Worldmaking and Border Politics
The need and desire for people to move from one place to another, including and especially from one state to another, generates responses from fear and hostility to welcome and compassion. At one extreme, closing borders is the most compelling option for many who wish to repel movements they do not endorse. Others struggle for open borders, but their demands are widely considered politically unfeasible. Between these two poles, the majority of public and scholarly debate pits the human rights of the migrant against the sovereign rights of the state. The sense that there is no escape from the tensions between contending rights gives rise to both enthusiastic and reluctant support for border controls, as either the best or the least-worst options available to deal with the existential stakes of human mobility.
Anne McNevin shows why this impasse need not define the limits of political possibility. This book offers a vision of a different border politics, drawing on diverse examples, from a site of immigration detention in Papua New Guinea, to Australian Indigenous modalities of sovereignty to contemporary abolitionist movements. Highlighting inventive practices that prefigure a different kind of world, McNevin makes the case for imagination and experimentation as crucial practical components of geopolitical transformation.
"In a time of hardening borders and narrowing futures, Anne McNevin's book compellingly reopens the potentiality of alternative ways of imagining polities not through utopian projects but via case studies of actual achievements. It is an inspiring inquiry into becoming and an invitation to think that another world is possible."
—Didier Fassin, co-author of Exile: Chronicle of the Border
"Through her powerful analysis of moments of resistance against border violence, McNevin shows us that borders are not hard divides but rather ropes of the ugly knotted practices we use to cordon off alien from citizen, and then she shows us, very precisely, how to pull at their threads and weave new futures of enduring interconnection and freedom. In this exquisite book, she gives us the border politics of hope."
—Natasha Iskander, New York University
"This is a much-needed and brilliant book, that invites us to move beyond no border/open border/closed border oppositions and situate a critical analysis of the politics of migration containment on the terrain of world-making practices. The challenge, McNevin compellingly argues, consists in engaging in a transformative critique of the border regime and envisioning a radically different border politics."—Martina Tazzioli, University of Bologna
