Expanded extractivism: Regimes of Confined Labor and Containment and the Displaced

 

Global displacement—one of the defining challenges of our time—is shaped by shifting legal and administrative categories that often obscure the structural and historical processes underlying it. In my talk, I propose a framework that connects fragmented histories of displacement and urban development to the shifting forces of the global political economy. This framework brings into conversation the intertwined regimes of confined labor, containment, and the governance of displaced populations, inscribed into distinct historical periods and political regimes. The talk expanded the notion of extractivism beyond its colonial and resource-based contexts to reveal the enduring racialized hierarchies embedded in contemporary European city-making. It explored how regimes of value and extractivism render displaced populations central to ongoing capitalist transformations.

 

 

Ayse Caglar is a sociologist and an anthropologist. She is a University Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna and is a permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. She is at CERC as Scholar Excellence – September-November 2025. She held several visiting professorships and fellowships at different universities (Oxford, Stockholm, Zurich, Budapest) and institutions (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Study at EUI, Florence, The Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, Max Planck Institute, Göttingen, and at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School). She is a member of Academia Europaea.

Caglar’s work and publications focus on the interfaces of migration, urban restructuring, dispossession, displacement, confined labor, extractivism, and the transformations of statehood and the governance of cities. She has edited, co-edited and co-authored Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants (Cornell University Press, 2010); Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration (Duke University Press, 2018); Urbaner Protest. Revolte in der neoliberalen Stadt (Passagen Verlag, 2019); Displacements and Dispossessions (Refugee Watch 2020); Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (Albany: SUNY Press (2024).