Mobilized

In a time marked by the increased militarization of borders, this study asks how immigrant workers mobilize in the face of political and economic disenfranchisement. 

What is the relationship between mobility and political mobilization? Mobilized: Labor and Political Mobilization Between Sudan and Lebanon examines how Sudanese exile-citizens and migrant workers in Lebanon organized during a time of revolution, military rule, and war. Witnessing these dramatic changes at home while laboring in the urban Middle East, the migrants faced a contradiction in terms: they are workers without labor rights abroad, but at home, they are citizens without political rights. How do people mobilize under these conditions? The book examines this question at a time when an increased militarization of borders and livelihoods is impeding people’s capacity to live, work, and organize. Through multi-sited ethnographic research, Anna Simone Reumert argues that people who migrate are forced to take risks and accrue debts in order to navigate an increasingly unstable global economy. She describes the gendered effects that this risk-taking has on migrant families and communities. In mapping an Afro-Arab geography of migration, the book reveals how agrarian lives in Africa have become zones of extraction for urban consumption in the Middle East, underscoring a racial capitalist logic of production. Set against the backdrop of this extractive violence, Mobilized engages in conversation with migrant workers and exiled activists who desire not only to be in the world, but also to make something of it.