Peter Nyers

McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Political Science

The securitisation of migration in Western states has resulted in an array of restrictive laws and policies that raise important questions about the relationship between protection and the political. New technologies of control (such as detention) and strategies of exclusion (such as deportation) are rapidly undermining—indeed, effectively criminal...

Migration is an inescapable issue in the public debates and political agendas of Western countries, with refugees and migrants increasingly viewed through the lens of security. This book analyses recent shifts in governing global mobility from the perspective of the politics of citizenship, utilising an interdisciplinary approach that employs polit...

The study of the political agency and subjectivity of refugees and migrants has become an increasingly important topic within migration studies. Migration involves struggles around fundamental social and political issues, namely mobility, residence, and citizenship rights. Expressions of this struggle can be found in local actions against detentio...

In the Winter 2020, Canada witnessed an extraordinary number of blockades and solidarity protests in support of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation. The Wet'suwet'en had for years been fighting against the construction of an oil pipeline across their traditional territories. After a police raid dismantled their blockade, the traditional chiefs of the Wet...

This commentary explores the politics of refusal as it plays out in struggles for citizenship. Refusals of noncitizenship involve a dialectic of negation and affirmation. They are at once acts of protest against an injustice or wrong, while also generative of new forms of political subjectivity and community. The refusals of noncitizenship found in...

This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions...

This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions...

The global compacts on refugees and migration are expressions of what I call “humanitarian hubris”. This hubris is manifested in at least three ways. The first is the global compacts’ confidence in the need to manage migration and asylum in the first place, along with the hubris that governments and international agencies are capable of managing gl...

Citizenship studies is at a crucial moment of globalizing as a field. What used to be mainly a European, North American, and Australian field has now expanded to major contributions featuring scholarship from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies takes into account this globalizing m...

The Citizen and the Alien and The Birthright Lottery are impressive books. Both works provoke innovative ways for thinking about equality and justice within the concept of citizenship. This essay presses on the authors' claims and assumptions about equality as they relate to citizenship. In particular, I raise questions about the treatment of borde...

As we move further and further into the twentieth century, the Western ‘global governance’ norm of interventionism is being challenged by East Asian norm of non-interference and territorial integrity. The two sets of norms are historically and philosophically rooted and have influential backers. Intriguingly, while the two approaches appear irrecon...

This article analyzes the responses to the mass evacuation of approximately 15,000 Canadian citizens from Lebanon during the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2006. The Canadian state went to extraordinary lengths to provide for the safety of its citizens, despite the fact that they were living outside the territorial confines of the nation. However, the ev...

By challenging the state's prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens, political movements by and in support of migrants and refugees are forcing questions about what criteria, if any, can and should be used to determine who can claim membership in the political community. To illustrate the complexity...

The introduction to the new series of articles in Citizenship Studies.

Securitizations of Citizenship investigates how the fate of citizenship is now caught up in a dramatic and dangerous process of securitizing political communities. In the nervous state of affairs of the post-9/11 period, technologies of surveillance and control are rapidly proliferating, creating severe constraints for the enactment of citizenship...

This article assesses the challenges to a key 'anti-policy' within anti-terrorism: the detention of terror suspects. It analyses the global response to the 2005 kidnapping of a Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq. Particular focus is given to how detainees in the 'War on Terror' emerged as key spokespeople in the attempt to influence the actions of t...

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 p...

How are citizens and foreigners made and unmade? This article addresses this question by taking Paul Virilio's recent theorizing on the accident as its point of departure. Virilio rethinks the received wisdom that says that the accident is solely that which is unexpected and contingent. According to Virilio, the invention or production of any techn...

Today's world, it is often remarked, is on the move like never before. Across the wide spectrum of human activities, there has been a vast expansion in the scope and a dramatic acceleration and intensification in the pace of socioeconomic and cultural relations.1 That a single term-globalization- is usually attached to these dynamic processes shoul...

Citizenship in Dark TimesCitizenship is at once one of the most celebrated and most problematic of political concepts. Celebrated, because citizenship is said to be the political identity that embodies modern claims to liberty, equality, rights, autonomy, self-determination, individualism, and human agency. Whenever and wherever this occurs, it alw...

On 8 December 2002, a roundtable discussion was held with members of the Action Committee for Non-Status Algerians (Montreal), the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (Toronto), and No One Is Illegal (Montreal). In this transcription of the discussion, the non-status Algerian refugees share their experiences of living in Canada without formal status,...

Emergency situations are always interesting for how they reveal the often unquestioned and undertheorised assumptions about what constitutes a 'normal' state of affairs. This article applies this perspective when considering the current possibilities and limitations of multilateral humanitarian action during refugee crises. While humanitarianism is...

The concept of "humanitarian emergency" has come to be largely synonymous with contemporary refugee situations. The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the connections between the categorization of refugees as an "emergency" situation and the way in which "humanitarianism" has come to constitute a hegemonic discourse in which academics,...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2002. Includes bibliographical references.

"Citizenship Between Past and Future" brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the field of citizenship studies to assess, critically and contextually, the ongoing significance of citizenship as an object of study. The authors reflect on the major issues and debates that have emerged in the field of citizenship studies over the last d...