By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Introduction
In July 2026, my book Faultlines in the Long Duree of Human History: Genealogies, Trajectories and Horizons was published where I posed the haunting question: why do human beings ceaselessly draw lines between those who belong and those who do not? It is within this context that the figure of the migrant, as a person out of place, arises. The challenge posed by the figure of the migrant has so far not elicited the correct response beyond the anxieties and panics. There is need for a rethinking of the figure of the migrant beyond current understanding as a problem but as a harbinger of the pluriversal world.
A policed figure
The migrant is the most policed, the most surveilled, the most criminalised, the most legislated-against and the most hated human being of our time. No other figure attracts such a concentration of technological, legal, military and emotional energy.
Walls, biometric registries, offshore camps, pushbacks, drones, deportation charters, hostile-environment statutes, algorithmic risk-scoring at consulates: an extraordinary planetary apparatus has been assembled around a person carrying a bag and sometimes nothing.
Why? All sorts of standard answers are given. They range widely from putting pressure on services, cultural anxiety, criminality, to security. Are these alibis? They explain the vocabulary of the panic, not its intensity. The intensity has a different source.
Why is the migrant criminal number one?
The migrant is hated because the migrant has already crossed. The migrant is the living refutation of the proposition that a human being belongs to a place rather than to a world. The migrant is the person who has, in body and in biography, declined the central metaphysical claim of the modern world system, the claim that humanity comes pre-sorted into sovereign containers, and that to leave one’s container without permission is a species of trespass if not treason.
Rethinking and redefining the migrant
The migrant is not a problem to be managed, a burden to be absorbed, a victim to be pitied or a threat to be repelled. The migrant is a harbinger, that is, the advance figure of a pluriversal world, the embodied prefiguration of a planetary right to mobility that modernity/coloniality postponed, criminalised and tried to abolish through its cartographies and its hierarchies of being. To rethink and unthink the figure of the migrant is nothing less than to rethink and unthink the transcendental modern colonial model of the world itself.
Context and contests
Every serious diagnostic vocabulary now in circulation is a vocabulary of termination. The end of the liberal international order. The end of the American century. The end of the post-1945 settlement. The end of the Holocene. The end of the long sixteenth century inaugurated by 1492. The polycrisis. The permacrisis. The interregnum in which, as we have all learned to repeat, the old refuses to die and the new cannot be born.
These are end-of-era discourses.[1] What is ending is not “the world.” What is ending is a particular world: the Euro-North American-centric, Christian-centric, patriarchal, capitalist, imperial, hetero-normative and modern world inaugurated in the long sixteenth century and universalised through five centuries of conquest, enslavement, colonisation, apartheid, extraction, and epistemicide (see Quijano, 2000; Grosfoguel 2007, Mignolo, 2011; Santos, 2014; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). The panic in the metropolitan commentariat is the panic of a provincial order that mistook itself for the universe and is now discovering it was only ever one world among many.
Symptoms and syndromes
The planetary has arrived and the national cannot hold it. Climate breakdown, pandemic circulation, financialized capital, oceanic plastics, algorithmic infrastructures and atmospheric carbon do not respect the container. Chakrabarty (2021) is right that the planetary is not the global: the global was our projection, the planetary is our condition. But the political architecture we possess for responding to a planetary condition is an architecture of some two hundred sovereign boxes, each with a flag, an anthem, a border force and a fantasy of self-sufficiency. The mismatch is total. And here is the obscenity: carbon crosses every border freely, capital crosses every border freely, weapons cross every border freely, viruses cross every border freely, and data crosses every border freely — the only thing that must not cross is a poor, black human body.
Coloniality has outlived colonial administration. Political decolonisation dismantled the empire’s flags but left intact the colonial matrix of power that organises labour, authority, knowledge, gender, subjectivity and nature along a racial line (Quijano, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2007).[2] The border is where that matrix is most visible today. Border regimes do not stop mobility; they differentiate it. They sort the planet into those whose passports are keys and those whose passports are cages. Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) taught us to read the border as a method of producing differentiated labour, not as a line of exclusion. Visa apartheid is coloniality’s most functional surviving institution, and it is administered daily, without scandal, in air-conditioned consulates.
