Covid-19 and rebordering the world

In April 2021, dozens of asylum seekers were moved back to the Napier Barracks in the UK, after the barracks had been emptied a month earlier following protests and media reports on its unsuitable conditions. Migrant support groups and NGOs denounced the ‘terrible conditions of the substandard accommodation and the effects it is having on […]

Border abolitionism as method

Reivew of Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum
Alison Mountz, The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 304pp., £81.00 hb., £20.27 pb., 978 0 81669 710 6 hb., 978 0 81669 711 3 pb. The implementation of the EU Pact on Migration in September 2020 has marked a further step in the sheer politics […]
Photograph from inside a damp pedestrian tunnel, with green trees and bright light at the end

Migrant multiplicities

Reivew of Martina Tazzioli, The Making of Migration
Martina Tazzioli, The Making of Migration: The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders (London: Sage, 2019). 184pp., £79.00 hb., £25.99 pb., 978 1 52646 403 3 hb., 978 1 52646 404 0 pb. It has been five years since the peak of what European states labelled a ‘refugee crisis’. The idea that this was an […]

Whose law is it anyway?

Reivew of Nadine El-Enany, (B)ordering Britain
Nadine El-Enany, (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 312pp., £20.00 hb., 978 1 52614 542 0 On the 11th August 2020, in the midst of a tabloid maelstrom around people travelling from Calais to Dover in small boats, the UK Home Office released a statement that departed from their usual […]

Critique without ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence

In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six […]

Stolen time

Dossier: Economies and Times of Deportation

The most remarkable reason for deportation I have seen is from 1914, when a Russian Jew was deported from Sweden after six years. A short sentence in the police report, explaining why he should be deported, reads: ‘He was a bad shoemaker.’ It was not enough to be a labourer; one had to be a […]

Crimes of solidarity: Migration and containment through rescue

‘Solidarity is not a crime.’ This is a slogan that has circulated widely across Europe in response to legal prosecutions and municipal decrees, which, especially in Italy and France, have been intended to act against citizens who provide logistical and humanitarian support to transiting migrants. Such criminalisation of individual acts of solidarity and coordinated platforms […]

Moving Borders: The Politics of Dirt

Commentary Moving borders The politics of dirt Peter nyers Who can move? Who can speak? Who can act politically? The struggles of refugees and migrants have problematized conventional answers to these questions in a profound manner. Their struggles have demonstrated that, despite the considerable risks and dangers, new political subjects are being formed within securitized […]