The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis is quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions. I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies.

Refugee law posits the refugee as a rights-bearing subject prior to legal recognition. The determination procedures from which legal protection may be availed to a person escaping persecution demand that the applicant be recognizable as a subject entitled to law’s power to name her as a refugee. In this article, I draw on speech act theory to investigate the rhetorical structure of refugee recognition. Viewed as a performative speech act, refugee subjectivity emerges as a result of repetition and citation of tropes of “refugee-ness,” which function to legitimate and naturalize certain representations as evidence of the grounds for protection. This places applicants in a paradoxical position: they must attempt to deliver their evidence as a performance of refugee-ness, but in making the narrative recognizable and understandable according to the norms of the legal process, the singularity, and possibly the authenticity, of the account may be lost. The argument is supported by empirical research conducted at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.