Raising Claims and Dealing with Claims in a ‘Mobile World’ of ‘Superdiversity’ Institutions and Policies of Accommodation under Pressure

Global migration has become more diversified and also the settlement, citizenship and integration package has changed. These changes have important consequences for cultures and identity-definitions, for the socio-political conditions of collective action and claims-making, for established institutional policy-patterns and dealing with claims, for citizenship and democratic representation, and for theories of multiculturalism. My focus is on changing socio-political conditions of collective action because it seems to be the empirically least researched topic and because the competing, fashionable paradigms – ‘intersectionalism’, ‘transnationalism’, ‘mobility’ or ‘superdiversity’ – are kryptonormative, overgeneralized and misleading. I start with conceptual, theoretical, empirical and normative objections against the superdiversity paradigm because it seems to have rapidly increasing traction. Next, however, I proceed from the criticized assumption that superdiversity diagnoses would be empirically true: If, and to the degree to which, cultural practices get more radically flexible, hybrid and fluid and objective social positions, collective identity definitions, netness, groupness and organizations would get fluid and flexible, less stable claims-making can be expected: immigrant ethno-religious minorities of all kinds would loose collective voice. Contrary to the normative praise of superdiversity and ‘individualization’ and of ‘diversity-policies’ this would be – in the real world of structural power-asymmetries – not a praiseworthy utopia but a nightmare.