The nation-state has entered its necrotic phase. Unable to deliver security, prosperity or dignity, the nation-state increasingly delivers enemies instead. Nationalism, the most banalised of modern ideologies, has become the political technology by which failing states produce the illusion of coherence: a nation is whatever is left when you have finished expelling. This is why anti-migrant politics is now the connective tissue of otherwise incompatible movements across the North Atlantic, the Gulf, South Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America. It is not a policy disagreement. It is the metaphysics of the container defending itself against its own obsolescence.
Into this conjuncture walks the migrant: some 281 million people living outside their country of birth, roughly 3.6 per cent of humanity, plus vastly more who move within the borders they were assigned (IOM, 2024). Statistically, a minority. Symbolically, the hinge on which the next century turns.
Misrecognitions
The dominant view of the migrant oscillates between four poles which are all hit by miscognitions and scapegoating.
The migrant as criminal and alien — a problem, a threat, a security risk, an illegality. Here the person is dissolved into a legal status manufactured by the very state that then polices it. De Genova (2013) named this the spectacle of migrant “illegality”: illegality is not a property of the person but a product of the law, staged publicly so that citizens may enjoy the theatre of their own legitimacy.
The migrant as humanitarian subject — a seeker of support, a body to be rescued, a photograph of suffering. This appears to be the compassionate pole, and it is in fact the most insidious. It grants life while withholding standing. It converts a political claimant into an object of charity. It requires the migrant to perform trauma as the price of admission, and it withdraws the moment the performance stops. Pity is a technology of hierarchy.
The migrant as competitor — for jobs, housing, clinics, school places, an unbudgeted fiscal burden. This pole works by an elegant substitution: forty years of privatisation, austerity, financialization, and state retreat are re-narrated as a housing shortage caused by the newest arrival on the street. The sins of the neoliberal project are piled on the migrant. The migrant becomes the alibi for the ruling class’s abandonment of the working class of every colour.
The migrant as civilizational threat — a demographic and cultural danger, the harbinger of the end of national purity, authenticity and continuity. This is the pole where the racial substrate becomes explicit, in the language of replacement, invasion, flooding and swamping. It is the oldest colonial grammar simply reversed and pointed homeward.
What unites the four poles is a shared premise: that sedentarism is the normal human condition and mobility is the deviation requiring explanation, justification and permission. Every one of the four asks what should be done about the migrant. None asks what the migrant is telling us. This is misrecognition in the strict sense, not an error of fact but an error of ontology.
Why is the migrant the most policed figure on earth?
Why does a person with a bag mobilise more state capacity than ecological collapse combined?
Because the migrant is a figure who crosses the line. And the line, as Du Bois (1903) understood, is the organising principle of the modern world, not merely a colour line but, as I have argued elsewhere, an epistemic line, an ontological line, a line separating those classified as fully human from those classified as questionably so (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; 2021). Fanon (1963) described the colonial world as a world cut in two, a compartmentalised world of zones and barriers whose first lesson is where one may not go. Decolonisation, he insisted, is the project of demolishing those compartments.
The migrant demolishes a compartment simply by walking. This is why the response is not merely administrative but affective — rage, disgust, panic, the desire not just to exclude but to punish and even totally eliminate. The migrant does not petition the line; the migrant has already treated it as what it is, which is a fiction with guns behind it. And a fiction that has been openly treated as a fiction has a problem.
What the migrant reveals?
So, the migrant is an anti-systemic figure. Consider what a single crossing performs. It refuses the reduction of a person to a place. It exposes sovereignty as conditional and selectively enforced. It reveals the labour market’s dependence on the very bodies the polity claims to reject — the fields, the wards, the warehouses, the abattoirs, the care homes and the construction sites of every wealthy nation run on people it insists it does not want. It makes visible the imperial debt that respectable politics is designed to forget, because most contemporary migration runs along the exact grooves cut by conquest and extraction: the Sahel to France, South Asia to Britain, the Andes and Central America to the United States, Southern Africa’s labour catchment to the Witwatersrand. As Achiume (2019) argues with great force, migration from formerly colonised to formerly colonising states is not an act of trespass at all. It is a claim upon a shared political inheritance. It is decolonisation continued by other means. We are here, because they were there!
Thus the crime of the migrant is not because the migrant takes, but because the migrant knows, and shows.
Settlement versus mobility
Let me put it this way: The sedentary human is a recent invention, and largely a colonial one. Mobility is a human trait.
