 Hello and welcome to the Arts Link Assembly. This year we are entirely online and this is week four of our five week assembly with a focus on radical hospitality. The Arts Link Assembly brings together artists and thinkers to reflect on the artist's role in their practice in building and sustaining civil society. This week in election week and I hope you're all sustaining the tension at the moment but we wanted to talk about something perhaps utopian to some but already a lived reality for many who are finding ways to connect and share trends globally and trends nationally. We wanted to look at the whole idea of no borders and post nationalism and we invited the professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, Thomas Nail to curate a series of resources, readings and artworks that you can see on our resources page but to pull together a week of conversations and a panel which tomorrow you can see Thomas moderating with Alex Saker and Nandita Sharma. Today however, sadly Tanya Bruguera who was to conduct this conversation with Nandita was really prevented from doing so by what is ironically enough governmental borders or in this case cyber borders restrictions on the internet that she could access from her home base in Havana in Cuba. So we are very fortunate indeed that Thomas was both free at this moment and able to step in. We only made this transition yesterday so we're incredibly grateful for Thomas for joining us a day earlier than planned but in conversation with Nandita Sharma, professor of sociology at the University of Hawaii. Thomas, I hope you're there. Okay Simon, are you there? Who disappeared? I disappeared, I leave it to you, I'll jump in at the end. Okay excellent, well thank you so much, big thanks to Simon for organizing this event and to all the ArtsLink assembly people who have helped organize the conference, it's really important and it's such a great thing that we're able to talk about no borders. There was definitely a time that this movement was much smaller and I feel like it's gaining traction so I'm very thankful to be able to have this conversation this week and I'm very thankful that Nandita was willing to talk with us today and talk a little bit about her book and about things in general, no borders. So first of all thank you Nandita and congratulations on the publication of your book Home Rule National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants with Duke University Press, it's such an incredible book and I feel like I've very much learned a lot if there is such a thing as an academic page turner, that's what I feel about this book when I was reading it, it synthesizes an enormous amount of literature very rapidly and so I have a number of questions that I think will be very broad but hopefully you can respond to them in relationship to the book but one very broad question that you talk about in the beginning of the book that I wanted to ask you, there's that we're living in this very weird paradoxical moment where the nation state as a structure has never been more violent, more destructive, more unequal economically speaking, the richest 1% of people globally now possess more wealth than the rest of the world. That nation states have never felt as inadequate as they do today of solving problems of global migration, of climate change and yet at the same time as we're encountering all of these limits, the unraveling of so many things that the nation state promised us, equality, universality, global community, at the moment that all those are unraveling, we're seeing a doubling down, an absolute commitment to increased borders, rigidification, anti-immigration, xenophobia, racism. My question here is why is this paradox happening to us and more dramatically, why are we being trumped to death? Why at the moment would this is the least thing that we need? We're getting the trumps and the Bolsonaro's. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. And before I answer that really important and interesting question, I also want to thank you, Thomas, for stepping in at the last moment and facilitating this conversation. I really appreciate it. And I love your work, so it's a great pleasure to also have a conversation with you about no borders. And thank you to Simon, especially for all of the patience and organizing and everyone, and, you know, everyone else whose labor is absolutely essential to making this possible. So I think in terms of answering your question, and it is a really important paradox to really question, I think many people who think about it think of it as a contradiction, and it's not at all a contradiction. So I'm glad that you framed it as a paradox rather than a contradiction. You know, for so many years, we've been hearing people saying, oh, why is capital so mobile when people are not as allowed to be as mobile? And they say, that's not a contradiction. That is the structure of the system that we live in. That is meant to be that way. And I think that, you know, what we're living in is a system, a global system of nation states that corresponds in no way to the reality of how people live their lives. You know, I think that should be the starting point, because if that's our starting point, then we understand we need to build a different system, that this system is designed precisely to produce the Trumps and the Bolsonaro's and the Modi's and the Duterte's and, you know, the rest of the authoritarian gang that is spreading like wildfire across the globe right now. So I think the paradox is the very structure of the nation state, the nation state by definition, in contrast to earlier forms of state power, which were, you know, destructive and violent in their own ways, the particular violence of the nation states is about continuously defining who belongs, who doesn't belong, who has rights, who doesn't have rights. You know, so one of the main rights that come with getting national self-determination, national sovereignty is the right to determine your membership, right? Every nation state is given the power and the authority, the legitimacy to say, well, you can be a member and you can't be a member and it's up to us to decide. And there's been, you know, as migration scholars have pointed out, a constant culling. There's been a constant culling of who belongs, who doesn't belong. And because that never corresponds with who actually lives in the territory of a nation state, like every single nation state in the world has people that are either legally defined or socially defined as not belonging, the violence is built into the system, right? And what we're seeing and what my book tries to document and analyze and address is that the criteria for national belonging is narrowing, right? Nationalism is hardening and it's narrowing and I really like the way that you put it, that people are doubling down precisely when it becomes more and more evident that this system is not designed to meet our actual lived conditions. And I think people double down because the one thing that we have been told about this system is that the problems in whatever problems we may have, they're always caused by foreigners, right? They're caused by foreigners who are competing with us for our jobs. They're caused by foreign capital who is competing for our capital, for our factory sites, for our production, for our taxes, you know, on and on and on. So the system is built in to produce a scapegoat, right? And to continuously produce the nation as the solution for all of the problems. So I think that's why nationalism produces more nationalism. You know, it's always the idea that the problem is that it's not national sovereignty, it's always we don't have enough sovereignty, we need more sovereignty, we need more things to be sovereign about, we need more control over how people move, who's allowed to have rights, so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, do you think part of that has to do with fear? You know, the rise of authoritarian leaders is they