The Political Subject of ‘Post-Sovereign’ (Non) Citizenship

The emergence of theories of ‘post-sovereign’ citizenship have widely shaped the direction of research in critical citizenship studies. Through a focus on ‘acts’, ‘enactments’, ‘affirmation’ (Isin and Neilsen 2008; Nyers and Rygiel 2012; Isin and Saward 2013) these theories re-examine the political subject of citizenship by exploring the emergent agency of subjects who can fracture, disturb and haunt the holy trinity of citizen/nation/state. Such theorisation has been extremely useful in researching relatively marginalised sites of the political - migrant protest (Nyers and Rygiel 2012), resistance over deportation (Tyler 2013), sex work (Andrijasevic, et al 2012)– this is intended to reveal both the ambiguity of sovereign notions of citizenship and how non-citizens often mirror the actions of the ‘good citizen’. This paper argues that whilst the theorisation of post-sovereign citizenship has some radical potential it also produces new sites of (in)visibility. Readdressing citizenship as ‘acts’ can be subversive but by maintaining a conceptual and empirical focus on 'citizenship' it also risks reducing accounts of political subjectivity to an existing historical assemblage of liberal rights/representations, autonomous agency and the reconstitution of inside/outside. This paper explores this tension by proposing a different orientation to our study of being political which works both beyond and within citizenship (Ni Murchu 2014). Following recent work in autonomy of migration (Tazzioli 2015; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, Tsianos 2008), we need to recognise both the violent operation of citizenship as a historical assemblage of apparently closed membership but equally allow for continual possibility of ‘escape’ and ‘refusal’ – acts of ‘non-citizenship’. Drawing on Vicki Squires work on ‘desertion’ (2014) this argues for a re-reading of political emergence through an account of day to day (in)visibility.