Book review: migration, ethics & power: spaces of hospitality in international politics by Dan Bulley

In Migration, Ethics and Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics, Dan Bulley offers a study of the ethics and politics of hospitality, exploring how spaces are produced through various negotiations of host/guest relations. Covering such topics as refugee camps, global cities and the institutional ethos of the EU, this book is a sophisticated and nuanced conceptualisation of hospitality that will be of interest to researchers of migration, political geography and global ethics, writes Chenchen Zhang. Migration, Ethics & Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics. Dan Bulley. SAGE. 2016. Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the Twentyfirst Century. Catherine M. Soussloff (ed.). Rowman and Littlefield. 2016

Race, gender, and Occidentalism in global reactionary discourses

This article seeks to deepen understanding of the global politics of reactionary discursive formations, which at the current conjuncture increasingly coalesce around self-victimising articulations of racial nationalism and a rejection of social justice struggles, often delegitimated as ‘elitist’ in Western core contexts or ‘Western’ in postcolonial spaces. Drawing on insights from feminist and postcolonial scholarship on racial entanglements, masculinism, and Occidentalism, I argue that racialised and gendered imaginations about an emasculated and overly multiracial West and, relatedly, renewed East/West binaries enable reactionary discourses in both Western societies and elsewhere through adaptable mechanisms of mediating between the international and the domestic. I then extend an analysis of global racial entanglements and gendered East/West binaries to Chinese anti-baizuo discourse from both online nationalists and dissident intellectuals, which provides a prime example of how grammars of global reactionary discourse are localised in different political projects and ideological constellations. It demonstrates how reactionary imaginations of the West are instrumental for animating narratives of racial-civilisational hierarchy and masculinist notions of politics and society hostile to egalitarian and emancipatory ideals in a ‘non-Western’ context. Moreover, by highlighting overlaps and divergence in the refashioning of dualistic constructs in American and Chinese ‘anti-woke’ narratives, I show that reactionary discourses operate not only across the geopolitical divide, but also through it, invoked by opposing political forces sharing ethnonationalist and masculinist logics in processes of mutual othering to perpetuate antagonistic identities. The article contributes to the intersection between critical research on the global right and postcolonial International Relations (IR)

Territory, rights and mobility: theorising the citizenship/migration nexus in the context of Europeanisation

The overarching objective of this dissertation is to conceptualise the spatiality of citizenship, which is approached here primarily in terms of territory and mobility, and their incorporation in the juridico-political system of distributing rights, through an exposure to its various others \u2013 especially to mobile subjectivity. In particular, it examines the changing patterns of territorialising space, distributing rights and regulating mobility in the intertwined politics of citizenship and that of migration in the EU. Building on the approach of critical citizenship studies, it assumes that the practices and discourses of othering have been constituent of the very foundation of modern citizenship, and understands citizenship at the interface between the governing structure and the acts of the governed that rupture, resist or appropriate it. In this framework, the thesis first of all looks at the spatial configurations of national citizenship by analysing the trajectories in which the interrelated concepts of territory, rights and mobility participate, and are reshaped, in the project of making the citizen and her various others. The main part of the thesis investigates the ways in which the interrelations between these spatial dimensions of citizenship are reconfigured in a multiplied citizenship-migration nexus under the process of Europeanisation. It first looks at two different notions of territory \u2013 a statist one and a networked one \u2013 that are visible in the official discourses, yet it highlights the fact that the technologies that are supposed to produce each type of territoriality often converge. Thus I read the politics of Eurostar and the Channel Tunnel project as one that involves competing patterns of territoriality and manifests the dynamics between facilitated and obstructed mobilities at a moving border. However, the permeability of this border is partly enabled by the uneven and ambiguous configurations of Schengenland itself, and draws attention to the excessive forms of mobility that challenge and break with the official formulation of free movement rights. Thus we turn to the intricate relationship between mobility and citizenship in Europe following our dialogical approach: focusing on the rationalities implied in the government of free movement on one hand, and the paths through which to redefine the right to mobility on the other. In the light of Ranci\ue8re\u2019s reconceptualisation of rights and democracy, I present two examples each employing different strategies to politicise and mobilise mobility: one is through appealing to the universal, the other legitimating the particular. The politics of mobility is also seen as an endeavour of producing alternative spaces against the territorialised state-centric space to which the imagination of citizenship is usually limited. In discussing a possible global ethics, however, I argue that the dynamics between rights and citizenship are not bound to an emancipatory end. While the juridical system of differentiated rights is constantly challenged by those who claim that they have the rights they are denied to, once the \u2018achievements\u2019 of rights-claims are re-appropriated in the juridico-political form of citizenship, this form continues to reproduce boundaries and differential inclusions which shall again be contested. A self-critical global ethics therefore should be conscious about the imperfectability of citizenship and the impossibility of community

Postcolonial nationalism and the global right

How can postcolonial critique address the use and abuse of the anti-colonial in contemporary reactionary and ultranationalist projects in the Global Easts and South? Building on the literature on amalgams of authoritarianism, social conservatism, and racial nationalism beyond the Western core, especially the emergent scholarship on the rise of the digital far right, I reflect on the ways in which postcolonial critique can help us think about the multifaceted relationships between postcolonial identity and the global right. First, postcolonial nationalism is a prevalent strategy employed by authoritarian and conservative actors who mobilize subaltern identity in a US/Western dominated world to legitimate reactionary politics. Secondly, while illiberal movements that appropriate the anti-colonial rhetoric purport to challenge the moral geography underpinning the liberal international order, they reproduce its essentializing, hierarchical, and racialized logics in reversing its value judgement. Thirdly, the rise of the digital far right in the Global Easts and South provides a particularly productive lens through which to explore the transnationality of contemporary formulations of racism, anti-feminism, Islamophobia, and the “culture war” discourses. I conclude by suggesting that attending to the role of postcolonial nationalism in global reactionary movements has wider implications for both postcolonial critique and the study of right-wing politics in general, including in the Western core

Mean Field Game Master Equations with Anti-monotonicity Conditions

It is well known that the monotonicity condition, either in Lasry-Lions sense or in displacement sense, is crucial for the global well-posedness of mean field game master equations, as well as for the uniqueness of mean field equilibria and solutions to mean field game systems. In the literature, the monotonicity conditions are always taken in a fixed direction. In this paper we propose a new type of monotonicity condition in the opposite direction, which we call the anti-monotonicity condition, and establish the global well-posedness for mean field game master equations with nonseparable Hamiltonians. Our anti-monotonicity condition allows our data to violate both the Lasry-Lions monotonicity and the displacement monotonicity conditions.Comment: 31 page