stoke this fear. And there is genuine reason, there are good reasons to be afraid right now. I mean, climate change is a scary thing that affects a lot of people, and people see that in the coming future that the world that that problem is not going to go away so easily. And economic inequality so much, I mean, more than half of the United States is at or below poverty level, like poverty is a very real feeling of fear and insecurity. And you're right, it's built in scapegoat, that's like, here's the problem, immigrants. And that I mean, Trump essentially had no platform except that their murderers, their rapists, they're coming for our everything. And this is the only way to protect it is to invoke me and the nation state and double down on borders, when that is precisely the problems of that have produced the migration in the first place is US imperialism, the history of US colonialism and capitalism. And all of those things, that's what Trump stood for was yes, more of that to produce more immigration to produce more fear to produce more authoritarian personalities. Yeah, and I think, you know, the other part of the agenda that also feeds into the xenophobia, the idea that the nation state is the solution rather than the problem is this constant focus, you know, I don't know if I can do a good Trump impersonation China, right? It's just this constant focus on what we need is an authoritarian leader who will bring back our jobs, right? That is the other part. That's the flip side of the anti immigration part is anti anti foreign foreign workers in other places, right? The anti, you know, so I think the other part of the nation state system that my book is trying to illuminate is the fact that, you know, after World War two, when the system of nation states became truly hegemonic, right? And became, you know, nation national self-determination, national sovereignty became the only legitimate form that state power could take. You know, when we when the world entered World War two, you know, we were still living in a world of very, very powerful and very large imperial states, right? You know, the two of the biggest powers going into World War two was the British empire and the French empire, right? Coming out of World War two, we see the disillusion of empires shortly thereafter and we start seeing the global ascendancy and and ultimately by the 1960s, the empires are gone. Even the metropoles of the empires are now nation states with their own immigration laws, right? Like the the first kind of significant immigration law of the British empire was 1962, right? In terms of keeping out the previous subjects of its empires, right? And we we tend to think of immigration laws as timeless and just as a part of all state sovereignty and that's absolutely incorrect. But what we saw after World War two with the global rise of nation states as the only legitimate form of state power, and we all continue to think, you know, many of us continue to think it's perfectly legitimate, is the global expansion of capitalism. Capitalism expanded after World War two and it expanded not through imperialism, but through nation states, right? Each and every single nation state facilitated the expansion of capitalism within its territories and facilitated the mobility of capital across the across the entire, you know, international system. So I think one of the things that authoritarians tell us today after the last, you know, 40, 50 years of neoliberalism, right, is that they will protect us from the globalization of capital instead of actually, so we're not able to see that capitalism globalized further through the nation states. We actually think it globalized against the power of nation states. And so authoritarians step in and say if you are experiencing hardship because of the further globalization of capital, the nation state is what you have to turn to. But of course, that's not going to work, right? Like Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, they are all neoliberal rulers. They want the further facilitation of capital mobility. But the promises that have all failed to be delivered upon is that somehow we can return to a period where manufacturing happened in high wage, you know, when we're talking about the United States, relatively high wage parts of the global system. That's, you know, so I think it's also the failure of analysts of this period to connect the global expansion of capital with the expansion of the nation state system, if that makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah, that's extremely well said. And that the first chapter of your book, I think covers an incredible amount of ground very rapidly, everything you're saying in a more expanded way. But it's that's the story that I think people are not. Yeah, that's the analysis we're missing is the long story and what seems like a contradiction. It's only this system playing out. It is the combination of nation states and capitalism playing out. So speaking of which and of this related theme and the sort of next step in this history of the rise of nation states to one thing that I found really helpful in your book was kind of untying a few naughty, naughty words that for me that were sort of knotted together and very sticky, I suppose words that we find a lot in the discourse about migration and borders and nationalism. And I was wondering if you could, for us, just kind of define and compare and contrast these four terms that for me, I think are very challenging. And I think your book helped clarify for me what those words mean, how they've been used, maybe a different way in which we ought to think about them. And for the audience to kind of just being introduced to these issues and thinking about that deep history of nation states as being fundamental to where we're at today. So these four words are post-nationalism, post-colonialism, neocolonialism, and decolonization. If you could just say a bit about sort of untangling those words, I found it immensely helpful. So post-nationalism, decolonization, post-colonialism, and neocolonialism. Okay. I think actually I would love to hear your thoughts on post-nationalism. I don't actually talk too much about that in the book. And I do not think we are living in a post-nationalist period. If what we mean by post-nationalism is what we mean by post-colonialism, I think post-colonialism in many people's mind has been incorrectly conflated with decolonization. So you have either people who think that national sovereignty resulted in decolonization, which I would argue it did nothing to that effect. To have national sovereignty does not mean that you are living in a decolonized society or a decolonized planet. I would say that national sovereignty is a form of governmentality or a form of ruling that looks very different than the kinds of ruling practices associated with imperial states, at least politically associated with imperial states, but it is still a form of ruling. And that is quite evident when we look at the demands of anti-colonial movements. Anti-colonial movements had some pretty common and very specific demands. We want the land back. We want our labor to stop being exploited. We want dignity and we want the ability to have control over our lives. None of that was achieved. None of that was achieved. No nation state in the world, no national sovereign that replaced the imperial sovereign, provided that. So I would say the first delinking that has to happen is post-colonialism is not decolonization. And people who are critical of post-colonialism will say that. They're like, oh, we're not in a post-colonial society because some of us still believe that we are colonized because we don't have our own national sovereignty. So there are still people in the world today who very much associate national sovereignty with decolonization. So in many efforts to decolonize, we still see that false linkage, that once we become national sovereigns over national territory, we will have achieved decolonization. And