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The politics of migration has become increasingly prominent as a site of struggle. However, the active subjecthood of people on the move in precarious situations is often overlooked. Irregular migration struggles raise questions about how to understand the agency of people who are marginalised. What does it mean to engage people produced as ‘irregular’ as active subjects of trans-border politics? And what new research strategies can we employ to this end? The articles presented in this Special Issue of Politics each differently explore how actions by or on behalf of irregular/ised migrants involve processes of subjectivity formation that imply a form of agency. Collectively we explore how irregular migration struggles feature as a site marked by active subjects of trans-border politics. We propose a research agenda based on tracing those processes – both regulatory, activist, and everyday – that negotiate and contest how an individual is positioned as an ‘irregular migrant’. The ethos behind such research is to explore how the most marginalised individuals reclaim or reconfigure subjecthood in ambiguous terms.

This paper examines how historical and geographical relations of injustice are ‘made present’ through the activities of the City of Sanctuary network in Sheffield, the UK. In so doing, it exposes the limitations of conceptualising and enacting sanctuary through the frame of hospitality, and proposes an analytics of ‘rightful presence’ as an alternative frame by which to address contemporary sanctuary practices. In contrast to a body of scholarship and activism that has focused on hospitably as potentially extending the bounds of citizenship to ‘include’ those seeking refuge, we consider how the ‘minor’ politics of City of Sanctuary potentially trouble the assumptions on which such claims to inclusion rest. Specifically, we claim that an analysis that pays attention to the ‘minor’ politics of sanctuary raises questions about the statist relations of guest-host that such an approach takes as its starting point . The paper develops this argument by emphasising the importance of practices that ‘make present’ injustices. This is conceived of as important in bringing to bear an account of justice that is grounded in concrete political struggles, in contrast to the more abstract notion of a justice ‘to come’. To explore sanctuary practices through a relational account of justice, we thus conclude, brings to bear a politically-attuned account of rightful presence in terms that challenge pastoral relations of guest-host as well as the statist framing of sanctuary with which such relations are intimately bound.

In October 2005 200 delegates from twenty-eight countries in Europe gathered in Brussels to take part in an event for sex workers' rights, which involved a three-day conference, the presentation of a Declaration on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe in the European Parliament, the drafting of a Manifesto, recommendations for policy makers, a party, and a demonstration. The sex workers' mobilisation appears, at first sight, to be an exemplary form of active citizenship. Nevertheless, despite engaging European institutions, being active participants, and making use of the language of rights, we argue that the sex workers' mobilisation challenges the conception of active European Union (EU) citizenship. In particular, we show how sex workers activists question territorially and culturally bounded practices of EU citizenship by enacting mobilities that exceed the instituted forms of free movement and that bring to bear a mode of sociality that is enacted through exchange relations between strangers. Specifically, we suggest that the concept of ‘acts of citizenship’ is better equipped than juridical or practice-orientated accounts of citizenship to engage a critical analysis of the ways that European citizenship is made and remade by the sex workers. Furthermore, we claim that the case of the sex workers demands attention be paid to the complex ways in which ‘mobilisations of mobility’ entails the disruption and enactment of European citizenship ‘on the ground’, rather than a simple extension of European citizenship beyond its existing bounds.

What happens to citizenship when the nation and the state are no longer assumed to be the inevitable starting points from which politics is defined? This paper considers how a refusal of the nation as political community and a questioning of the state as guarantor of rights and responsibilities reconfigure our understandings of citizenship. We do this by taking as a metaphor and analytical entry point an art installation developed by artist Tomás Saraceno titled 14 Billions (Working Title). Forming an exaggerated version of a black widow spider's web, this installation offers us a way of engaging politics in relational terms. Inspired by this installation, we ask: how are the categories of citizenship and community troubled or reconfigured when we address sociality and politics from a relational perspective? In which ways does 14 Billions prompt us to address questions of spatiality, power, coexistence, and contestation differently from those accounts of citizenship that remain wedded to the state as a contained geographical unit and to the nation as an imaginary of political community? And finally, how might this web installation suggest an intervention into the broader problematic of ‘citizenship without community’ that forms the focus of this theme issue? We address these questions by way of an engagement with the ‘lines’, ‘gaps’, and ‘tension points’ presented by 14 Billions and argue that an understanding of citizenship as based upon membership appears inadequate when we address politics through a web. In so doing, we contend that the provocation of citizenship without community presents a challenge that does not simply demand a shift from the nation to the state or the reaffirmation of a rights-bearing subject; rather, this provocation leads us to argue that politics involves more than a search for inclusion and recognition, whilst the web installation offers us a way in to thinking about politics through heterogeneous sites and moments of

About the book: Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years. Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an 'analytic of irregularity'. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging 'borderzones' that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term 'illegal' to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.

