Precarity and the international: an introduction

The five essays assembled here take as their shared point of departure a critique of the erasure of the modern international in a growing trans-disciplinary discourse on the precarization of life and labour in the contemporary conjuncture. Precarity, conventionally understood on a principally sociological register as the production, regulation and disciplining of populations in insecure work, remains trapped in analytics committed to methodological territorialism in virtually all analyses of shifts from secure to insecure work. Conversely, assumptions about the flattening of differences in the spatial and temporal coordinates of the smoothed spaces of global capitalism continue to generate discourses on precarity and precarization as a fundamentally global condition of labour contingency, uncertainty and risk, and a shared heightened vulnerability to insecurity. The erasure of historical, political and conceptual borders, lines and distinctions constitutive of the modern international, understood as fractured political space, however, largely remain outside the frames of contemporary ‘precarity talk’. In an attempt to foreground questions of the international in analyses of precarity and precarization in contemporary scholarship within the contexts of globalization and the vicissitudes of global capitalism, the essays that follow call attention to colonial, racial and gendered regimes of valuation that systematically link the production of security and insecurity across an unequal ordering of the world. By mobilizing a critical attunement to questions of historical and colonial difference, the articles that follow bring the debate on precarity and precarization to disciplinary International Relations (IR), while simultaneously pressing on established modes of precarity discourse.