Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft Such manoeuvres are what Kim Rygiel and Margaret Walton-Roberts call ‘slippery statecraft’: governments’ strategic use of citizenship to manage populations in order to position themselves competitively in the global economy. We use the term ‘slippery statecraft’ to draw attention to this process by which states use citizenship to open membership to some ‘desirable’ populations, while simultaneously employing securitisation to ‘shed’ certain other populations. Rather than seeing these trends as contradictory, the term ‘slipperiness’ draws attention to the way these competing economic and security logics work in tandem as part of the new dynamics of neoliberal statecraft, where the state is viewed not as a unified territorially bounded whole but as an assemblage of territorial and nonterritorial practices that operate simultaneously across various geopolitical scales. 28 What does globalisation have to do with this state of affairs? Not only has neoliberal globalisation compressed time and space; increased flows of information, people, goods, capital; and deterritorialised social, economic and political life, 29 so too has it set about reconfiguring relationships between the governing and the governed, sovereignty and territoriality. In the global governance literature, the 1990s is seen as the decade when neoliberalism spread, not only as an economic doctrine upholding the primacy of the market and limiting state power, but as an ideology and technology of governance in which governing activities are cast as non-political problems in need of technical solutions. 30 In Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Aihwa Ong describes the ways in which neoliberal logic is infiltrating technologies of population governance: government provision and guarantee of rights for citizen insiders depends on the exclusion of noncitizen outsiders, even if they physically reside in a territory under state control. 31 This manoeuvre is what she calls the neoliberal exception. 32 Here Ong draws on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s variation of Carl Schmitt’s political exception. 33 Instead of regarding the political exception as a means of distinguishing between friend and foe during conflict, Agamben sees the exception as a fundamental principle in the exercise of sovereignty, 34 enabling the state to strip noncitizens down to a condition he calls ‘bare life’. 35 A sovereign state determines who belongs to its juridical order, and denies state protection to all those cast outside its purview, creating important dilemmas as to who counts as a subject of justice 36 — a point to which I return in the concluding remarks. As production processes have become dispersed and management concentrated, globalisation has increased demand for labour mobility. Yet it is widely acknowledged that liberalisation of the mobility of capital and goods has not been accompanied by the free movement of labour. Migration policies the 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Rygiel and Walton-Roberts (n 11) 211. Jan A Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Palgrave 2005) 8. Philip Cerny, Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Neopluralism (Oxford University Press 2010); Robert W Cox, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge University Press 1996); Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (Cambridge University Press 1996). Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Duke University Press 2006). ibid 19. ibid 5. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (University of Chicago Press 2005). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press 1998). Fraser (n 14) 281. 141