Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion. Historical and Critical Essays

Abstract

This volume presents an attempt to conjoin two related, but in essence deeply problematic notions: vulnerability and exclusion. Their relationship today seems unambiguous: if one is excluded, one is, in all probability, vulnerable and vice versa. We take this as a given. However, we also wish to see what lies behind that givenness, and in a certain sense produces it. Like many of the notions that have taken shape in philosophy and social theory, once they become part of the policy language of righting wrongs, they tend to become hollow and stripped of their multiple layers of meaning. Often, they portray a phenomenon as something that can be singled out and cast outside a larger and inevitably more complex frame. Both exclusion and vulnerability are cases in point: certain groups/populations/identities are vulnerable, thus actions need to be taken to alleviate their vulnerability; certain groups/populations/identities are excluded, and so ways to include them need to be found. Without questioning the fact that there are indeed such groups, assembled and categorized as vulnerable and/or excluded, we wanted to understand why this is the case; more specifically, in what ways these groups are related to others (those deemed ‘invulnerable’ or those excluded on some different basis); how, and from where, the boundary between the excluded and the included arises; what the stakes of ‘invulnerability’ (to which the alleviation of vulnerability supposedly leads) might be; in what ways such categorizations preclude or forestall the agency of the excluded/the vulnerable. What might be the conclusive frame to which actions of inclusion and alleviation of vulnerability lead – one in which all are recognized as vulnerable and where the notion of exclusion has ultimately lost its meaning, or one in which the desired invulnerable individuals monitor the boundaries of their communities or nation-states, caring for the included and warding off those who do not belong? The questions themselves are certainly not new, although the answers to them have assumed a specific form and content in the 21st century. With this volume we want to emphasize both their novelty and their deep-seatedness. Following a variety of critical approaches, all of the contributions here attempt to shed light on the dense theoretical content and complex conceptual history of such notions.