Border and Rule

Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.

The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.

Walia describes how this segmentation undermines… show more.

Walia’s Border and Rule expands the framework to think globally about the role of borders in fracturing the global working-class to the benefit of corporations and states and to the detriment of ordinary people and the planet. She helps us see that there is in fact no migrant crisis, but multiple crises of racism, capitalism, and imperialism that converge at national borders. The fact that people move across borders is a symptom of these convergent crises. So, again, if we want to get serious about addressing border violence, targeting migrants (the symptom) makes no sense. Instead, we must address… show more.