A review by brnineworms
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

dark informative slow-paced

3.0

Definitely not bad, but not what I was expecting. I was hoping for more on the philosophy of borders – their creation and maintenance, the mentality that underpins them, the consequences of their enforcement – but the book drifts away onto tangentially related topics. Immigration and labour exploitation and liberal multiculturalism are not irrelevant, but discussing those subjects is not the same as directly interrogating borders themselves. It’s one degree removed from what I was interested in, if that makes sense. And that’s not that these things aren’t worth talking about! I just wish that more of an effort was made to explicitly link them to the subject at hand. For example, Walia mentions TERFs only to point out that they are connected to a global network of alt right ideologies and organisations. What she could have done is examine transphobia through a “border and rule” lens: how (and why) are identity categories like gender constructed and policed? It felt like a missed opportunity to not approach it in this way.

Border and Rule is very dense; it feels a lot longer than two hundred or so pages. There are a lot of statistics and cold hard facts. I found myself thinking about Said’s Orientalism and Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Neither of these books is without its flaws, but I feel they were more reflective and, as a result, had more insightful observations to offer than simply describing the state of the world.

CONTENT WARNINGS: racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, incarceration in detention centres and refugee camps, trafficking, deportation, police brutality, torture, sexual assault, mass shootings, violence in general, colonialism, slavery, genocide, death, self harm