ABSTRACT
The second genre, animated by the transnational and cosmopolitan practices of citizenship by the ‘lowly’ non-status subjects on the ground, proceeds through an even more nuanced set of critical investigations that looks specifically at how the predominantly non-Western undocumented migrants and refugees who are remaindered by the state-centric institutional structures in the international world order, engender ‘informal or extrastatal forms of citizenship’ (Sassen 2004 : 187). Centring on these non-status subjects’ political agency and lived experiences in adapting, negotiating, and contesting the rules and mechanisms of exclusion, exploitation, and survival in Western industrialized democracies, this set of critical studies attends to the alternative staging of citizenship precisely by those who lack official standing to participate in a democratic polity and claim citizenship rights, whether by way of their daily life activities and interactive networks in the community (Rocco 1996 , 2004 ) or insurgent democratic political acts (Honig 2001 , Nyers 2003 , Gordon 2005 , Isin 2009 , McNevin 2011 , Andrijasevic et al . 2012 ).
