Zones of Hypergrowth

The accelerated flows of populations and capital have focused attention on how citizenship is affected by the claims of border-crossing economic actors. Such transnational practices denote the susceptibility of citizenship to the exercise of market freedoms, as those with entrepreneurial capacities can negotiate the limits of immigration.

“Flexible citizenship” describes maneuvers whereby subjects are induced to respond fluidly and opportunistically to dynamic market conditions regardless of national borders. In an age of flexible accumulation, “flexibility, migration, and relocations, instead of being coerced or resisted, have become practices to strive for rather than stability” (Ong 1999, 19). Furthermore, nation-states seeking wealth-bearing and entrepreneurial immigrants do not hesitate to adjust immigration laws to favor elite migrant subjects, especially professionals and investors. In advanced capitalist sites, the articulation of market-based criteria and citizenship norms encourages elite actors to exploit the possibility of capital accumulation through the astute deployment of multiple passports.

In advanced liberal democracies, policies toward domestic populations have also become market-based. It has been claimed that citizens are generally governed not through oppressive controlling mechanisms, but “through freedom,” or an inducement for formally free subjects to make calculative choices on their own behalf (Rose 1999). Government is no longer interested in taking care of every citizen, but wants him/her to act as a free subject who self-actualizes and relies on autonomous action to confront globalized insecurities. There is thus a fundamental change in the ethics of subject formation, or the ethics of citizenship, as governing shifts its target from the social and collective management of the population (biopolitics) to a focus on individual self-governing (ethico-politics). Such ethics are framed as an animation of various capacities of individual freedom, expressed both in freedom from state protection and guidance, and in freedom to make calculated choices as a free self-maximizing individual.

In the United States, human technologies that govern through the freedom or aspirations of subjects especially target the urban poor, immigrants, and refugees who are viewed as less capable of self-improvement (Ong 2003). This shift toward a neoliberal technology of governing holds that the security of citizens, their well-being and quality of life, are increasingly dependent on their own capacities as free individuals to confront globalized insecurities by making calculations and investments in their lives. These market-driven values are derived from Frederic von Hayek's theory of the homo economicus as an instrumentalist figure forged in the effervescent conditions of market competition. The theory of individual economic agency as the most efficient form for distributing public resources was embraced under the “neo-conservative” policies of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Ironically, as neoliberal values of flexibility, mobility, and entrepreneurialism become citizenship ideals, they undermine the democratic achievements of American liberalism based on ideals of equal rights.

Neoliberal ideas and practices are diffused to various environments of hyper-growth. In Asian cities, citizens are urged to be self-enterprising, not only to cope with uncertainties and risks, but also to raise the overall “human quality” of their societies. Thus, in East and South Asia, neoliberal ethics of self-responsible citizenship are linked to social obligations to build the nation. In India and Malaysia, discourses about “knowledge workers” and “knowledge society” urge citizens to self-improve in order to develop high-tech industries. In Singapore, the accumulation of intellectual capital as an obligation of citizenship is extreme. Ordinary citizens are expected to develop new mindsets and build digital capabilities, while professionals are urged to achieve norms of “techno-preneurial citizenship” or lose out to more skilled and entrepreneurial expatriates and be reduced to a second-class citizenry (Ong 2005).

In short, neoliberal values of self-management and self-enterprise have different implications for citizenship, depending on interactions with particular political environments. While the tendency in England and the U.S. is to focus on the self-governing and technologically savvy citizen as an individual participant in civil society, in Asian growth zones, the discourse of the knowledgeable and entrepreneurial citizen is tied to contributions to “civic society,” or to solidarity as a national community. The common feature is that across these diverse milieus, the stakes of citizenship are raised for the majority. Especially in hypercapitalist zones, those who cannot scale the skills ladder or measure up to the norms of self-governing are increasingly marginalized as deviant or even risky subjects who threaten the newly normalized regime. The spread of neoliberal criteria as an expression of individual freedom systematically undercuts juridical principles of citizenship that promise universal rights to all.

