A state of being defined by its insecurity and vulnerability. It is an expansive concept, used to apply to a wide variety of situations in which people feel precarious, but it tends to be used to refer to people who are unemployed, underemployed, or insecurely employed. It is also possible to distinguish between groups of people whose situation is more precarious than others---e.g. refugees are generally in a greater state of precarity than people who are unemployed but residing within the borders of a state in which they can claim citizenship. Precarity has both a subjective or existential dimension and an objective or empirical dimension. In the first case it applies to a feeling, but also a frame of mind, a way of seeing the world. In the latter case it refers to (largely) economic indicators that point to a shift in employment conditions in First World countries away from secure, so-called âlifelongâ jobs with âliving wagesâ towards âflexibleâ, âzero-hoursâ contracts that force even highly trained professional people to live pay cheque to pay cheque. In his book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Guy Standing named people in this situation the precariat, defining them as a fourth class of people below the level of the previously bottom of the social heap proletariat. The problem, as Standing explains, is that the precariat live in such difficult circumstances that they have little or no political voice (they are generally excluded from unions or other kinds of labour organization) and little opportunity for solidarity with people in their own situation (if they refuse to work under a particular set of conditions, their refusal is quickly undermined by someone else offering to take their place out of sheer desperation and physical need). Precarity can thus be characterized as a ârace to the bottomâ. Subjectively, this is characterized as a âbroken promiseâ, i.e. a failure on the part of governments to guarantee a âgood lifeâ for all its citizens, particularly those who perceive themselves to be hard-working and yet not receiving the same benefits as other secure workers. Butler, Judith gives this concept a more rigorously philosophical cast in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009), where it is used as a starting point, or foundation point, for an attempt to construct an ethics in step with contemporary conditions, specifically a media-saturated biopolitics world. To do so, she distinguishes between precariousness and precarity: precariousness is a general condition of all life---all life is precarious, not just this or that life. All life is vulnerable in the sense that it has a defined set of needs which must be met: we have to eat, drink, and sleep, or we literally die. In this way it calls into question the ideology of individualism which holds that âmyâ life is always the most important or indeed the only important life to consider. By contrast, precarity is a politically induced state. It refers to a situation in which a person or group of persons have been pushed into a state of precariousness by circumstances beyond their control, e.g. refugees. Precarity in this sense is a condition of maximum vulnerability for which there is no obvious source of relief. The statelessness of refugees means that no state is obliged to come to their aid and give them shelter; they are therefore âlet to dieâ as Agamben, Giorgio has put it. Butlerâs project consists in asking how the perception of precarity can be used to ground an ethics of life. Her answer to this question is rather uncertain because, while she thinks the recognition of precarity imposes upon us an obligation to act to ameliorate that perceived state of precariousness, she also acknowledges that it is not guaranteed.