as such subjects allows us not only to rethink politics, but, more profoundly, to envision sovereignty as the means by which we each rejuvenate ourselves and the polities we constitute with others"--

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface: Migrations Without Migrants and Migrants Without Migrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Presence of Migrant-hood and the Absence of Politics -- PART 1. Atomization: The Ubiquitous Condition of Migrant-hood -- PART 2. Activity: Atomization Through Connection -- PART 3. Action: The Presence of Politics and the Absence of Migrant-hood -- Bibliography

Introduction : sovereignties and their gray zones -- The ambiguity of truth : the ephemeral limits of security apparatuses -- Identity and the investigative team : violence, sovereignty, and personhood -- The thinness of secrecy -- Sovereign actions on a global stage -- Conclusion : alternatives within : the appearance of the second sovereign form despite the first

Unconnected in the acephalous world of migration policymaking -- Right versus right : how neoliberals and neo-nationalists dominate migration policy in Europe -- Making things simple : forms of knowledge and policy coherence in the "area of justice, freedom and security" -- Border control : the new meaning of containment -- Biometrics : where isn't the security threat? -- The right solution, or, The fantasy of circular migration -- When there is no there there : nonlocal ethnography in a world of apparatuses -- Epilogue : the comparative advantages of the academic and the policymaker

AbstractBased on intensive ethnographic fieldwork among an undercover police investigative team in a southern European Union member state, I argue that moments arise when this team acts "ethically" in spite of the legal and policy mandates surrounding their work. I understand ethical action to include action that people undertake because they refuse to bear any responsibility (active or passive) for events that they deem to be "evil," lest such events become constitutive of their own personhood. This situation would preclude individuals from living in agreement with themselves. To this end, the article details some basic conditions in which this team works when operating outside of the law. This ethnographic analysis points to a form of political sovereignty that depends squarely upon particular speaking subjects rather than transcends and homogenizes those subjects as made evident in Agamben's "state of exception" argument. Those conditions include their particular place in the investigative process; egalitarianism among particular subjects; deep familiarity with each other; and an understanding of similarities between themselves and the targets of their investigations. Though fleeting in its appearance, the impetus to political action and a sovereign form premised upon particular speaking subjects can be well understood by developing certain implications in phenomenological anthropology and the anthropology of ethics. Most important among them is the need for mutual recognition among particular speaking subjects as political equals.

Focusing on the Estonian government's policy to integrate Soviet-era Russian-speaking immigrants, this article historically examines how public officials have come to constitute Estonian state space as a particular national place through the re-constitution of these immigrants in public policy. Drawing on Lefebvre's The Production of Space , the analysis describes place as a combined result of three types of space mobilized in social practice: spatial practices, representational spaces, and representations of space. Conceived through the third type, successful statecraft produces an abstract space that traps target populations through subject-making. The article's deeper project is two-fold. First, it aims to theorize the spatial interplay between deterritorialization and the state's efforts to reterritorialize the nation through citizenship and integration policy. Second, it aims to compensate for ethnographic tendencies that privilege data obtained through direct sensory experience to better capture how the deployment of spatial abstractions in public policy marginalize immigrants and minority groups.

As the rational choice model of "policy" proliferates in "policy studies, " the social sciences, modern governments, organizations, and everyday life, a number of anthropologists are beginning to develop a body of work in the anthropology of public policy that critiques the assumptions of "policy" as a legal-rational way of getting things done. While de-masking the framing of public policy questions, an anthropological approach attempts to uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results. In a rapidly changing world, anthropologists' empirical and ethnographic methods can show how policies actively create new categories of individuals to be governed. They also suggest that the long-established frameworks of "state" and "private, ""local" or "national" and "global, ""macro" and "micro, ""top down" and "bottom up, " and "centralized" and "decentralized" not only fail to capture current dynamics in the world but actually obfuscate the understanding of many policy processes.