I think the main purpose for me writing this book was to delink those two, that national sovereignty doesn't produce decolonization. But what I do think that the critique that post-colonialism is inadequate to talk about both for people, for instance, who believe that they are still colonized, I think that that's also a problematic thing. So what I tried to do in the book is to show that post-colonialism is actually a form of ruling relationships. And the form of ruling relationships that I call the post-colonial new world order is the world order of nation states and how capital uses nation states to expand, right, to expand what gets put into the market. More and more things are in the marketplace than they were prior to World War II. More and more people's labor is in the capitalist marketplace than it was after World War II. And nation states were absolutely central to facilitating those processes, turning, for example, subsistence farmers into the proletariat, right? That is something that we've seen in every single nation state in the world, whether they were nominally socialist or communist or nominally capitalist, they all did the same thing. They turned people from subsistence, you know, people who largely relied on subsistence and their own means of subsistence into the proletariat. So there's hardly any people or any place in the world that is not totally enmeshed within capitalist social relationships right now. So to me, post-colonialism is that form of governance, governance through the nation states. So that's how I define post-colonialism. But drawing upon, for instance, Frederick Cooper's definition of post-colonialism, which is the delegitimization of imperial states. So, you know, Frederick Cooper talks about the post-colonial period is when imperialism became no longer legitimate, right? Empires were no longer legitimate. They're called, you know, having colonies was no longer legitimate. National sovereignty was the only thing that became legitimate. And so that legitimation process is what we are dealing with when you talked earlier about the paradox, that we actually feel free while we are being ruled over, right? That's the paradox of nationalism. And so I'd love to hear your thoughts. Oh, just the neocolonialism thing, which drives me insane, which is this idea. So, neocolonialism was a theory that was developed in the late 1950s, early 1960s. And it's definitely associated with third world political theorists and politicians and state leaders, particularly in Krumah, in Ghana, in the, you know, in the national liberation state of Ghana, to try and make sense of why national sovereignty didn't feel much different than imperialism, right? So why did all these third world national sovereign, you know, nationally sovereign states still feel like they were being ruled over, being controlled by these forces that were outside of their nationalized societies, right? So this theory was developed that the reason that national liberation was unable to deliver on its promises was because of international forces still led by the most powerful states. And of course, after World War II, the most powerful state is the United States. And that's not a coincidence by any means. And, you know, the Bretton Woods institutions that were put into place after World War II, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Global Agreement on Trades and Tariffs, which became the WTO in the 1990s, and of course, just the financial system that was put, you know, that all of those institutions were a part of, they did control what happened around the world, right? They did control the flow of finances. They did control whether any nation state in the world received funds for quote-unquote development. You know, and of course, the U.S. military, as well as the Soviet Union during the Cold War, did interfere militarily around the world, right? So national sovereignty never, never felt like what people thought it would feel like. But instead of saying, oh, okay, this system that we maybe some of us actually believed would solve the problems of colonization, it's not working. They did double down. So the theory of neocolonialism doubles down on the idea that what is missing, especially in the third world, is more national sovereignty, right? And it also deflected attention away, you know, focusing all of the attention on the United States or the Soviet Union or focusing all the attention on the IMF, the World Bank, etc., also deflected attention from the very real policy decisions and very real commitment of third world national leaders to the expansion of capitalist social relationships inside their territorial borders, right? So I was born in India. Both of my grandparents were very active in the anti-colonial movement against the British Empire there. And what we see in India right after independence in 1947 is we need new mega development projects. We need new dams. We need the electrical grid. We need industrial agriculture. We need mass irrigation and monocropping of cash crops. All of that displaced tens and hundreds of millions of people and brought them into capitalist social relationships. And yet we were told that the problem was the United States, the problem was the IMF, the problem was the World Bank, which of course they were the problem, but so were the national leaders of India and every other single nation state in the world. So neocolonialism to me operated as an alibi to especially third world leaders to deflect attention from their own responsibility in building the post-colonial New World Order. I think that's such a such a great critique. I just I just I love that and could not agree more. Now for one more example on just from my own research in the case of Mexico, that's exactly what happened. We could go back to once Mexico established independence. It stole the land from the indigenous Hito farmers and the people that had been farming that land. And then once NAFTA went into effect, they blamed the U.S. They blamed the loans and they blame and and and they did exactly what you said to build more dams, more more industrial agriculture. So they appropriated, they changed their independent constitution, which originally had some space for indigenous subsistence farming. And then they changed the constitution, stole all that land. And that's exactly I mean, that is that is one of the big reasons for so much immigration out of Mexico to the United States. It's precisely that history in which Mexico in that neocolonial narrative. Oh, it wasn't the nation state. It's not the project of independence. So in one with one hand, they're sort of blaming, you know, the suit, the the empires. With the other hand, they're blaming the indigenous peasants for not, you know, stepping it up and, you know, come on and getting on board with the project of nationalization. And but I think that's that's I think that's such a good description of how to think about that problem. And that shows you that the nation state, even the post colonial nation state is really at odds with the with the with the decolonization, the project decolonization. Yeah, it's at odds with the demands of anti colonialism, like the demands have not been met. But we don't feel like we need like for an instance in India to argue that we need anti colonialism doesn't make any more sense to us, right, because people in India don't feel colonized, right. They just feel they don't have enough national sovereignty. And so we need we need more and more authoritarian leaders who will promise us more sovereignty, right, and and be kind of belligerent in a global in a global arena, right. Right. So this this so now that we're talking about indigenous and native claims I did that's another big feature of the book that I thought was very important was your description and your definition and analysis of the history of that term native, and how it's appropriated by different groups of people. And so that that's that's, you know, in Colorado, you know, I drive