In this blog we are collaborating with Nisaba on the theme of decolonising migration.
What is decolonisation?
Decolonisation is the process of undoing colonisation. It involves deeply reflecting about ourselves and about the world we live in, and implementing systemic change that disrupts hierarchies and power structures of harm and dehumanisation: such as racism and capitalism. To decolonise means we must centre and embrace the perspectives of those who are ‘Othered’, excluded, traumatised, harmed and dehumanised as a result of racial capitalism, border regimes and immigration systems.
Decolonisation involves land back and reparations, and the revival of Indigenous knowledge systems (epistemic liberation). It involves a world where people are free to move, but also free to stay, rather than being forced out of their homelands because of legacies of colonialism and imperialism. You can find out more about this here.
Colonialism and anti-migrant narratives
Anti-migrant rhetoric often neglects to recognise the ‘West’s’ role in destabilising the Global South through political interference, exploitation, colonisation and proxy wars. It is also true that many anti-migrant narratives, such as the language of “integration”, “hardworking” or “contribution”, are rooted in colonial ideas of what it means to be civilised. Colonisers often justified their domination of colonised communities, who they demonised as “lazy”, by stating that they would help instil hardworking industrious values in them, and therefore help them progress along the path to “civilisation” and “superior humanity”. Across Europe, integration functions as an internal border. It demonises Global South cultures as a “threat”, and expects racialised migrants to give up their heritage in order to be seen as human. This is also reminiscent of the forced assimilation and erasure of cultural identities and practices that is characteristic of both colonialism and settler colonialism.
Therefore, decolonising migration also involves getting rid of these harmful anti-migrant narratives that are rooted in colonial domination.
Colonialism and borders
“The western archive is premised on the crystallisation of the idea of a border…If we want to conclude the work of decolonisation, we have to bring down colonial boundaries in our continent and turn Africa into a vast space of circulation for itself [and] for its descendants”.
Borders as they exist today are a colonial invention, designed to manage, control and exert power over the movement of racialised and colonised people. The creation of the modern-nation state across the Global South was the creation of White men drawing arbitrary lines on maps.
People have always moved. As Mbembe writes, boundaries in the pre-colonial era were always “porous” and “permeable”: they were “meant to be crossed”. Yet during the Scramble for Africa, the artificial borders of colonies (and therefore future states) were decided effectively at random by the colonial powers, and were not based on existing (although fluid) tribal/ethnic boundaries. So these newly imposed borders therefore split many tribal and ethnic communities in half, and impeded their ability to move as they previously would have.
In the modern world, colonisers continue to dictate and regulate the movement of the racialised and colonised ‘Other’ for profit, through labour exploitation, immigration detention and the prison system, which turns racialised people into goods to be controlled and assets to be managed. The UK Government has paid private contractors millions of pounds for surveillance, border militarisation, and the segregation of migrants in inhumane asylum accommodation. A similar pattern is spotted in Europe, where the EU and its member states pay private companies to collect biometric data and carry out deportations. This echoes the commodification and dehumanisation of Black people during Transatlantic enslavement.
To decolonise migration then, not only involves land back, reparations, epistemic liberation, and the dissolution of colonial narratives, but also the dissolution of borders and the neoliberal nation-state. What a world without borders could look like exists in the realm of imagination, however we can take inspiration from history. We can harness pre-colonial histories of movement, mobility and fluidity as a stepping-stone to envision what a world that serves everybody could look like.