In the text Politics and the Other Scene, from 2002, Étienne Balibar describes borders as polysemic, heterogeneous, and ubiquitous. In his words, “we cannot attribute to the border an essence which would be valid in all places and at all times” (Balibar 75). Borders are experienced differently, by different people, according to different scenarios. They never exist in the same way for individuals belonging to different social groups. They also perform many different functions at the same time, such as structuring economic systems, regulating different flows, organizing political authority, shaping identities, and separating different kinds of people and social groups. They create nations and national identities, determine access to rights, and produce categories such as “immigrant” and “citizen”. In other words, borders perform a world-configuring function – they actively produce and systematize the world as we know it.
Nonetheless, human mobility long predates the existence of borders. Borders are not the original condition of humanity; movement is. People have been mobile since the beginning of time, moving across regions and continents long before the existence of nation-states or political borders. Human history is that of migration, trade, exploration, exile, and cultural exchange. In fact, migration as a phenomenon and as an object of concern was only conceptualized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly due to the growth of statistics and the tabulation of numerical data. In a rapidly changing world, early social scientists such as Ernst Georg Ravenstein and Richmond Mayo-Smith attempted to make sense of, and schematize, human movement. But, centuries later, these are still the same narratives that continue to shape how we perceive migration today, even in our highly globalized world.
The way countries now track, categorize, document, and control migrants is not something that naturally existed whenever nations came about. The modern system of regulating human movement is actually a quite recent invention. In the book Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, Adam McKeown explains how migration control did not emerge as a logical or structural necessity of the international system, but out of attempts to exclude people from that system. Modern migration laws were not created through cooperation between equal nations and people, but instead to keep groups of people out of the modern political world. As countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were championing ideas of women’s suffrage, public education, labor protection, and democratic reforms, they were also creating racial exclusion systems that dictated who was deemed worthy of participating in this new, “civilized” order. They drew a “cordon around the Pacific [that] demarcated the line between progressive democracies and ‘stagnant’ Asian polities” (McKeown 8). By the end of the nineteenth century, most people had become “citizens”, and ideas like freedom, rights, and equality gradually became tied not to being a human but to belonging to a recognized state that could protect and enforce those rights.
The nation-state was built on an idea of unity and homogeneity, imagining the “citizens” as sharing a common culture, language, history, and identity. In order to maintain this sense of national cohesion, borders became tools for distinguishing who belonged within the nation and who existed outside of it. It created otherness by dividing people into categories of belonging and non-belonging: citizen/foreigner, legal/illegal, insider/outsider, refugee / national, documented / undocumented. Although citizenship is often portrayed as something universal and neutral, it reflects histories of colonialism, nationalism, racial exclusion, and unequal power relations. In fact, many nations historically defined citizenship in racialized ways, such as excluding colonized peoples, limiting migration from Asia or Africa, or tying national belonging to whiteness and cultural assimilation.
To this day, passports do not weigh the same: citizenship is increasingly flexible for elites and restrictive for migrants. While some passports grant seamless access across borders, others trap people in situations of danger or precarity. For wealthy people, professionals, and investors, citizenship is ever more something you can accumulate or strategically use rather than a fixed national identity. Think dual passports, citizenship-by-investment programs (“golden visas”), long-term residency options tied to capital. At the same time, for migrants (especially from the Global South or economically vulnerable backgrounds), citizenship and visas are becoming harder and harder to obtain and maintain, and they are also more conditional. This shows up in stricter visa regimes, asylum limitations, longer pathways to naturalization, temporary residency statuses, and deportability even after years of residence. Citizenship is not a universal, equal status. It functions as a global sorting system where some people are “trusted” movers, while others are seen as threats and destabilizing forces.
