Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces

Collective Movements and Emerging Political Spaces addresses the politics of new forms of collective movements, ranging from anti‑austerity protests to migrant struggles and anticolonial demonstrations.

Drawing on examples from various countries, as well as struggles taking place across borders, this book traces the emergence of new practices of being political, described as ‘collective movements’. These represent something looser than a common identity – long held as necessary for a political struggle to cohere. They also suggest a different understanding of emancipation to the promise of transformation in time. By addressing various examples of ‘collective movements’, the chapters in this book examine other ways of being political together, formed through relations carved in cramped spaces or small movements that rearrange our ideas about what is possible. Drawing on the temporary and fleeting nature of many migrants’ struggles, the chapters develop concepts and approaches that acknowledge how such mobilisations trouble many standard political sociological categories – including nation, identity and citizenship. In combining an attentiveness to theories of affect, emotion and atmosphere, they also go beyond a focus on either individuals or collectives, to address the ways bodies are moved by the world and by others. Overall, the chapters propose new questions, methods and starting points for addressing collective movements in emerging political spaces, and for understanding how what counts as politics is being redrawn on the ground.

This book will interest students, researchers and scholars of international political sociology, human geography, international relations, critical security studies and migration studies.

Angharad Closs Stephens is Associate Professor in Human Geography at Swansea University, Cymru/Wales, UK. She is the author of National Affects: The Everyday Atmospheres of Being Political (2022), The Persistence of Nationalism: From imagined Communities to Urban Encounters (2013) and co‑editor with Nick Vaughan‑Williams of Terrorism and the Politics of Response (2009).

Martina Tazzioli is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Bologna, Italy. She is the author of Border Abolitionism. Migration Containment and the Genealogies of Struggles and Rescue (2023), The Making of Migration: The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders (2020), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and co‑author with G. Garelli of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). She is co‑editor of Foucault and the History of our Present (2015) and Foucault and the Making of Subjects (2016). She is on the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.