Colonialism, Postcoloniality, and the Study of Forced Migration

Abstract

This Special Section explores the continuities, ruptures, genealogies, and contingent parallels that can be traced between twenty-first-century forms of subjectification, governance, and control within the management of mobilities, and older, imperial politics on slavery and colonialism. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial approaches that emphasize the continuity of colonial thinking embedded within current systems of power, it critically examines the impact of colonial empires on migration control in the present day, as manifested by a variety of state and non-state actors across diverse temporal and geographic contexts. In doing so, it pays careful attention to the lived experiences and resistance practices of those subjected to colonial power matrixes past and present, and to strategies of countering researcher complicity in knowledge extractivism.