"New Keywords: Migration and Borders" is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i)

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Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes. We approach copper as a material element that due to its capacity to conduct electricity provides conditions of possibility for contemporary digital capitalism. At the same time, we consider the elements that constitute logistics as a political force by asking how logistics operates in parallel, partnership, and rivalry to forms of state and international order themselves in uncertain transformation. Empirically, the article stems from research conducted in Chile, specifically in the port of Valparaíso, the Andina mine run by the country’s state owned copper mining company CODELCO, and the copper smelter run by the same company on the coast at Ventanas. On this basis, we ask how the production and circulation of copper has mutated with shifting logistical arrangements that respond to the geopolitical position of China, the financialization of trade in base metals, the rise of business models based in data extraction, and workers’ struggles in times of labor precarization.

The essay aims to show the relevance of logistics for political theory, both as an object of research for understanding production, and as an angle on the transformations involving the state-form, sovereignty and the formation of subjectivity in the global age. By reflecting upon some experiences of field research, the essay discusses logistics as an element of the transnational dimension of the political and as a specific form of power and governance. The essay argues for the need to critically analyze the discourses and transformations connected to logistics in order to imagine new forms of theoretical production to critically grasp the present and includes some preliminary insights to interpret the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.