around and I see people with these bumper stickers that say native. And it always creeps me the hell out that they've put these bumper stickers on their car. I mean, they're in I've seen them in other states too. But this claim that even people, you know, they want to claim to be native, which is it's offensive on many levels. And but what they're trying they're both at the same time distinguishing themselves as as as the real natives, not the indigenous people who have that original claim. And also that they're native, meaning they're not immigrants. I mean, putting that sticker, it looks like it's just pride for your state or wherever. But it's actually quite offensive to both indigenous people and to immigrants as well, who you're basically just saying I'm you're an immigrant. That's what that means that sticker means I'm from here. You're not like I have more authority over this territory than you do. And also simultaneously reclaiming that from indigenous people. Anyway, your analysis is much more robust. But it made me think of that moment where we've seen a resurgence of nativism in the United States. But anyway, so what's what is the problem with it with nativism? Who's claimed it? And why is it at the core of our contemporary moment? Well, you know, the category of native is is initially a, well, actually, it's, you can go back and associate the category of native with actually being a slave. Right. So the kind of earliest, you know, definitions in in the English language about what native means of links it back to a labor relationship, right, like someone whose labor is being exploited in a more kind of feudal system. But the kind of contemporary meaning of native actually is initially an imperial state category to be native meant that you were a colonized subject of an empire, right? You were the natives of India, you were the natives of Mexico, you were the natives of, you know, the British colony of Canada, you know, whatever, right? So it was an imperial state category that was juxtaposed and set in opposition to European. So the category of European and the category of native acted as kind of negative duality with all good things being European, all things powerful being European, all things negative and subordinated being native. But with the post-colonial New World Order, that was kind of flipped on its head. So to because because of the imperial association of native with both being colonized, but also being of that territory of that call of that colonial administrative unit, right? And throughout the 19th century, the imperial state hardened that definition of native of being kind of a territorialized identity by bifurcating the colonized native, right? So they had the imperial category, you were the natives of X colony, they started bifurcating that in the middle of the 19th century in a classic divide and conquer strategy, like how do we divide the natives so that, you know, they are less threatening to the continued existence of the empire. So they bifurcated the category into and Mamud Mamdani has done really excellent work on this into this category of indigenous native. So this is where this kind of construct of indigeneity gets brought into it. And it's a very territorialized, essentialist idea that the indigenous natives are the real people of this place, right? And then the other natives were the quote unquote literally the migrant natives. So they're still colonized. So they're still native, but they are from somewhere else other than this specific colony and then rights and ideas of tradition and custom became more and more located in indigeneity, right? Now once empires dissolve and nation states take their place, those categories kind of morphed, right? Like there used to be a period until World War II, you know, until actually the post-World War II era, where it was thought in European political thought that the natives were incapable of self-governance, right? You know, we see that embedded in the League of Nations, right? That, you know, even though they're using the term nations, the empires are self-determinant and then the colonies still need tutelage, right? And after World War II, as anti-colonial movements fought for national sovereignty, got the national sovereignty, empires are dissolving, they're becoming nation states too. That kind of flipped. So the territorial idea still was embedded in the nation-state system, right? This is national territory. The idea of self-governance was still attached to ideas of nationhood, right? So we get this kind of national self-determination and in order to qualify for national self-determination, you had to prove that you were a nation, right? How best to prove that you are a nation that should be sovereign over a particular territory, then to claim ancestral, timeless, essentialized territorial belonging to that particular territory, right? So native kind of got flipped on its head. So it used to be this category that was completely undeserving of nationhood and now nationhood increasingly depended on being a native person of that place. And so the competition started. Who is the real natives of this place? And in some places, like in France, Marine Le Pen, when she was running for power and got a third of the vote in France in the last presidential election, the discourse was the first French. We are the first French, right? So we are the natives of France and that discourse of indigeneity and of nativeness is a part of every far-right movement in Europe right now, actually of every far-right movement on the planet now is the idea of indigeneity and we are the native people of this place and kind of like your Coloradans, right, who believe that they're native and therefore the native status gives them the authority over the place and over migrants, right? Everyone else who's not a native. That's exactly the, that's what the nation-state system is built on and that's precisely, you know, going back to your earliest question, that is why we're seeing the rise of authoritarianism, right? Is the further narrowing of who belongs to the nation, right? It is no longer sufficient to be a national citizen. Ask Marine Le Pen if the citizens of all citizens in France are equal. No, they are not. Some of us are real French people and others of us are, yeah, you may be a citizen, but what is that? That's just a legal device and it's kind of suspect and it's illegitimate. How did you become a citizen in our national homeland? That's exactly what this idea of native attached to nationalism is producing, right? Now of course, and sorry, I know I'm rambling on here, but just to get to someplace like the United States or Canada or Australia or New Zealand, where you also have indigenous people who are also mobilizing the discourse of indigeneity, of nativeness, of national sovereignty, clearly they're not part of the far right, right? Clearly we should not equate them with, you know, the far right in Europe or the far right in the United States. But at the same time, many of the kind of philosophical bases for precisely those kinds of very hardened nationalist politics are embedded within any use of the category of native or indigeneity, right? Because the category itself has a built in philosophical project or political project, I mean, which is that if you are native to this territory, you do get to have the first say and the last say of what happens there. And that say is over and against everyone who is not native. And we can see this. So in the book I discuss in the U.S. context to in the U.S. and Canada context to indigenous groups of people who in their struggle against colonialism for national sovereignty are utilizing the same practices of culling, right? Of saying who are the real members of the Mohawks? Who are the real members of the Cherokee nation? Right? And I'm not equating that with, you know, the genocide in Rwanda, which also operated along these same philosophical lines of, you know, the Hutus being native and the Tutsis being migrant. But