Mass incarceration, police brutality, and border controls are part and parcel of the everyday experiences of marginalized and racialized communities across the world. Recent scholarship in international relations, sociology, and geography has examined the prevalence of these coercive practices through the prism of “disciplinary,” “penal,” or “authoritarian” neoliberalism. In this collective discussion, we argue that although this literature has brought to the fore neoliberalism's reliance on state violence, it has yet to interrogate how these carceral measures are linked to previous forms of global racial ordering. To rectify this moment of “colonial unknowing,” the collective discussion draws on decolonial approaches, Indigenous studies, and theories of racial capitalism. It demonstrates that “new” and “neoliberal” forms of domestic control must be situated within the global longue durée of racialized and colonial accumulation by dispossession. By mapping contemporary modes of policing, incarceration, migration control, and surveillance onto earlier forms of racial–colonial subjugation, we argue that countering the violence of neoliberalism requires more than nostalgic appeals for a return to Keynesianism. What is needed is abolition—not just of the carceral archipelago, but of the very system of racial capitalism that produces and depends on these global vectors of organized violence and abandonment.
How do non-governmental organisations (NGOs) represent migrants and refugees? Based on 24 interviews with staff members of US-based NGOs I show that organisations aim to emphasise migrants’ and refugees’ resilience and to highlight our ‘shared humanity’. While these strategies seemingly mark a break from previous criticisms that NGOs mobilise racialised and gendered narratives of victimhood or model minority achievements which demarcate between those who deserve support and those who do not, they still operate under the same meta-narrative: An understanding of worthiness predicated on individual deservingness. Based on critical and post-colonial migration studies, I argue that this not only ignores the racist structures that shape people’s lives. It also silences the racial underpinnings of who has historically been considered fully human. I further embed these narratives in the industry and the white saviour culture of humanitarianism, which are centred around individual action and individual donations and thus favour individualised stories. « Nous essayons d’humaniser leurs récits » : Interroger la représentation des migrants et des réfugiés à travers le basculement d’une « pornographie de la pauvreté » vers l’humanisation et la résilience
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