For most human time, movement was ordinary. Africa, in particular, was a continent of mobilities. The mobilities included pastoral, commercial, pilgrimatic, ritual, seasonal, and dynastic. Belonging was layered, negotiated and frequently multiple; polities were defined by centres and allegiances rather than by continuous surveyed perimeters. What the Berlin Conference and its aftermath introduced was not order but cartographic violence: lines drawn across mobilities, the freezing of fluid identities into census categories, the invention of tribes and natives, and the legal apparatus that Mamdani (1996) analysed as the bifurcation of citizen and subject.
The passport and identity card
The passport regime as we know it, universal documentary identity, monopolised by states, required for ordinary movement, consolidated only in and after the First World War (Torpey, 2000). It is younger than the aeroplane. It is younger than my grandparents. Yet it is treated as a law of nature.
Here is the cruellest inversion. The colonial order moved people ceaselessly and without consent: twelve million or more across the Atlantic in chains; indentured Indians to Natal, Fiji, Trinidad and Mauritius; migrant labour compounds pulling men from Nyasaland, Bechuanaland and my own Matabeleland into the mines of the Rand; the entire architecture of the pass, the isitupa, the dompas, designed not to prevent movement but to own it. Colonial modernity was a gigantic engine of forced mobility. Having built the world on the coerced movement of the racialized, it now presents the voluntary movement of the racialized as the ultimate outrage. The descendants of those who moved everything are appalled that anyone should move at all. Europeans repopulated the rest of the world from the fifteenth century. They called it voyages of discovery. It was their repopulation of the planet, long before passports were invented.
Nandita Sharma (2020) makes the point that should end the debate and instead has barely entered it: the modern separation of “native” from “migrant” is itself an imperial artefact, carried over from colonial rule into the postcolonial nation-state, where it now licenses new autochthonies and new expulsions. We did not inherit freedom in 1957, 1960, 1963, 1980 or 1994. We inherited the container, and we inherited the sorting machine inside it.
The weak liberal interventions
The liberal repertoire consisting of tolerance, integration, assimilation, social cohesion, social inclusion, equality, diversity and inclusion, multiculturalism, the celebration of difference is not adequate to the revolutionary question the migrant poses. It is not merely insufficient. In its present form it is a containment strategy, and a rather effective one. A weak response to a planetary challenge.
Examine the grammar of each term.
Tolerance presupposes a host who possesses the power to withdraw it, and an object whose existence is an imposition being graciously endured.
Integration presupposes a fixed centre into which the newcomer must dissolve, and it never runs in reverse; nobody asks the settled majority to integrate.
Assimilation is integration with the mask off — the demand that the migrant liquidate the world she carries as the price of a residence permit.
Social cohesion names a project of managing the affective comfort of the majority.
Diversity and inclusion is the most sophisticated of them: it invites bodies while quarantining the knowledges those bodies carry, producing institutions that are chromatically plural and epistemically monocultural. You may bring your face. Please leave your cosmology at reception.
All of these operate within the container. They ask how the box can be made more comfortable. They cannot ask whether the box should exist, because the box is their condition of intelligibility. This is precisely what Santos (2014; 2018) means by the abyssal line operating at the centre of the cognitive empire (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021): a regime that can absorb any number of new members while conceding nothing about what counts as knowledge, personhood or world.
The migrant does not need to be tolerated. The migrant needs the world to be reworlded.
The sins of the South
If this provocation only indicted Europe and North America it would be comfortable, and comfort is the enemy of debate.
Some of the most ferocious anti-migrant politics on earth is practised by the formerly colonised against the formerly colonised. Nigeria expelled some two million West Africans, mostly Ghanaians, in 1983. Southern Africa has produced recurring waves of lethal violence against Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians, Somalis, Ethiopians and Congolese, alongside movements that make the expulsion of foreign nationals into a civic virtue. Across the continent, autochthony has been weaponised in electoral politics; in South Asia, citizenship registers manufacture statelessness at scale; in the Gulf, the kafala system perfects a mobility that grants labour without personhood.
The key problem is the reproduction of colonial logics horizontally, between the colonised, without the coloniser needing to be present resulting in the production of what I have termed necro-nativism, a politics that constitutes the authentic native through the social and sometimes physical death of the neighbour (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2026). Nyamnjoh (2006) saw this early in Southern Africa: the insider is manufactured by the continuous production of the outsider, and the machinery is inherited, not invented.