About the book: Irregular migration has emerged as an issue of intensive political debate and governmental practice over recent years. Critically intervening in debates around the governing of irregular migration, The Contested Politics of Mobility explores the politics of mobility through what is defined as an 'analytic of irregularity'. It brings together authors who address issues of mobility and irregularity from a range of distinct perspectives, to focus on the politics of control as well as the politics of migration. The volume develops an account of irregularity as a produced, ambivalent and contested socio-political condition, showing how this is activated through wide-ranging 'borderzones' that pull between migration and control. Covering cases from across contemporary North America and Europe and examining a range of control mechanisms, such as biometrics, deportation and workplace raiding, the volume refuses the term 'illegal' to describe movements of people across borders. In so doing, it highlights the complexity of relations between different regions and between a politics of migration and a politics control, and makes a timely intervention in the intersecting fields of critical citizenship, migration and security studies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, international relations, sociology, migration and law.

This article draws attention to the limitations of the UK's integration and cohesion agenda and introduces an alternative analytical approach that focuses on solidarity, mobility and citizenship over cohesion, integration and community. Developing such an approach through analysing the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, the article has two interrelated objectives. First, it aims to shed critical light on the assumptions regarding community that inform the UK's integration and cohesion agenda, which involves a series of contradictions that exclude asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects of integration and cohesion. Second, it aims to offer some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into Citizens campaign, based on the activation of mobile solidarities that cut across established social hierarchies. In so doing, the article suggests that the UK's approach to integration and cohesion is flawed because it overlooks engagements and solidarities in which cultural categories and legal distinctions are extraneous, while at the same time it privileges the collective engagements of established residents over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less definite. In order to demonstrate the inadequacies of such an approach, the article shows how minor acts of citizenship that are mobilised by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens enact a mobile form of solidarity based on participation through presence. This, the article argues, potentially serves as the grounds for a critical alternative to an approach that assumes that intensified movements and diversities induce hostility.

The chapter proceeds in four parts. First, we examine the activities of City of Sanctuary by providing an overview of its organisation, ideals and practices. In so doing, we draw distinctions between the formal articulation of sanctuary found in this movement, and the broader ‘patchwork’ of everyday enactments of sanctuary manifest across Sheffield and beyond. The limitations of this formal approach form the focus of the second part of the chapter. The third part sets out how City of Sanctuary activities might be understood as creating opportunities for everyday enactments of sanctuary that disrupt the assignment of positions associated with relations of hospitality. Here we explore the temporality of sanctuary through considering the regulatory potentials of ‘waiting’ as an imposed practice which conditions the lives of those seeking asylum (see Conlon 2011; Schuster 2011). We then consider how informal practices of volunteering potentially question such governmental temporalities of waiting. Drawing attention to the significance of tensions within City of Sanctuary activities, we then turn to the work of Henri Lefebvre (1996) on the ‘right to the city’. We argue that Lefebvre helps to highlight how routines of work, travel and occupation can be of particular significance for challenging uneven relations embedded in sanctuary practices. Specifically, we show how Lefebvre’s work allows for an exploration of how everyday enactments of sanctuary might be tied to a notion of inhabiting the city as a practice that cuts across the positions and assumptions of sanctuary as a form of hospitality. Let us begin, however, by introducing City of Sanctuary.

About the book: 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 politics, sociology, anthropology, and history. Featuring an international group of leading and emerging researchers working on the intersection of migrant politics and citizenship studies, this book investigates how restrictions on mobility are not only generating new forms of inequality and social exclusion, but also new forms of political activism and citizenship identities. The chapters present and discuss the perspectives, experiences, knowledge and voices of migrants and migrant rights activists in order to better understand the specific strategies, tactics, and knowledge that politicized non-citizen migrant groups produce in their encounters with border controls and security technologies. The book focuses the debate of migration, security, and mobility rights onto grassroots politics and social movements, making an important intervention into the fields of migration studies and critical citizenship studies.

This article examines recent struggles over the mobility of Roma across Europe in terms of the insights that these provide into the limits of European Union (EU) citizenship. Showing how the struggle to deport and contain Roma citizens across Member States of the Union reflect a broader series of limits regarding EU citizenship, the analysis questions any simplistic assumptions regarding the progressiveness of European citizenship over national citizenship. Rather, it points to the constitutive tensions between citizenship as derivative of the nation- Vicki Squire 130 CONTEXTO INTERNACIONAL – vol. 33, n. 1, janeiro/junho 2011 state and citizenship as formed through free movement provisions, and reads these tensions as important in understanding the conditions under which contestations of the limitations of EU citizenship emerge. Focusing specifically on the struggles of Roma and Sinti activists in Italy, the article goes on to suggest that questions of mobility are critical to the transformation of European citizenship through „acts of citizenship‟ that contest the limits of an EU citizenship regime. This is not understood in the sense that free movement automatically or inevitably rights the wrongs of territorial or nationally-inscribed regimes by including those who are excluded. Rather, the article argues that mobilisations of Roma around mobility are important both in contesting the internal differentiations of EU citizenship, as well as in reconfiguring the limits through which such a regime is inscribed as such. This occurs through acts whereby exclusionary processes such as criminalisation are transformed into claims to social justice. Such claims might be said to take on new significance when developed at the European scale, since claims to social justice in this regard become „transnational‟ in the scope of their enactment. However, the transnational cannot be understood in a fixed or spatially-contained sense when viewed through the lens of mobility, but i