Are there, then, better to reimagine citizenship that goes beyond traditional political borders? In Acts of Citizenship, Isin and Nielsen reorient citizenship studies from a focus on legal status to the performative “acts” through which individuals and groups constitute themselves as citizens. They move away from the idea of citizenship as a legal identity granted by the state, and instead focus on how people become citizens through enacting political action. People become political subjects by acting – protesting, demanding rights, organizing, showing solidarity, occupying spaces, and publicly asserting belonging. Isin defines acts of citizenship as “those acts that transform forms and modes of being political by bringing into being new actors as activist citizens (claimants of rights and responsibilities) through creating new sites and scales of struggle”(Isin 39). Even if the state does not recognize them, people’s actions can make them visible as political subjects. Examples of this can be seen in undocumented migrants organizing for rights, refugees protesting detention, or residents of a city demanding housing rights. They are not passive subjects of law, but political agents through their acts. This is important because it highlights that political action doesn’t happen only in traditional places, but also in unconventional ones (streets, borders, neighborhoods, workplaces, social media) and at different scales (local, national, global).
Contentious politics is a term that, following Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto, indicates “concerted, counter-hegemonic social and political action, in which differently positioned participants come together to challenge dominant systems of authority, in order to promote and enact alternative imaginaries”(Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 157). In simpler words, it refers to organized collective action where different groups come together to challenge power structures and imagine different ways of living and organizing society. In the text The contentious politics of refugee and migrant protest and solidarity movements: remaining citizenship from the margins, Taç, Rygiel, and Stierl examine examples in which citizenship is enacted globally, with refugees and migrants demanding rights as a form of enacting themselves as citizens. Their work offers concrete examples of Isin’s concept of acts of citizenship, and they do so by examining protest activities of migrants and solidarity networks as a form of contentious politics. In this framework, migrant and refugee movements are reshaping citizenship from the margins by organizing across borders and creating new forms of political life that transcend the nation-state model.
Indeed, translocality is an interesting way of rethinking mobility. In Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas, Barak Kalir reflects on translocality as a “creative and critical approach that treats imagination as a crucial ingredient in understanding the role and experience of mobility in localities around the world”(Kalir 352). Translocality believes that all kinds of movement matter, no matter the scale. They are important not just for the people moving, but also for the places they leave and the places they arrive in. It takes into consideration people’s experiences of movement, and it demonstrates that people’s feelings (such as belonging or feeling out of place) connect to larger group identities and traditions. As highlighted by Ataç, Rygiel and Stierl, many struggles are already often delocalized and transnationalized. Solidarity networks are often transnational in nature. In addition to being transnational, many of the refugee and migrant struggles are also trans-categorical in nature. They are disruptive of territorial borders but also of the very political borders upon which notions of traditional citizenship are based. (Ataç, Rygiel and Stierl 539.)
Ultimately, what we can learn from these texts and examples is that the world and its inhabitants are inherently mobile. The greatest contradiction of our world today is that goods, money, and capital move freely across borders, while people do not. Corporations operate globally, yet migrants face increasing surveillance, restriction, precarity, and the constant threat of exclusion. We must remember that borders have never been just lines on a map; they are systems that are historical and therefore should be thought of critically. Yet no border regime has ever fully contained people’s desire and need to move. In this sense, the refusal of the border has always existed as an everyday practice of survival, resistance, and mobility. Translocality invites us to rethink movement not as displacement alone, but as an ongoing process of emplacement and re-placement. People, ideas, cultures, and struggles move across places, transforming both the places they leave and the places they enter. Migration is not the problem; the problem is a world structured through inequality, exploitation, and exclusion. A different political imagination requires forms of belonging that do not depend on othering, and it asks us to live our political projects through solidarity, collective care, and translocal organizing that crosses borders and fixed categories of citizenship. A No Borders politics ultimately challenges the legitimacy of a global system built on exclusion and capitalist exploitation, while insisting on the right to exist, belong, and move freely — el derecho de ser de aquí y allá.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balibar, Étienne. Politics and the Other Scene. Translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner, Verso, 2002.
Isin, Engin F., and Greg M. Nielsen, editors. Acts of Citizenship. Zed Books, 2008.
Kalir, Barak. “Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas.” Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas.
McKeown, Adam. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. Columbia University Press, 2008.
Ataç, Ilker, Kim Rygiel, and Maurice Stierl. “Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements: Remaking Citizenship from the Margins.” Citizenship Studies, vol. 20, no. 5, 2016, pp. 527–44.