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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...