"'Foreign villains and home-grown heroes': A critical geopolitical re-reading of a neoliberal text from The Atlantic Monthly"
Date
2001
Authors
Lloyd, Andrea L.
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Abstract
This study presents a critical analysis of neo-liberal discourses of international migration. Through a close reading of the text "Must it be the West against the Rest?", I challenge the authors' representation of refugee/migrants as a pre-eminent geopolitical threat to 'global order' in the post-Cold War period. I employ a critical geopolitical approach to problematise this identification of a 'new' antagonism not as an objective description of reality, but as part of powerful discursive representational practices that produce exclusion. I argue that these sorts of explanations are less about refugees/migrants and the 'reality' of international migration, and more about the need to secure Western hegemony and its idealised way of life. One means to resist the exclusions in neo-liberal texts is to resist the narrow conceptual categories that they force upon their readers, and to reject the exclusive 'we' that is created for 'us' in these texts.