there is a culling going on here, right? More and more people are being ejected from the membership of the Mohawks or of the Cherokee along the same lines, right? You're not able to prove, you're not able to prove ancestral genealogical ties to this nation. You're not able to prove, you know, no one has adopted you into the nation. So you're just out, right? And I think that those logics are dangerous and they, again, are not going to produce decolonization. So why are we, you know, why are we using them? Why are we supporting them? Thanks. That history explains so much. And I've often wondered about that. And I think that that's a very compelling history that makes a lot of sense. I just wanted to remind the audience that if you have any questions, you can type those into the chat and we'll leave some time. I have maybe only one or two more and then I'll pause and we can answer questions from the audience if you just want to type them into the chat. We'll come to them. Yes, so much to say on that. But I want to ask you another question. Because, well, maybe just one thing, which is that's to me, I think what's sort of interesting about the figure of the migrant. And two, I think we maybe share this agreement about the importance of that figure because the migrant is sort of something, it's an open, it's a much more open category than either the natives on either side, no matter who's claiming that term, the migrants get excluded. And that population of migrants gets larger and larger. The more claimants there are to nativism, the more refined and restricted those get. And then that margin of people that started out possibly somewhat small apparently as an exception, no longer is the exception. It's just the rule that more and more people are expelled based on someone else's claim to be the genuine owners and proprietors of some piece of territory. So yeah, I think that the migrant gets left out of every one of those stories. And for that reason is quite interesting. But I did have a question about, so you and I both come to political theory from activism, from doing activist work and that informs quite a bit of what we do. And I wanted to ask you about that issue. I mean, there are many also activists and artists that are listening to our conversation. And I think it's an important conversation worth having when we can have it in an open way is what's the relationship of academics to activists or artists working with activists or around political movements? Some activists very much feel that they don't want interlopers, artists who are just there to use their movement for something else for an art project or academics who are there to study whatever it is about their work. They're like, we don't want to be studied, just let us do our thing and stop leaching off of our of our project if you're not if you're not going to help us. So I guess my question to you would be, you know, what how can we as academics and artists be good good allies with activists in a way that doesn't try to speak for them or, you know, stand out in front and tell them what to do that kind of old classical vanguard vision of the intellectuals knowing what to do and the masses not knowing and that that's an extremely problematic thing. So what has been your experience in relationship and what do you think a positive one would be like how should artists and academics approach activist movements? Well, I mean, I think the starting point is to take activism as a serious site of theoretical knowledge, right, theoretical developments. They, you know, we are all engaging in theory, right, we're all coming up with explanations of why the world is messed up, what we need to do to change it, etc. So it's to take it's to take seriously the fact that activists are engaged in defining what the problem is and in defining how to solve the problem. And to engage at that level, like I, for example, do think that some of the ways that we theorize what the problem is, foreigners, or the way that, you know, because the left has been as important in producing the figure of the migrant and foreigners as has the right, right, because so much of the left is nationalist. So I do think that the way that, you know, speaking for myself, the way that I participate in activism is by helping to define what the problem is and helping to define what the solution is and not thinking of myself as, you know, necessarily telling people what to think, but saying, hey, you know, here are some ideas, here are some thoughts, here are some problems with the way that we've done activism in the past on the way we're currently doing activism, we may actually be contributing to the problem itself. Let's rethink this. So rethinking to me is as important as anything else. So like, let me just give you an example very briefly in the, you know, I've been, I was an activist long before I was ever an academic, so to me, the two are indistinguishable, like I don't know how to distinguish the two. To me, an activist is someone who's trying to change the world in order to produce a just and livable and beautiful world, right, and academics can contribute to that, artists can contribute to that. But for example, in the summer of 1999, while I was living in Vancouver and finishing my PhD, four boats arrived on the west coast of Canada, of British Columbia, from China, right, they were private vessels that had been hired by people trying to move from China into North America, right, in search of a better livelihoods. The media and the Canadian government went into racist hysterics with the arrival of about 599 people, right, 599 people from China just sent them into a conniption fit, right, of like, we're being invaded, we've lost control of our borders, these people are economic refugees, they're not real refugees, so on and so forth. And we immediately, a group of us started a feminist organization to work with the women and the children who were on those boats. And some of the women in the organization I was a part of started talking about these women as victims of trafficking, right, and we need to end trafficking, we need to protect these women from the people who actually helped them move here, by the way, right, like the people who were on those boats, hired the boats, got the boats, steered the boat over here, they are actually the traffickers, and we need to protect these women and children from them. And I'd never heard of trafficking in 1999, I was like, okay, you know, I don't know what's going on here. But what was interesting to me was that the minister of immigration of Canada at that time jumped on the anti-immigrant, I mean anti-trafficking bandwagon, and said, yes, these women and children are victims of trafficking and the men that were on those ships, they're not refugees, they're traffickers. So let's put them all in jail, the men go to jail because they're traffickers, the women go to jail because they are being protected from the traffickers, we can't keep them on the street, the traffickers will get on and on and on. It was just like, okay, this is going crazy. And then the women who were interested in calling the refugee women victims of trafficking were like, let's find them jobs in the garment industry in Vancouver, in sweatshop conditions and wages to protect them from the sex traffickers that want to lure them into prostitution. And it was just like, okay, everything is gone and sane. What is going on here? Why are we facilitating these dialogues and discourses, which is when, as an academic, I delved into the laws and policies of anti-trafficking and said, look people, this is a problem. If we say that the traffickers are the problems that these women are experiencing, we've just delegitimized the very people who helped them move, we've criminalized the people who've helped them move, and we have allowed the Canadian government off scot-free their immigration policies, their border controls, their their pathetic asylum seat, you know, asylum policies, all of that gets off