Noncitizen power - Tendayi Bloom

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (the Compact) was agreed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on 19th December 2018, following 18 months of negotiation. The Compact, according to the UN, ‘…recognises that a cooperative approach is needed to optimize the overall benefits of migration, while addressing its risks and challenges for individuals and communities in countries of origin, transit and destination’.1 Yet the negotiations leading to the Compact’s creation centred the voices and interests of states themselves, from the outset casting migration as a problem to be solved, and setting aside the views of those whose interests are not met by the international system of sovereign states.

It is these views which are the focus of Tendayi Bloom’s Noncitizen Power. Through this book, Bloom seeks to demonstrate how and why the voices of ‘noncitizens’ were omitted from negotiations over the Compact, both in relation to the structures of the UN and in the lived experience of activists seeking to be involved in the processes. Bloom draws on a wealth of interviews with a range of individuals whose relationship to the global system of states is primarily one of noncitizenship, and with key civil society actors seeking to influence these processes. She also draws on extensive first-hand observations of the negotiations themselves.