Latest
July 19, 2024
Pan-Africanism from Below
Zachariah Mampilly
The Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe describes a “politics of separation” that fuels an irrational and counterproductive fear of migrants. In this frame of mind, the only solution to the woes of the wealthy world lies in further securing borders. It’s a fortress mindset, but one that finds support across the political spectrum, and has been exported around the globe. In Africa, the legacy of colonial violence plays out in...
July 19, 2024
An Interspecies Problem
Cara Giaimo
Last October, a black bear was caught on camera trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in southeast Arizona. In the video, the bear can be seen poking his snout through a steel fence built to block vehicles; the gaps between the posts are also too narrow for ursine shoulders. Sky Island Alliance, the binational conservation group that released the footage, has recorded members of at least a dozen species interacting...
July 19, 2024
An Expensive Gimmick
Grace Blakeley
The rallying cry of the Brexit referendum, “take back control,” will likely be remembered as one of the most effective political slogans in history. It was an emotive refrain, vague enough to allow very different groups to project their visions for a post-Brexit world onto the Leave campaign. For some, “take back control” was a simple demand that the British state control its borders. For others, it meant constraining the...
July 19, 2024
Politics of the Shelter
Jack Herrera
When Joe Biden’s motorcade departed the Brownsville airport on March 1, it hung a right, taking one route to a Border Patrol station on the Texas town’s northwestern outskirts. If, instead, the SUVs had turned left, setting out on a different route to the station, they would have passed directly by the Ozanam Center, a migrant shelter. That day, I met Durglannis Garrido in the center’s courtyard, where she stood...
July 19, 2024
Imperial Hubris
Dur e Aziz Amna
In 2001, the Pakistani government was distributing polio drops in Mohmand Agency, a semiautonomous tribal area bordering Afghanistan, when it learned that the Taliban had been conducting a polio drive in the same villages. Children, it seemed, were being vaccinated twice. According to Fida Muhammad Wazir, a doctor and civil servant who oversaw the distribution, the Pakistanis tried to chase away the Taliban, but local Afghan leaders claimed the villages...
July 19, 2024
A Once Familiar Place
Sophie Pinkham
In 2011, a Ukrainian friend drove me past the Kharkiv marriage palace. To get hitched, he said, you went through the grand pillared entrance. To get divorced, you used an unobtrusive back door. We laughed. I wasn’t getting married or divorced that day, but I was on my way to Belgorod, across the Russian border, where a friend would pick me up. I had applied for a visa in Kyiv,...
July 19, 2024
My Business on My Land
Julian Brave NoiseCat
As a long-haired, brown-skinned Native man with an obviously Indian name, I have an easier time than most getting between the United States and Canada. Because I am a “status Indian,” legally registered with the Canadian government, I have special border-crossing rights under the Jay Treaty of 1794. The treaty is named for John Jay, the second governor of New York, who negotiated with Great Britain on behalf of the...
July 19, 2024
A Failure of Imagination | On Borders and the Nation-State
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, Cara Giaimo, Dur e Aziz Amna, Grace Blakeley, Ian Volner, Jack Herrera, Julian Brave NoiseCat, Sophie Pinkham, Zachariah Mampilly
In 1990, there were fifteen international border walls, according to the political geographer Reece Jones. Today, that figure has more than quintupled — and it doesn’t account for the vast surveillance apparatuses that track and criminalize migration even in the absence of brick-and-mortar (and chain-link, and steel) barriers. By 2025, the global border-security market is expected to generate more than $65 billion in revenue. These structures and systems haven’t stopped...
July 19, 2024
Tivoli | Poetry
Ashley D. Escobar
Tulips waiting to bloom in schoolyards. Children in wellies stomp the alphabet into the street. Streetlamps bend over, I am not yet a trampoline. I’m pining for a soon-to-be stepmother of three. Her reflection meets mine in a stale puddle of milk. All the town’s clocks died. I missed every train; trains shouldn’t arrive on the same track. I’ll eat away her guilt. I fought in a war I let...
July 19, 2024
Go Look in the Closet, My Son Said | Poetry
Michael Bazzett
and I did and it was there, hunched beneath the coats, covered in hair, doing its best to look inconspicuous and it did indeed smell a bit like woodsmoke and iron, and I did see something that looked a bit like a talon draw closer into its body before melting away into the shagginess in much the same way the markings of a snake might simmer down into a pile...