scot-free. And the problem is the traffickers. So to me, that is a classic way that as an activist and an academic, I am contributing to the movement by saying, let's not fall into this trap, let's not call migrants victims of trafficking. They are not, right? They are victims of nation-state policies that prevent their freedom of movement, which is how I became a no-borders activist, actually. The critique of anti-trafficking is how I became a no-borders activist. It was like, okay, this is not working. We need a new system. We need a system without constraints on people's freedom of mobility. That's the struggle. It's not a struggle against traffickers. It's not a struggle for fairer asylum policies, because those policies are designed to fail, right? It's actually a no-borders world. And so, you know, here we are. Great. That's actually a perfect segue into a question that Simon asked, which overlaps with the question that I was going to ask you. And I'll just, sorry, I said for the audience to, if they had questions, put them in the chat. There's actually a separate box that's called Q&A at the bottom of the Zoom screen. You can click on and you can just type your question into that if you have questions. So, you know, we're sort of in toward the end enough of the conversation. If you want to add, if you have questions, you please put them in there. But so the question that Simon is asking and the question that I have, the way that Simon put it, was what are the conditions do we need to put in place to imagine a post-nationalist world? And somehow I got off by, I didn't have to define that. You asked me and I think I answered something else. So, I was able to get away from answering that question. But my question now that you're talking about no borders is just to ask you what you think about, what does that mean for you? What does no borders mean to you? And maybe would you want to distinguish it from open borders or freedom of mobility? Like where there are, I mean, another idea too that Etienne Ballabar talks about is, because he doesn't want to say he's against all borders. He's in favor of democratized borders. But he never says exactly what that would look like when he says it. I'm like, well, what is, how does that work under the conditions of the nation state? And in any case, I think I and Simon both sort of, what do you think? What does no borders mean to you? How do you imagine that? Well, I really like the fact that no borders has become an important enough idea and political project that people are now trying to parse it out. Like how is it different from open borders? How is it different from simply calling for freedom of mobility? So, I love the fact that it is expanding. And I would love to hear you talk about post-nationalism. So you may not. But to me, all states constrain people's freedom of mobility. All states do. Nation states do it in particular ways through immigration controls. Imperial states did it largely through exit controls. Feudal states did that through containing labor on feudal states. Previous imperial states did it through slavery. There's all kinds of ways that states, so I think a no borders politics is also an anarchist project. It is an anti-state politics. It is saying that yes, class relationships also must be abolished for there to be freedom and for there to be liberty. But so must the state because the state is the institutional basis for class relationships. So the state and class relationships to me are completely intertwined historically. Both of them are interested in constraining the freedom of mobility of the people who they rely on to create their positions of wealth and power. So to me, a no borders politics is absolutely revolutionary. It is not a policy prescription for nation states. It's not a policy. I can't imagine testifying in the U.S. Congress that there should be no borders. And I think that's why it doesn't make sense to people. It makes no sense to people because this system cannot allow for it. So it is a revolutionary call. It truly is. It cannot coexist with any part of the way we organize our world today, whether that's through class relationships, gender relationships, racialized relationships, and certainly citizenship, right? So I don't know what Balibar means when he says that borders can be democratized because to me, democracy means autonomy from rulers, right? Whether those are class rulers or state rulers, the two are kind of indistinguishable from one another. So it is a revolution. It's not just it's not easy. And that's so that means building a revolutionary movement in which that is a central demand. Which is just to say one last thing. Some of the movements that we currently think of as revolutionary, anti-colonial movements struggling for national sovereignty, that's as far as I'm concerned, that's not a revolutionary movement, right? Because those movements cannot account for freedom of mobility. And without freedom of mobility, you know, I kind of agree with Hannah Arendt, right? That this is a foundational basis for freedom is freedom of mobility. Yeah, that's I agree with that. And I think it connects up sort of with both of our experiences in living in Toronto and working with known as illegal. I mean, they're one of the most radical groups. And that's why I was drawn to them was they had it wasn't just we're another migrant justice movement. They were that plus they were like, well, true migrant justice means justice for everyone everywhere. And that is a global revolutionary strategy. That is that starts from the position of migrant justice, and sees the entanglement of all those things. Because some some critiques, I mean, from inside the left, even will say things like, look, open borders, if nation states just open borders, one of the effects will be that you will essentially drain populations from other third world developing countries who don't want to lose those people. And the truth is economically, even though the argument is not best made from the perspective of economics, economics, people who study economics, economics professors and advisors, they know full well that immigration always increases GDP, it is a moneymaker, it increases jobs, it increases wages for resident citizens. It has all these benefits for the nation state. And by opening borders, oh, yes, yeah, the economy will flourish, but like at what expense. So opening borders, yeah, I mean, that I think there are some benefits. But without the abolition, I mean, without some real genuine transformation of global inequality, you're just you're making things maybe a little better, but also worse at the same time, if it's not also an anti capitalist project. And I think that's right. I think whenever you say no borders, it sounds like it might be a policy prescription at a surface level. But you just scratch the surface and you quickly realize that this is it doesn't make any sense, unless these other things are wrapped up, which sound on the face of them, way more radical and way more distant on the horizon, like anarchism, the abolition of capitalism, you know, like, yeah, the global abolition of capitalism in nation states, it sounds so much easier to just say no borders. I think that you're right. I know borders without the abolition of the nation state, it would not it would not it would not successfully achieve the aims that no borders actually, I think seeks to to achieve. No, because because border controls are ideological, right? They we know they're not stopping people. So what are they doing? What are borders doing today? They're not stopping the movement of people more people are moving today than they were when I first started studying borders, dramatically more people three times more people are moving around the world across nation, national borders than they were when I started studying borders, which, you know, I may, I'm not that old, right? So it's like, border controls aren't working to stop people's mobility per se, like they are killing more