Thinking with and beyond Innocence: From Liberal to Illiberal Politics

Through the lens of recent political events around migration and border control, and ongoing imperial wars, I will suggest that claims to innocence serve as a battleground for the shifting relationship between liberalism and illiberalism/fascism in the contemporary world, and as the ground of contemporary politics of racial capitalism. I will argue that innocence helps facilitate this shift along the continuum of liberal/illiberal, both through the claiming of racial innocence and through a shifting of the concept itself, toward its meanings of purity, hygiene and cleansing. I will conclude by discussing non-innocent political formations of collective life, or commoning.