Increasingly many people in the democracies are turning to a strongarm politics for
reassurance against globalisation uncertainty and precarity. In countries ranging from the US
and Britain to Brazil India and Turkey support grows for a nativist politics attacking
migrants minorities liberals and elites as enemies of the nation. Is there a politics of
belonging that progressive forces could mobilise to counteract these trends? After Nativism
takes up this question arguing that disarming nativism will require more than improving the
security and wellbeing of the 'left-behind'. The lines drawn by nativism are of an affective
nature about imagined community with meanings of belonging and voice lying at the heart of
popular perceptions of just dues. This argues Ash Amin is the territory that progressive
forces - liberal social democratic socialist - need to reclaim in order to shift public
sentiment away from xenophobic intolerance towards one of commonality amid difference as a
basis for facing existential risk and uncertainty. The book proposes a relational politics of
belonging premised on the encounter fugitive solidarities public interest politics
collaboration over common existential threats and daily collectives and infrastructures of
wellbeing. There is ground for progressives to mount a counter-aesthetics of belonging that
will convince the discontents of neoliberal globalisation that there is a better alternative to
nativism.