The lesson is severe. Anti-migrant violence in Alexandra and anti-migrant policy in Westminster are not analogous; they are cognate. Both are the container defending itself. Both are the colonial sorting machine running on local current. Any decolonial position that denounces Fortress Europe while excusing Operation Dudula is not decolonial. It is nationalist, and nationalism is precisely the ideology whose degeneration is the problem.
Rethinking the migrant as harbinger
What do we gain if we shift paradigmatically — if we cease to view the migrant as criminal, victim, competitor or civilizational threat, and instead view the migrant as the revolutionary harbinger of a pluriversal world, a force for reworlding the world, and the nucleus of a planetary citizenship founded on relationality and on the earth as the shared home of everyone?
We gain at least six things.
We gain a different ontology of the human. Fanon’s new humanism and Wynter’s (2003) unsettling of Man both require a subject not exhausted by the categories of the colonial order. The migrant is that subject in practice: a person who has demonstrated that identity is a becoming, not an assignment. Nail (2015) argues that the migrant should be understood as the constitutive figure of the political present rather than its exception. I would go further. The migrant is not the exception to the human. The migrant is the human, minus the fiction of rootedness.
We gain a different theory of belonging. Glissant (1997) gave us Relation, errantry and the right to opacity: the insight that identity may be a rhizome rather than a root, and that we may be in relation with those we do not fully comprehend and do not need to. His pensée du tremblement — a thinking that trembles rather than one that stands on certainties — is precisely the mode of thought a mobile planet requires. Assimilation demands transparency; Relation permits opacity. Only one of these can build a plural society.
We gain a correct description of what migration actually is. Not invasion, not charity, but the return leg of a five-century circuit of extraction (Bhambra, 2017; Achiume, 2019). Wealth moved from the colonies to the metropoles for four hundred years without a visa. The people are simply following their own stolen labour home. Say this in a policy seminar and watch the temperature change.
We gain the beginnings of a planetary politics. If the crises are planetary and the institutions are national, the missing element is a planetary subject. It will not be produced by summits. It is being produced, painfully and involuntarily, by people who have already lived in more than one world and can no longer be persuaded that only one exists.
We gain a model of the pluriverse that is empirical rather than aspirational. A world in which many worlds fit is not a Zapatista slogan awaiting implementation (Escobar, 2020; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). It is Yeoville, Peckham, Little Mogadishu, Jackson Heights, Forest Lawn. The migrant carries a world into other worlds. The pluriverse is already here; it is simply criminalised, under-resourced and denied a theory.
We gain the right question about the future. The twenty-first century will be the most mobile in human history. Climate displacement alone will move populations at a scale that will make current debates look quaint. The question is not whether people will move. It is whether they move as rights-bearing persons or as cargo, and whether the polities receiving them are organised as containers or as commons.
Envisioning the plural society and pluriversal world
A plural society, in the liberal sense, is a single world containing multiple cultures. One ontology, one legal order, one epistemology, one calendar of the real; decorated with many cuisines and festivals. Difference is admitted at the level of culture and refused at the level of world.
A pluriversal world is a world of many worlds, in which more than one ontology, more than one cosmology, more than one legal tradition and more than one ecology of knowledge is granted the status of real rather than the status of heritage (Escobar, 2020; Santos, 2018). Pluriversality is not relativism, because it is not indifferent; it is a demand for co-presence under conditions of equality, and it entails ecologies of knowledges rather than a hierarchy topped by one provincial tradition mistaking itself for reason as such.
Canada, where I now write, is the world’s laboratory for the difference. Multiculturalism as policy has produced genuine achievements and one structural evasion: it can celebrate cultures while leaving unaltered the single legal-epistemic order within which they are celebrated. Indigenous legal orders, Indigenous cosmologies and Indigenous ecological knowledges pose the pluriversal question directly, because they are not cultures asking for recognition within one world; they are worlds. And this is why the Indigenous question and the migrant question, so often set against each other, belong to one horizon: both interrogate the settler-colonial container, one from beneath and one from across.
Reworlding, then, is not immigration reform. Reworlding is the construction of a world in which the migrant is not an anomaly requiring administration, because the world is no longer built on the axiom that a person belongs to one place, one language, one law, one people and one truth.
