Germany’s racial capitalism has entered a renewed and increasingly repressive conjuncture, marked by intensified institutional, economic and infrastructural pressures. This book considers these developments through the transformations set in motion after the autonomous arrival of refugees in 2015, examining how labour mediation, workfare structures and infrastructural racism shape contingent and uneven labour relations. It analyses how racialised workers negotiate logistical constraints designed to confine, categorise and circulate their labour. By foregrounding refugees’ everyday infrapolitics and labour struggles, it shows how their decisions, mobilities and refusals contest these racialised formations while asserting alternative relations of solidarity. Drawing on critical migration studies, racial capitalism research and ethnographic inquiry, it offers an empirically grounded account of resistance within contemporary logistical orders.
Price: £25.00
Pages: 288
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Racism, Resistance and Social Change
Publication Date:
10 November 2026
ISBN: 9781526193995
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, Employment and labour law: general, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, Racism and racial discrimination / Anti-racism, Migration, immigration and emigration
Mouna Maaroufi is a post-doctoral researcher in Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder.
Introduction
1. Reproducing racial capitalism through infrastructures of asylum and workfare
2. Race, refugees and recognition: Logistics of extracting knowledge
3. Circulation, contingency and coercion in labour supply chains
4. Competition, conflict and division at work
5. Refusing racial capitalism: Autonomy, fugitivity and solidarity
Concluding remarks
References