Mobilized: Labor and Political Mobilization between Sudan and Lebanon
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What is the relationship between labor mobility and political mobilization? This talk follows Sudanese and other African migrant workers who mobilized in response to Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2020 by organizing mass sit-ins to leave the country. By amplifying their “right to return” as exile-citizens, the migrants articulated a double critique both of their home nation-states for not caring for them, and of the Lebanese state for its racist treatment of migrant labor. Instead of being deported, as migrants have regularly been, they were now asking to get out. In conversation with protesting migrants as well as with migrants who kept their distance from the sit-in and critiqued it for lacking a clear political goal, Reumert argues that the sit-in fleshed out the dilemma that migrant workers face as doubly excluded; from labor rights in Lebanon, on account of their position outside the national labor force, and from citizen rights in Sudan, as exile-citizens from mostly marginalized agrarian communities, for whom Sudan’s December 2018 revolution signified a distant aspiration of citizen belonging. The talk traces these interlinking geopolitical events, culminating in the current Israel/US-Iran war which has displaced over a million people in Lebanon, many of them migrant workers. Reumert will conclude by reflecting on how migrant workers, by organizing for their collective survival amid conflicts and crises past and present in the Middle East, have become a central part of the region’s political history.
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