Book Review: Emotional labor and moral weight of border work

Abstract

1. It is striking that Aliverti always refers to citizenship enjoyed by members within national boundaries as a ‘privilege’. This take on citizenship clearly opens important new questions about global inequalities and the ways in which border control protects them. It also calls to attention the practices of colonial extraction that enabled these privileges. But the term ‘privilege’ nonetheless seems partial, and can strike a tin-eared note. It overlooks the long political and social struggles that produced citizenship recognition and rights for the poor and excluded within nation-states. To term the hard-won and still-fragile outcomes of these struggles ‘privilege’ is to overlook important dimensions of the history and lived experience of citizenship acquisition and retention. It also hints at the idea that the citizenship of members is the problem, something that might need to be undone because it rests of the exclusion of the world’s poorest who are locked out of the enjoyment of such benefits.