Ten propositions of a policy horizon for a mobile planet
The urgent need for a planetary mobility charter, resting on a triad of rights. The right to move, the right to stay, and the right not to be displaced. These are not in tension; they are one right, that is, the right to determine one’s own relation to place. Any regime that grants only the third is a prison. Any regime that grants only the first is a market. The Charter should be drafted from the Global South and not received from Geneva.
Decouple rights from nationality. Rights should attach to persons and to residence, not to bloodline or birthplace. Presence over time should generate standing automatically — a jus domicilii under which sustained residence converts into full political membership, including the vote, without discretionary gatekeeping. Arendt’s right to have rights should belong to the human being, not to the passport.
Reparative mobility. Visa regimes should be indexed to historical and ecological debt. States that colonised should extend preferential mobility to the states they colonised. States that are principal historic emitters should extend preferential mobility to the states now rendered uninhabitable by those emissions. This follows directly from Achiume (2019): if migration is decolonisation, then mobility is a form of restitution and should be legislated as such.
A climate mobility protocol. The 1951 Refugee Convention cannot see the climate-displaced person, because persecution by a state is legible to it and inundation by a sea is not. Africa already has the more advanced instruments such as the Kampala Convention on internal displacement and the ECOWAS free movement regime among them. The African Union’s 2018 Free Movement Protocol should be ratified and operationalised as a matter of urgency and extended into a Southern-led climate mobility instrument that the North will eventually be obliged to join.
End the contradiction at the heart of continental integration. The AfCFTA proposes to move African goods freely across African borders while African people continue to require visas to visit their neighbours. Africa cannot demand the dismantling of Fortress Europe while constructing fifty-four fortresses of its own. Free movement of persons is not a supplement to African integration. It is the test of whether it is real.
Abolish visa apartheid through reciprocity audits. Publish, annually and by state, the differential: refusal rates, fee burdens as a share of median income, processing times, and the passport-power gradient. Make the racial architecture of global mobility a measured, reported, litigable fact rather than an ambient condition. What is measured becomes contestable.
Regularisation as default, detention as abolition target. Undocumented status should expire, not compound. Time-bound presence should trigger automatic regularisation. Offshore processing, indefinite detention and externalised border enforcement should be recognised for what they are — a carceral archipelago — and dismantled, with the budgets transferred to settlement, housing and municipal capacity.
Citizenship at the scale of the city. Cities already practise a de facto pluriversality that states resist. Municipal identity documents, service access decoupled from immigration status, sanctuary practice and voting rights in local elections after short residence periods constitute an existing, testable model of post-national membership. Build the future where it is already living.
Epistemic portability. Rights are not only juridical. Recognise qualifications across borders; end the systematic devaluation of Southern credentials that turns physicians into drivers; fund the mobility of Southern scholars whose visa refusals routinely empty conference panels devoted to their own continent; and require that plural societies pluralise their curricula, not merely their photographs. A plural society with a monocultural syllabus is a diversity brochure, not a pluriverse.
Build the institutions of planetary citizenship now. A Pluriversal Mobility Observatory, led from the South, producing the counter-data. An assembly of the mobile with standing in international fora, in which those who have crossed speak as constituents rather than as case studies. And, in every university that claims a commitment to pluralism, a research and teaching agenda that treats mobility as constitutive of the human condition rather than as a policy problem to be optimised.
Counterarguments
“You are romanticising suffering.” Most people who move do so under duress, and to call the drowned a harbinger is obscene. Yes, I am cognisant of this danger and I reject the conclusion. To read the migrant as harbinger is not to celebrate the conditions of departure any more than reading the enslaved as agents of modernity celebrates the hold of the ship. Coercion and world-making coexist; that is the whole difficulty of subaltern history. What I refuse is the alternative, which is to grant the migrant significance only as a wound and a problem.
“Open borders will devastate the working poor of receiving states.” — The empirical literature is far more contested than the political rhetoric admits but let me answer politically rather than econometrically. The wages and housing of the working poor were devastated by capital that moved freely while labour was chained, by austerity, and by the deliberate destruction of collective bargaining. The answer is to unchain labour and to tax capital, not to police the poorest against each other. A politics that defends workers by dividing them has not defended workers.
“What about the right to stay? Is not celebrating mobility complicity with the forces that destroy homes?” — This is the most serious objection and I incorporate it: the right to stay is the second term of my triad, and it is inseparable from the first. A world that forces people to move and a world that forbids them to move are the same world, differently configured. Both deny self-determination in relation to place.
