Short Abstract

This roundtable aims to rethink the concept of displacement as a form of life shaped by restrictive border control policies within the context of rising populism and authoritarianism.

Long Abstract

Migrants have come to occupy a central role in national imaginaries and ideologies of identity, often including xenophobic and racist motifs at a time of rising populism and authoritarianism. While much has been written on immigration and asylum, on migrants and refugees, we focus on the connections between the politics of migration in its varied modes and displacement as a form of life.

How are the contemporary politics of border control shaped by colonial and imperial pasts, racial and gendered forms of violence, technologies of surveillance, the externalization of migration governance, and the rise of populism and authoritarianism? In what ways are the logics of humanitarianization and securitization complementary or contradictory? How does the rejection of legal routes of entry and residence generate conditions of "illegality" and rightlessness? How do people on the move experience these processes, practices, and policies of displacement? What kind of individual and collective tactics do they invent to circumvent and resist them? What forms of solidarity develop in relation to them? What affects and values are mobilized in the defense of migrants or in the restrictions of mobility?

This roundtable aims to address these questions anthropologically by bringing together an international group of scholars utilizing different perspectives and methodologies anchored in different regions of the world. It aims to make a distinctive intervention in the scholarly debates on "displacement" by rethinking this concept beyond its conventional meaning in forced migration studies and understanding it as a form of life, an experience with no clear beginning or end, characterized by a disjointed temporality and a dispersed form of spatiality that cuts across national and regional borders.