Yuna Blajer

Yuna Blajer de la Garza is a political theorist studying inequalities and oppression in democratic societies by focusing on the interactions between formal political institutions, the ideals that undergird them, and everyday practices and norms. Normatively, her work is driven by a commitment to equality, and specifically to the pursuit of a society in which individuals relate to one another as equals. Substantively, she focuses on the interplay between formal institutions and the everyday practices, norms, and narratives of ordinary citizens. Methodologically and to generate insights attuned both to the institutional and the everyday, she combines political theory with interpretive methods and ethnographic tools, when possible drawing from her own ethnographic fieldwork. While the ethnographic component of her work has put her in conversation with political scientists more empirically inclined, the centrality of equality in her work has led her to engage with debates of political philosophers invested in relational egalitarianism.

In her first book manuscript, provisionally titled A House Is Not A Home: Citizenship and Belonging in Contemporary Democracies, Blajer addresses the interplay between the institutional and the everyday by examining the tension between citizenship and belonging in 21st-century democracies through the figure of the citizen who does not belong —for instance, one construed by others (and at times self-described) as “American, but not a real American” or “French, but not really French.”

The main contribution of the manuscript is to offer “belonging” as a category of analysis for democratic theory—a category currently undertheorized in political science. On one hand, belonging captures membership in a political community in a manner close to how ordinary citizens make sense of it. On the other hand, belonging offers a more demanding gauge of equal membership than citizenship, making it helpful in articulating the requirements of a political community juridically defined and undergirded by equality. Blajer argues that it is on democratic belonging, and not democratic citizenship, that political theorists should set their eyes as the better measure of equal standing.

Belonging draws from a formal status (citizenship) but is also an affective experience inferred from social exchanges with others. Blajer refers to the former as “formal inclusion” and to the latter as “informal inclusion.” Both formal and informal inclusion are political and required for belonging. Belonging is an intersubjective experience that draws from shared norms and a sociopolitical background that makes the experience of an individual legible to others.

There are, of course, many ways in which someone may not belong or feel like she does not belong and Blajer’s discussion of belonging is not about the general psychological experience of feeling unwelcomed. Instead, she focuses on belonging or failing to belong in a political community juridically defined in which one enjoys equal formal membership.

The manuscript draws from insights gleaned through ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Paris and Mexico City between 2015 and 2017. Mexico and France illustrate two incomplete pathways toward democratic belonging. Although both Mexico and France share a discourse of civic nationalism, a commitment to secularism and public education, and a revolutionary past, France boasts a strong state with a reliable bureaucracy that secures legal rights, while Mexico’s is beset by corruption, inequality, and inefficiency. The literature on state strength and democratization would expect France to fare better than Mexico in guaranteeing the equal standing of its members—and thus their equal belonging. Counterintuitively, Blajer finds that not to be the case. In France, formal inclusion takes precedence in determining membership and shaping belonging. In Mexico, by contrast, the state’s underperformance creates a reliance on social bonds that nurture informal inclusion. Informal inclusion thus takes precedence over formal inclusion. In both countries, democratic belonging is incomplete. Although political scientists are well aware of the many ways in which a place such as Mexico could benefit from being a little more like France, the book manuscript highlights how France could learn a lesson from Mexico.

More tangibly, however, Blajer proposes that public space encounters often brushed off as trivial, epiphenomenal to formal institutions, or anecdotal are worth celebrating and approached as spaces for intervention to foster equality. They are crucial in the pursuit of democratic equality and relational egalitarianism.

Blajer has investigated the relationship between formal arrangements and everyday practices in other recent work. In her 2019 Politics and Society article, “Leaving your Car with Strangers: Informal Car Parkers and Improbable Trust in Mexico City,” she explored the case of informal car parkers in Mexico City to whom drivers entrust their unlocked vehicles. In contrast to the literature on social trust that expects institutional and interpersonal trust to support one another, she shows that interpersonal trust improbably arises in the context of corrupt and inefficient institutions. Moreover, she argues that deep class cleavages provide the framework for familiar forms of interaction that coalesce with classist tropes, becoming formulaic enough to appear safe. Interpersonal trust becomes possible, not only despite class cleavages and low institutional trust but, paradoxically, because of them. She has also co-authored a piece on judicial reforms and socioeconomic vulnerabilities in Mexico speaking to the instrumentalization of indigenous and economic minorities in creating the fiction of a modern Mexican democratic state.

Her second book project addresses the role of emotions in creating and reproducing power hierarchies and oppressive systems. Blajer published an initial foray into this topic in the European Journal of Political Theory in 2020. “The Meek and the Mighty: Two Models of Oppression” distills two emotional discourses undergirding narratives that support systems of oppression: pity and fear. In that article, she distinguishes pity from compassion and then argues that narratives that draw upon pity prevail when those in power perceive limited threats to their power structure, in turn inducing low-intensity charitable state action. Conversely, narratives that deploy fear emerge when the power structure is perceived to be under threat, in turn eliciting high-intensity punitive state action. Pity narratives tend to infantilize members of oppressed groups, while fear narratives animalize them. The project, which is still in early stages, will draw from newspaper articles, speeches, novels, and memoirs to discuss how affect is mobilized, stoked, and shaped to justify oppressive systems.

This second book project is in conversation with literatures on oppression, sociopolitical inequalities, and the significance of emotions, all key dimensions of the interaction between institutional frameworks and everyday practices that motivate the questions at the heart of Blajer’s research.

Blajer holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University. She was born and raised in Mexico City.

Yuna Blajer de la Garza can be reached at yunablajer@gmail.com. An updated overview of her research as well as information on working pieces and teaching can be found at https://www.yunablajer.com.