“This dissolves the political community; democracy requires a demos.” — It requires a demos; it does not require an ethnos, and it does not require that the demos be defined by birth in perpetuity. Every expansion of the franchise — to the propertyless, to women, to the colonised — was met with the identical warning that the political community would dissolve. It did not dissolve. It became a community.
“This is utopian.” — The abolition of the slave trade was utopian. The end of formal colonial rule was utopian. Female suffrage was utopian. The dismantling of apartheid was utopian in 1985 and inevitable in 1994. Meanwhile the genuinely fantastical proposition — that a planet in ecological and demographic transformation can be governed by two hundred sealed boxes — is treated as realism. I would ask my critics to consider which of us is holding the more improbable belief.
Ten theses for the debate
1. The migrant is not a problem to be solved but a question to be answered.
2. Sedentarism is not the natural human condition; it is a colonial administrative achievement of the last century and a half.
3. The border does not stop movement; it prices it, races it and extracts value from it.
4. Nationalism is the most banalised ideology of our time and the least examined; it survives because it is never asked to justify itself.
5. Tolerance, integration, assimilation and diversity are containment strategies operating inside the container, and they cannot answer the question the migrant poses.
6. Anti-migrant politics in the Global South is not a betrayal of decolonisation by accident; it is lateral coloniality and necro-nativism running on inherited machinery.
7. Migration from the formerly colonised world to the formerly colonising world is decolonisation continued by other means, it is a reworlding process, and should be legislated as restitution.
8. A plural society is one world with many cultures; a pluriversal world is many worlds in relation. Do not accept the first when you asked for the second.
9. Planetary citizenship will not be granted by states; it is being prefigured by those who have already crossed.
10. The migrant is the harbinger. The question is only whether we recognise the messenger before or after the world we know has finished ending.
Conclusion
This piece inaugurates Provocations & Debates at the Reworlding the World Research Network (RWRN). Responses from historians, political theorists, geographers, lawyers, anthropologists, artists, policy practitioners and, most of all, from those who have themselves crossed and whose analysis of the crossing exceeds anything the academy has produced about them, are most welcomed.
References and Further Reading
Achiume, E.T. (2019) ‘Migration as decolonization’, Stanford Law Review, 71(6), pp. 1509–1574.
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Balibar, É. (2004) We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2016) Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bhambra, G.K. (2017) ‘The current crisis of Europe: refugees, colonialism and the limits of cosmopolitanism’, European Law Journal, 23(5), pp. 395–405.
Césaire, A. (1972) Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Chakrabarty, D. (2021) The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De Genova, N. (2013) ‘Spectacles of migrant “illegality”: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(7), pp. 1180–1198.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company.
Escobar, A. (2020) Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press.
Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Ferdinand, M. (2022) Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ghosh, A. (2021) The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge.
Glissant, É. (1997) Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2024) World Migration Report 2024. Geneva: IOM.
Jones, R. (2016) Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London: Verso.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007) ‘On the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept’, Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 240–270.
Mamdani, M. (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mamdani, M. (2020) Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2019) Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2021) Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2013) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W.D. (2011) The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mignolo, W.D. and Walsh, C.E. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nail, T. (2015) The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. (2013) Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. (2018) Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London and New York: Routledge.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. (2021) ‘The cognitive empire, politics of knowledge and African intellectual productions’, Third World Quarterly, 42(5), pp. 882–901.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2026) Faultlines in the Long Duree of Human History: Genealogies, Trajectories, and Horizons. Mankon, Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG.
Nyamnjoh, F.B. (2006) Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. London: Zed Books.
Quijano, A. (2000) ‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), pp. 533–580.
Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
Santos, B. de S. (2018) The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sassen, S. (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sharma, N. (2020) Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants. Durham: Duke University Press.
Torpey, J. (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walia, H. (2021) Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Wynter, S. (2003) ‘Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after Man, its overrepresentation — an argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), pp. 257–337.
Yusoff, K. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[1] Walter D. Mignolo has persuasively posited that we are not witnessing changes within an era but end of an era itself.
[2] Ramon Grosfoguel building on the pioneering work of Anibal Quijano delineated 16 of what he called the colonial cartographies of power.
About the Author
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Pluralistic Societies: Epistemic Pluralism and Ecologies of Knowledges in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary.
An epiphanic provocation.