Precarity names the condition of vulnerability — to economic deprivation, to violence, to abandonment by institutions — that is not randomly distributed but structured by race, class, gender, disability, citizenship, and other axes of power. Some lives are made precarious by the same systems that secure others.
The concept has two overlapping lineages. In labor studies, precarity describes the condition of workers without stable employment, benefits, or legal protections — the growing class of contingent, gig, and informal laborers whose insecurity is a structural feature of contemporary capitalism, not a personal failure. In political philosophy, Judith Butler developed precariousness as an ontological condition (all lives are vulnerable and dependent on others) and precarity as its political distribution (some lives are recognized as grievable and others are not, and this recognition determines who receives protection).