Labour, care and (anti-)authoritarianism

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• GGP: Global Governance Programme
• Eastern Europe as Laboratory of Change Working Group

How can we think the interrelation of labour, care, migration, and authoritarianism in contemporary Europe in times of both increasing (post-pandemic) labour shortages and anti-migrant sentiments?

By working with two fragments from an ongoing ethnography of the conjuncture between radically changing labour migration patterns (immigration from the Global East/South to the post-Yugoslav space) and the student-led anti-authoritarian struggle in Serbia (which foregrounds non-migration as a value and even a form of activism), the paper presented seeks to contribute to, and look beyond, the analytical lens of racial capitalism. It aims to understand how a society under an authoritarian-populist regime, marked by social violence and ruination, as well as strong nationalist, racist, and homophobic trends, can (still) appear as a locus of care, a good life, and labour; and how it can also inspire the reclaiming of the democratic state well beyond the post-Yugoslav context.

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