and more people all the time, right? Absolutely, they are very harmful. But what their main effect of border controls is, is to produce a, you know, a category of people within nation states who can be legally and legit, you know, for many people legitimately denied the rights and entitlements that are associated with national citizenship. That is one of the main effects of border controls today, right? So eliminating borders is about eliminating the ability for us to also be socially, socially, and politically, juridically divided from one another through our placement in these different categories, right? So I conclude the book by actually arguing that the category of migrant, along with the category of the national citizen, and then, you know, which is increasingly the native, needs to be eliminated. Those political categories need to be abolished in order for us to no longer be captured and constrained and constrained by the work that those categories do. Yeah, I think that's a great answer. And I think that definitely points to the future. I mean, maybe some of what Simon is asking about in the chat, but also what that future would look like. It's very, it feels very radical, but I agree that it's hard to imagine a different way forward. And just at that moment, I mean, I think it's interesting that the rise of people talking about no borders right now. Yeah, please do folks who are listening and watching add your Q&A. We definitely have time to hear those. I see there's one added. But I'll just conclude this thought very quickly is that it's hard to imagine a different way forward, even if this one seems very difficult and long. The abolition of nation states and the elimination of capital, that sounds extreme, but what alternative is there? And that's, I think that's where we're at, is we're either going to push past the nation state, or we're going to double down. And that's exactly what we see, the rise of people talking about no borders and writing about it. I mean, Reese Jones of the collection that both of you and I contributed to, that's one of the first, I think there is another one too, but it's one of the first collections of articles like academics and intellectuals, political theorists are thinking about borders seriously now. And coming to the conclusion that you're not going to get away from those unless you actually rethink the entire political theory. It's not just an addendum to existing liberal political theory. It is a deep transformation and it's taken us a long time to get to this point. But here we are at that cusp right alongside the rise of right wing xenophobia, climate change, and Trump. We're all there. Should we go forward? Should we go back? And we're kind of at that turning point. I want to just take a look at the question here. So I'm going to read it to you. It says, hello, my question is for Nandita. Thinking of a post nationalist visual representation of migrants. How do we assess when an image empowers and when it exploits them or it supports the capitalist system? How can photographs challenge the narrative of a nation state? I wish my partner was here. Gay Chan, she's a photographer, would have a much better answer about that than I would because I'm a bit, you know, I do feel that photographs like I'm thinking of Sebastian Salgado's work on migrants, you know, like he's done this, you know, what I consider to be a very powerful visual documentation of migrants around the world. But I do also think that when we're talking, like how do you visually represent migrants is also like maybe what we need to do is expand it from my from migrants, like not not continue to create the, you know, to participate in the reproduction of this category of migrants, right? And instead to look at mobility, right? We're all mobile, you know, we're all mobile beings. And all of our mobility is actually constrained in different ways, right? Can we, you know, and I'm particularly thinking here of the work of Bridget Anderson, right, who's done a lot to show us that the separation that we have in our politics and in our political structures between citizen and migrant prevents us from seeing that citizens also face mobility controls of a variety of means, right, through welfare state policies, for example, through labor market policies, through obviously incarceration, you know, so on and so on. So maybe it's about artists helping us to see mobility as central to freedom. I would love to see an artistic project that focuses on mobility and its constraints, rather than reproducing images of, you know, the classic figure of the migrant, because one of the most offensive photographs that I've seen an artist produced recently about migrants was Ai Weiwei's picture of himself lying on a beach and reproducing that horrible image of the two year old child from Syria who was murdered by nation state immigration controls, right? Do you remember that picture? That picture of the, and I do. I'm just shocked that he would do that. I don't even remember seeing that, but I feel like that's way over the line. That's, I think that's inappropriate. I thought it was extremely inappropriate. The original picture of the two year old child was enormously powerful and it helped to mobilize discussed at what nation national borders were doing, what immigration controls were doing, right? Leading to people having to put themselves onto rickety boats to flee, you know, one of the most violent wars on the planet today, right? The, you know, the war in Syria. But the artistic reproduction of that, especially the one that Ai Weiwei did, was unacceptable. And I don't think, I don't, I don't know if he understood that. I don't think he ever did understand that. But I would like to see a shift away from the kind of classic images of migrant to allowing us to see us as also being constrained in our mobility, whether we fall into that category or not. I don't know what, what. No, there's a, there is a another question. Oh, no, just a response, I think. Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry. Answered, open. Okay, new questions. Yeah, somebody's agreeing about the flagrantness of that, of that, of that. What are the alternatives to capitalist economy that will be able to sustain 7 billion people? So small question. Well, you know, I mean, I think, I mean, I would love to help have you also participate in this, Thomas, as well. What do you think? I mean, to me, the only economy that is at all just or, and therefore also ecologically viable in terms of reproducing life on this planet is the commons. Right? The commons is when we all have access to the stuff of life that we need. And we access it not because of our status as citizens or mothers or fathers or, you know, whatever, but we access it for simply being a living being, right? Like we access land, water, air, fuel, you know, all the things that we need to be alive, right? And I can't, I don't know of another, an economic system that could be just or ecologically sustainable. And we would have to obviously would have to be planetary. You can't have little islands of commons, right, surrounded by seas of capitalism, you, it would have to be a global system. