I use accent as a metaphor and a conceptual tool to epistemologically reflect over the field of migration studies. Accented thinking is a response and a reaction to the condition of coloniality that structures the processes of knowledge production. In this article I aim to explore the potentiality of accented thinking in the formation of knowledge within the field of migration studies. I approach accent both as a way of knowing and a form of struggle. The combination leads to an epistemic refusal. I use accent as refusal not only as a tool to scrutinize how epistemic injustices arise and what forces maintain them, but also as a tool to find out what forces are available to create alternative ways of knowing. I argue that accented thinking can stimulate the emergence of new perspectives and approaches. It takes us beyond notions which have restricted the possibility of any alternative order.

Since its invention in the late nineteenth century, the penetrating gaze of the X-ray has changed our vision of the inside of the human body. After we started to see inside ourselves, the relationship between ourselves and our bodies changed forever. As a progression in medical science, X-ray technology was fashioned to maintain and save life. However, as the contributors to this volume show, it has been a device of ruination as well. They visualise the traces and the pattern of violence, practised by the states, racial capitalism, colonial racism and sexism. By juxtaposing different cases across time and space, this collection demonstrates a set of relations between civilization and ruination.

The COVID-19 pandemic and interventions addressing it raise important questions about human mobility that have geopolitical implications. This forum uses mobility and immobility during the pandemic as lenses onto the ways that routinised state power reacts to acute uncertainties, as well as how these reactions impact politics and societies. Specifically, we propose the concept of “shock mobility” as migratory routines radically reconfigured: emergency flights from epicentres, mass repatriations, lockdowns, quarantines. Patterns of shock mobility and immobility are not new categories of movement, but rather are significant alterations to the timing, duration, intensity, and relations among existing movements. Many of these alterations have been induced by governments’ reactions to the pandemic in both migrant-sending and receiving contexts, which can be especially consequential for migrants in and from the Global South. Our interventions explore these processes by highlighting experiences of Afghans and Kurds along Iran’s borders, Western Africans in Europe, Filipino workers, irregular Bangladeshis in Qatar, Central Americans travelling northwards via Mexico, and rural-urban migrants in India. In total, we argue that tracing shocks’ dynamics in a comparative manner provides an analytical means for assessing the long-term implications of the pandemic, building theories about how and why any particular post-crisis world emerges as it does, and paving the way for future empirical work. 

Our world is a suffocating world. The colour line which is always also a class line is based on the differential distribution of the right to breathe. There are many who cannot breathe; the illegalized people on the move who are suffocated to death in crowded containers; travellers without papers who drown in the Mediter-ranean Sea; African Americans who are asphyxiated to death under the knees of a brutal racism; people for whom breathing has become a struggle due to the toxic air; and nations who live under imperial condi-tions such as for the Iranian people who suffer under USA-led sanctions. In such a suffocating world the atmospheric relations are shaped in a way that has turned breathing (literally and figuratively) into a com-bat. As Frantz Fanon puts it:

There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.

The word smuggler often unleashes a simplified, negative image painted by the media and the authorities. Such state-centric perspectives hide many social, political and economic relations generated by smuggling. This book looks at the practice through the eyes of the smugglers, revealing how their work can be productive, subversive and deeply sociopolitical.

By tracing the illegalised movement of people and goods across borders, Seeing Like a Smuggler shows smuggling as a contradiction within the nation-state system, and in a dialectical relation with the national order of things. It raises questions on how smuggling engages and unsettles the ethics, materialities, visualities, histories and the colonial power relations that form borders and bordering.

Covering a wide spectrum of approaches from personal reflections and ethnographies to historical accounts, cultural analysis and visual essays, the book spans the globe from Colombia to Ethiopia, Singapore to Guatemala, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, and from Kurdistan to Bangladesh, to show how people deal with global inequalities and the restrictions of poverty and immobility.

Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. Waiting is a particular experience of time, shaped by class, race, and gender. In modern societies, time is associated with success and money. It can be counted, saved, spent, lost, wasted or invested. Hence waiting symbolizes waste, emptiness, and uselessness. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? The book is a combination of text and images, by scholars, artists, architects, and curators whose works deal with waiting in various situations and geographies

We live in a time of wall fetishism. Never have human beings been so obsessed with building walls as they are today. Walls are, however, age-old. Empires built walls. And if we look closer, we can see that there are still traces of the old imperial visions in the modern borders and border walls. In this essay I will look at the connections of wars and walls, walls and empires. Through a radical historicisation I will argue that there is a link between the installation of border walls (here) and the unsettling of communities (there). The current border regime is part of a larger and older project of colonial accumulation by dispossession and expulsion; stealing wealth, labour force and time. I will also argue that border crossing discloses the cracks in the dominant narration of borders and that travellers without papers denaturalise what are otherwise naturalised borders, and politicise what are otherwise depoliticised borders. I will illustrate this argument by following travellers without papers along the railways in the Balkans; tracing Afghan deportees in Kabul; and following the social life of the materialities used in the oil sites in Iran and in the wall between Mexico and the USA.