Zones of Exclusion

The interactions between markets and administrative decisions have created not only sites of hypergrowth, but also zones for the politically excluded. As such, political claims by the disenfranchised are increasingly focused not on legal rights, but on the right as human beings to biological survival. In the post-Chernobyl era, health-based claims have become an important part of citizenship rights in the West. Chernobyl sufferers claimed biomedical resources and social equity that can be conceptualized as a kind of “biological citizenship” (Petryna 2002). In France, bodily health is gaining voice as a legitimate claim for asylum. Didier Fassin argues that the suffering body of the HIV-infected migrant reverses public perception of his biopolitical otherness rooted in race and alien status. Increasingly, some form of legal recognition is awarded in the name of humanity, i.e., the right to a healthy body, regardless of the citizenship of the patient (Didier 2001). This is an emerging assemblage that links illegal migrants, rights to health and citizenship.

But questions of sheer survival more fundamentally apply to the ever-increasing populations of the globally excluded. Discourses of human rights and of global norms of actualized humanity seem incapable of reaching millions of the politically weak in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Where people can be included only as bare life, the rhetoric of ethical globalization operates at too vast a scale to deal with specific, situated, and practical problems of abused, naked, and flawed bodies. In many cases, we are talking about populations without rights—disenfranchised subjects, refugees, and migrants—in a variety of situations where they have little or no claims to protection, and for whom the most minimal claims of the right to survival are being posed for the first time. These populations are excluded from environments of rights because they are hidden from view, or they live in “failed states,” or as migrants they are stripped of citizenship rights once on the move.

In such situations, a new constellation of elements defines the space for articulating and making claims about living conditions. The explosive growth of NGOs indexes the emergence of alternative political authorities that adjudicate among claims of bare life. In the non-state administration of excluded humanity, groups and individuals are sorted into various categories in relation to particular needs, prioritized interests, and potential affiliations with powers-that-be. For instance, the HIV epidemic in the Ivory Coast has brought together patients, health NGOs, and drug companies in clinic-centered networks. Patients form special socio-political groups in order to make particular claims on the state and on corporations. The interrelations among these disparate elements shape conditions for what Vinh-kim Nguyen calls “therapeutic citizenship” (2005). Such “counter-politics of sheer life” is a form of situated mobilization that involves ethical claims to resources articulated in terms of needs as living beings (Collier and Lakoff 2005).

One milieu of the politics of sheer life involves foreign domestic maids and their affluent employers in Southeast Asia. Throughout the region, a vast female migrant population—working as maids, factory workers, or prostitutes—is regularly exposed to slave-like conditions. NGOs seeking to improve the living conditions of foreign maids invoke not migrant rights but something more minimal and attainable, their biological survival. NGOs invoke the ethics of reciprocity or at least recognition of economic symbiosis between migrant workers and the affluent households that depend on foreign nannies to sustain a high standard of living. Where citizenship does not provide protection for the migrant worker, the joining of a healthy body and dependency on foreign maids produces a claim of “bio-welfare.” By mapping the migrants; claims onto the space of regional labor circulations, NGOs are articulating the moral status, if not the human rights, of migrant workers as human beings.

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A binary model that opposes territorialized citizenship to deterritorialized statelessness cannot capture the emergent political conditions produced by particular articulations of citizenship elements, market forces, and politics. Multiple assemblages of disparate elements create novel political spaces in which questions of living are problematized and resolved today. In zones of hyper-capitalism, neoliberal values articulate ideals of belonging by making talents and self-enterprise ideals of citizenship. Those who are assessed to be underperforming and therefore a security risk are treated as second-class citizens. Ironically, the linking up with global markets also creates spaces for the politically excluded to mobilize and articulate specific claims in terms of problems of collective fate.

In particular global assemblages, entities beyond the state such as corporations, religions, and NGOs are becoming more active practitioners of humanity. Diverse and contradictory standards of human worthiness are at play in these constellations. We do not need to agree with particular schemes of human categorization to recognize that globalizing criteria are increasingly embroiled in defining and recasting notions of political belonging, entitlements, and rights, i.e., elements long associated with citizenship. Specific problems of citizenship and of living are posed and resolved through the situated articulations of heterogeneous ideas, institutions, and networks. The dis-articulation and re-articulation of citizenship elements mean that political resolutions are contingent, varied, and ambiguous. We are moving beyond the recent past when citizenship as a package of territorialized rights seemed immutable to the flux and conjunctures of global flows.