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, I mean, I agree with that. And I think that there's two questions. One of them is quite long, which is how do we get there from here? And that might include a lot of intermediate steps, which would sound more reasonable, but would only be intermediate steps. And then there's a question of where, where we would want to go. And I agree with Nandita's answer, that's where we would want to go is a collectively managed commons. And it's not like that's ridiculous. Like most of human history has worked that way. The thing that is actually really shocking is that it's impossible now for us to imagine that. Like that is a very historical moment of amnesia, where we can't possibly imagine what it would be like in that world. But for me, I'm not saying human history is perfect or by any means, but that it is mostly not capitalist. So it's very easy to imagine other forms because you just have to look past the 16th century and look before that or look at indigenous populations. And you can see that there are lots of people working in smaller sized economies that either don't or they peripherally participate in the capitalist system or going back far enough historically that just have no connection to it whatsoever. And I can't, I don't want to dream up a utopia at this moment, but I'll just give one example historically for me, but though there are many, which is what the Zapatistas are trying to do in Chiapas, Mexico, they have an economy. It is not outside of the capitalist system. It is not outside of the state. They're living under post-colonial world system in Mexico and constantly being harassed by paramilitary forces. But they are also, they collectively manage the things that they have together based on who needs them. And that, I mean, it would be relative to even, one could imagine a trend. So it's called cooperative economics, shared ownership. And when you know what a co-op is, like a co-op is something that's owned collectively by everyone and the products of it are shared by all the people who own it. So they raise bees and make honey and make coffee and some of the coffee they use and some of it they sell on the capitalist market in order to subsidize autonomous education. In any case, there are lots of examples of people trying this. I'm not saying they're utopian, but it's not hard for me to imagine what that would be like. And as an intermediate stage, it's not ridiculous to imagine a shift in which everything that was currently private at least shifted over to a model of cooperative. All of the people who currently own so many of the businesses and things that exist, you just chop off the head. The CEO, make sure there's no profits. Everything is reinvested. All of the people who currently work there just get to collectively manage their own labor. It's just democracy. And it sounds, usually democracy sounds good to us, unless it's about economics. And then we're like, oh, that's crazy. How could you possibly have a democratic economy? That's like a contradiction. But it's only a contradiction for capitalism. And otherwise, it's mostly what we all would like to have and practice or try to practice anyway, wherever we're at is shared decision making over the things that we have access to. You just have to ensure that there's no there's no profit and there's no accumulation. And then you'd have some intermediate stages. Anyway, that we could we could go on speculating, but it is a good question. It's an open question and one for everybody to decide on. And how to get there from here is has to be an open question. And we can't even pretend to answer it unless everybody's involved in that. And that returns us back to the question that we've been talking about, which is no borders. If people are not involved in making the decisions that affect their own lives, then start again, bring those people in. Everybody needs to be participating and have the right to participate in deciding those things. It's not up to wealthy countries to decide what that future looks like, whether they have an idea of utopia or not. I don't care unless everybody's involved in making that world. It's not a world that I want. Yeah, agreed. And you know, it is, you know, we have been taught to we've been inculcated with the belief that the problem is always scarcity, right? That we always have to address the problem of scarcity. And we are never allowed to believe that the problem is hoarding, right, that there is plenty in the world for everyone. The problem is that some people are hoarding what everyone else needs, right? The problem is not scarcity. There is no scarcity in this world, right? The planet can actually is more than capable ecologically of actually sustaining more life than currently exists on it. But, you know, not in the conditions of today. Okay, I think we have time. I agree completely with what Nandita said. I think we have time for one last question, which is similar to a question I had. So thank you for asking it here. So the question is how to further strengthen current transnational struggles for freedom of mobility and liberation movements, your views. And thank you. Grateful for this conversation. And I would add on to that question, Nandita, of how to strengthen transnational struggles. It seems like there could be a genuine alliance between indigenous movements that also are in some ways reject the colonialism of nation states and migrants themselves who have, you know, could themselves have an interest. Again, not that they always reject the nation states. Some of them very much want to just be part of that and identify with it. But there's a potential, it seems to me, in indigenous movements and migrant justice movements to form some kind of alliance. But what other kinds of alliance, you know, do you imagine that would help move this forward? Yeah, I mean, I certainly think that those alliance, like all, I'm kind of reminded actually about something that Ruthie Gilmore always reminds us, right, is that the term allies is a military term and we should expunge it from our political imagination. We are not allies with one another. We are, we need each other for our collective survival, right? And so how do we, to me, the basis is always politics and not categories of identification, right? It's the basis is the politics. Like, who in the world right now wants to engage in the struggle against constraints on mobility? How can we expand that from the migrant justice projects? How can we expand it so that all of us who are, whose, you know, mobility is constrained fight against that, like make the no borders project even bigger, right? Because I really like the way that you put it earlier, Tom, is that the no borders thing started and continues to be very much housed in the migrant justice movements. But it is a movement that is important for everyone to participate in, but not as allies, not as someone who is doing it because they want to help migrants, but because we are actually all in this together. And if, you know, we need to all have constraints on our mobility removed in order to be free, right? Which would require the end of class ruling relationships and the state, right? So how, and then how do we build mutuality with one another outside of marketplaces is the big thing, but I always fail. I always get a big F for thinking about the future because it's hard for me to do that outside of a collective, right? Like, so I guess I'm mostly inspired. I can talk about the things that inspire me. I love the, I love the ships that are being sailed in the Mediterranean and the Aegean right now, picking up people that nation states in Europe are abandoning, purposely abandoning to die. You know, I really appreciate those projects. And if we could connect them somehow to how people in Italy, people in France, people in Turkey are also being constrained by the same forces that are constraining migrants, that would be a whole new step in the revolutionary project. Thanks, Nandita. I completely agree with that. I think that's a great note to wrap things up on. Thanks everybody for listening and for your questions. And thanks Simon again for hosting all of this. Yeah, and thank you, Nandita, for sharing all of that. I was going to dive in and thank you both so much for framing these very complex ideas but in so succinctly and so powerfully. It's really been a great beginning to our no borders post nationalism week, which I'm sure we'll come back to post nationalism. But thank you so much, Thomas, Nandita, thank you for sharing so much and so powerfully. And you'll join tomorrow in a panel with Alex Sager from the University of Portland. So I'm looking forward to that. People can also send in their questions. It's tomorrow, Friday, also at three o'clock. See you all then. Thank you so much.