The Politics of Belonging

This is an in-depth examination of a slippery and contradictory subject. Knowledge alone is not enough for this type of project. It takes breaking out of narrow conceptual cages and unsettling what we think of as stable meanings. The author brings all of this to life in often unforgettable ways.

National identities were once taken largely for granted in social science. Now they are part of an even more complex "politics of belonging" that challenges both public affairs and the categories of social science. Nira Yuval-Davis offers a nuanced account that will be important for scholars and all those concerned with contemporary politics.

Nira Yuval-Davis always pushes the feminist envelope. Here she guides us through the thickets of five questions that preoccupy all of us today , shining a bright light on the fraught dynamics of "belonging." One of the innovations of The Politics of Belonging is to introduce us to specific feminist groups and movements tackling each one of these five thorny questions. I've learnt a lot, as I always do when guided by Nira Yuval-Davis.

Nira Yuval-Davis has written an important book on the politics of belonging. As a result of her anti-racist, socialist version of feminist political commitment she has always approached the issues of gender and gender relations intersectionally; this stands as a key feature of her work overall and of this particular book... Yuval- Davis thus provides a mapping of the ‘politics of belonging’ applied to different environments and she does it with exquisite sophistication and attention to detail by including a wide range of theories and authors.

This book is a major contribution to debates about how we can understand the intersections between multiple forms of identification and belonging which structure social relations. It argues that analyses and political projects which privilege particular axes of identity are always incomplete and limiting and thus always make for inadequate social science and dangerous politics... Yuval-Davis’ scholarship is always concerned with understanding the social world in order to change it – in a more meaningful way than that captured by the now ubiquitous term ‘impact’.

Nira Yuval-Davis is Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at The University of East London.

Introduction: Framing the Questions The Citizenship Question: Of the State and Beyond The National Question: From the Indigenous to the Diasporic The Religious Question: The Sacred, the Cultural and the Political The Cosmopolitan Question: Situating the Human and Human Rights The Caring Question: the Emotional and the Political Concluding Remarks