The Structural Misrecognition of Migrants as a Critical Cosmopolitan Moment

Abstract

Transnational migrants and their struggles have become central for rethinking cosmopolitanism from below. This chapter builds on the theoretical and empirical arguments of the critical cosmopolitan perspective and proposals for methodological cosmopolitanism, which shifts the angle from which the social sciences look at social reality. Who is regarded as a relevant social actor to put forth cosmopolitan claims is crucial. Nevertheless, the author suggests that equally important is what struggles are taken into consideration. She suggests that cosmopolitan critical social theory can be usefully oriented by the concept of recognition toward the experiences of harms and wrongs as pre-political motivations for social struggles and the related articulation of claims. Migrants’ lived critique is an expression of their struggles against structural misrecognition that is mediated by the geopolitics of borders and the structures of global capitalism, and the claims they voice that arise from these struggles need to be taken into consideration in the process of articulating cosmopolitan norms. In the first part of the chapter, the author offers a critical explanation of the geopolitics of borders within capitalist globalization in order to outline the social relations and practices that bring about the structural misrecognition of forced transnational migrants. In the second part, she examines the lived critique of forced transnational migrants through the concept of recognition. She argues that while forced transnational migrants do not necessarily share a cosmopolitan consciousness, they can be defined as cosmopolitan actors if conceptualized as a structural group. In the concluding part, she compares the viewpoint of migrants’ lived critique with that of organized migrant protests that have obtained political visibility but may provide only partial foundations for cosmopolitan critical social theory. She suggests that the claims arising from migrants’ lived critique expand the normative horizons of cosmopolitan imaginaries to include a more radical critique of global capitalism. In this sense, it engages in struggles also for the benefit of those who do not migrate.