Ethno-nationalism serves as actuarial insurance whose payouts are distributed unequally

Evidence

Speculative imaginations, however, are not unitary—they are often fragmented and incoherent, forging social bonds and political subjectivities that lead to unwieldly coalitions of disparate actors, from big pharma and derivatives traders to blue-collar workers and small-town churchgoers. Importantly, the speculative communities I have examined in this chapter are moral communities (to use Wuthnow’s term) with nation-centered notions of collective responsibility. We can see in these developments a new type of actuarial chauvinism—which is distinct from other types of social insurance—whose allocations of responsibility no longer involve substantive redistribution. As the state retreats from both its insurance and its redistributive roles, new collective liabilities fill the void it leaves behind. What unites these communities is their distinctive use of ethno-nationalism as insurance against their widely varied experiences of uncertainty. But the “compensations” that are claimed and received through this symbolic insurance differ because people’s access to the “underwritten assets” at stake (such as imagined sovereignty and collective autonomy) remains vastly unequal. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 295

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines ‘actuarial chauvinism’ as distinct from other social insurance—a core concept in this chapter.
• SEED: The image of ethno-nationalism as an insurance scheme with unequal ‘payouts’ could seed an essay on how symbolic insurance reproduces rather than corrects inequality.
• XREF: connects to: Nationalist myth functions as insurance hedging individual anxiety about uncertainty — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 454; Ethno-nationalism now functions as symbolic insurance substituting for redistributive state provision — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 457