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 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.

Anne McNevin is a non-resident research fellow at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School.