Migrant Protest and Democratic States of Exception

Kathleen R. Arnold is Director of the Refugee and Forced Migration Program at DePaul University. She is a political theorist who has written extensively on statelessness, displacement, and poverty. This is her sixth single-authored book.

"Kathleen Arnold has written a bold and brave book confronting the veritable rightlessness and legal non-personhood of unprecedented masses of migrants and refugees subjected to the detention power of the United States and Australia. While training her incisive critical acumen on the real prospect of various kinds of necropolitical atrocity within these regimes of immigrant detention, Arnold nevertheless reveals the radical potentialities of protest and the appropriation of freedoms that instigate discrepant claims to a sort of counter-sovereignty that exceed and sometimes transcend constituted statist regimes of “rights.” In short, this book reveals the dynamic plenitude of politics that abound in the face of monumental carceral forms of border and immigration enforcement, as enacted by the humble but defiant persons who refuse their dehumanization. A work of tremendous uncompromising lucidity informed by deep compassion." Nicholas De Genova, University of Houston

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceIntroduction1 Understanding migration policy as foreign policy2 Self-harming protest3 Faith-based sanctuary: Creating spaces of democratic exception4 Sovereignty and counter-sovereignty: Is democratic sovereignty possible?Conclusion: States of democratic exception: migrant agency and resistance to the warfare stateIndex