"We Live in a Country of UNHCR"—Refugee Protests and Global Political Society

Between September and December 2005 over 3,000 Sudanese refugees held a sit-in demonstration at the Mustapha Mahmoud Square in Cairo, Egypt, which is located directly across from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We analyze the events of the refugee sit-in as an act of global political society, one that saw people outside the realm of the political making demands for recognition and a say in the solutions being developed to relieve their plight. We argue that the sit-in at Cairo was fundamentally a disagreement between the refugees and the UNHCR over the politics of protection, care, and mobility. The article analyzes the strategies through which the refugees named their "population of care" in ways that countered the UNHCR's governmental strategies to classify the Sudanese refugee population in Cairo. We propose the concept of "global political society" as a way of thinking about global political life from the perspective of those who are usually denied the status of political beings. Global political society is a highly ambiguous site where power relations are enacted, taken and retaken by various actors, but in ways that do not foreclose opportunities for refugees to actively reformulate the governmentalities of care and protection.     

The accidental citizen: acts of sovereignty and (un)making citizenship

In previous issues of Economy and Society, Somerville and Durham debated the moralization of neo-liberal family policy. The conservative politics of the family has been moralized not only in Anglo-American societies but also in South Korea. From a neo-Confucian perspective, many conservative politicians and even scholars have found a convenient scapegoat in the nuclear family as the main cause of many recent social problems, in particular, widespread poverty and psychological difficulties among the elderly and children. In a situation where public services and social security programmes have been neglected for decades of growth-oriented developmentalism, conservative elites seem to derive a convenient excuse in the functionalist proposition that family nucleation nourishes individualism at the cost of traditional familial solidarity, and thus causes the alienation and abandonment of many dependent people. This paper refutes the neo-Confucian/liberal claim by showing that the thesis of family nucleation is untenable not only from a demographic but also from a sociocultural and economic perspective. This neo-Confucian society will be no exception to the need for a comprehensive package of public services and social security programmes if its industrial capitalism is to remain socially sustainable.