Thinking Borders - Vicki Squire

Hi everyone and welcome to Thinking Borders, a podcast series part of the International Relations Thinking Global Podcast. If you like our content, check out our website for open access articles, books, interviews and more. And follow EIR on all social media, including substack where you can get our content straight to your mailbox. I am Mariana Karakulagi and our guest today is Professor Vicky Squire, a leading scholar on migration, citizenship, humanitarian and border studies. In this episode we talk about her work on migration and borders, the ethical responsibilities of scholars, activism, her most recent book, making and unmaking global citizenship, and so much more. Please note that this episode was recorded before the publication of her book, so we talk about it in future tense. I am so excited for you to hear this interview, so let's do this. I am Vicky Squire, I am a professor of international politics at the University of Warwick in the Department of Politics and International Studies. It's such a pleasure to have you in the podcast because I admire your work, I've been admiring your work for a very long time. So I'm kind of fun-girling at the same time. Let's start with the questions. It's been a decade since the peak of the EU border crisis. How would you assess this decade? Yeah, well, 10 years on isn't it? It feels like just yesterday. Of course, I mean, the struggles that people still go through to live lives, that have valued these are longer standing. They're continuing today with a vengeance, so I think in terms of assessing the situation a decade on, of course, this is far from improved. For anyone, I think, not least for those making those dangerous journeys to the EU and elsewhere. Yeah, people are still dying, they're facing multiple harms, doing fragmented migratory journeys. States are still plowing huge amounts of money into ineffective hostile policies designed to deter unwanted, so called unwanted migrants. I think we're all facing the erosion of solidarity, aren't we, with people who have lived experience of precarious migration, who are segregated from local communities, subject to increased hostilities? So I guess, you know, there's always people that capitalize on this situation. I'm quite reticent to suggest that that means the situation's improved for those groups, for those people. I just, I don't believe that anyone benefits from a divided world in which people are devalued and dehumanised, like we are seeing just on a greater scale now. I think in terms, I just think about this question in terms of, you know, who benefits, who are beneficiaries? And, you know, often smuggling gangs that are highlighted as beneficiaries of this situation, though, of course, not everyone labelled as a smuggler, would view the situation as improved at all, or one they benefit from, or would want to benefit from. Populous and far-right politicians and social movements have been the obvious beneficiaries, many cynically capitalising on societal fears about migration, even invigorating racist ideas about the so-called great replacement of white European populations, for example. And then there's also, of course, corporate beneficiaries, so states in the global north are specially shifted now more explicitly. I think more explicitly from a drive to control to a drive for deterrents. I think that's become more and more evident over the past decades. So, advancing a whole raft of investments by corporations involved in industries within fields like border security, data capture, caste, and so on. So, I think there are a range of vested interests in this direction of travel over the past decade, and that's led to a situation that's much more difficult for people on the move and their allies. But I don't want to think of it in terms of winners and losers, because as I indicate, I think we're all losers in this situation, even though there are people who capitalize on it. They do that in ways that shape our shared existence in violent and brutal terms, ultimately undermining the social and material fabric of human life in which there are parts as well. So, I mean, I think I want to emphasize that these state, these corporate brutalities along with the shadow of the far right under which they lie. That's not also not the full story of what's happened over the past decade. So, even though we've seen all those tendencies, we've also seen people fighting much more deeply for solidarity, for care, for the value of life, even as those negative tendencies have become embedded. So, for example, about solidarity activists over the past years facing increased efforts by state actors to criminalise them. We still see the persistence of groups involved in activities like sea rescue, border monitoring, migrant support, et cetera. And I think also we've importantly seen the rise of activist groups within the communities that have lived through experiences of precarious migration. And that's something I've been really interested in looking at in my forthcoming book on migrant activism and claims making. That one example I've been looking at for example as an example is the Gambian Association in Palermo and that was set up by youth who arrived in Sicily a decade ago, who are now really working to dismantle racism in society, the injustices in society that they're living in and building bridges within that society. So, you know, the situation definitely hasn't improved over the last decade, but I don't want to paint an overly bleak picture of, you know, where those last 10 years have brought us because I think there's a lot of positive stories to be telling as well. There are a lot of positive stories, certainly. And assessing this decade, I don't think it's an easy task. That's a hard, hard question. Yeah. So, you have extensively researched how the EU governs migration and in 2024 the EU agreed on a majority form of its asylum immigration pact. How do you see this development affecting both asylum seekers and the broader framework of migration governance? Yeah, thanks. I mean, this is probably one area that I will provide quite a bleak picture, you know, because E policy hasn't moved in a positive direction over recent years. Is that a surprise? I think no, not really. Perhaps some might have been some opportunities for at best a more liberal direction of travel in the 90s. But this anti-migration, this anti-Sylim stance has been always embedded in EU policy developments in this area. I think, you know, they've just become more sedimented over time. So, I haven't really been working intensively on EU or EU governance over recent years, but what does strike me is continuity of the current reforms in relation to developments that were already away, underway as decades ago, still thinking, you know, back to that height of the so-called crisis. The stated aim of the pact is to move towards a more unified approach to ensure faster, more efficient procedures. And of course, we know from experience this unified approach is far from easy in the EU context. So, when I was working in the Mediterranean in 2015 and 2016, there was this effort attempt to relocate new arrivals across different EU states. And that was notoriously limited in terms of uptake. So, I think these difficulties internally to the EU also drive and feed into the drive to externalise migration control. So, to enroll third states within migration management, such as through so-called capacity building activities in third countries. And we can go back again, thinking back continue to be can go back much further. So, the Saville European Council Summit of 2002, at that point, the EU was seeking to use what it called the "intorative its relationship with third countries" to prevent migration. So, those developments aren't new, but they have taken on increased intensity over time. And I think it's probably quite telling to look at some of the aspects of the new pack that have been identified as priority areas to sort of front load or fast track. So, some areas here include the agreement of a list of safe countries of origin, the application of an accelerated asylum procedure for those coming from countries where 20% or fewer of the applicants are usually granted granted international protection within the EU. So, those are embedded as part of a longer standing effort to prevent those forms. of migration deemed to be undesirable and to facilitate the return of those who are not seen as deserving of international protection. 2015, again going back to the European agenda on migration, there were four pillars to this and the first one was focusing on reducing incentives for so-called irregular migration, addressing what referred to the root causes of migration into countries. And tackling as well as tackling smuggling networks and increasing deportations. So we see that sort of tendency there of course. Coming back to the 2024 pact, this idea of the 20% asylum threshold, this is average from across EU member states. And of course acceptance rates can really vary across the EU. So in effect, these measures are likely to be detrimental for many people seeking asylum. And they seem very much about speeding up rejection and deportation processes. Right. So that of course raises a lot of concerns around violating human rights, the dangers or harms that will produce for those subject to deportation. I think another part of the pact that stands out for me is this aim to standardize data collection processes and institutionalize new screening processes. So people will either be referred through the asylum procedure or the returns process. And concerns here are really raised about the kind of extension of biometric data collection to a wider range of groups. So this even includes children as young as six years old who will be subject to that sort of biometric data capture. There's a focus on interoperability of systems through which data can be shared amongst different actors. And that's not just about that raises concerns not just about data privacy or data security, but also I think more fundamentally about the ways in which data forms a new mode of capture for groups that are not empowered to have a say in the use of their data. Yeah, and it seems like, you know, this is a kind of a trajectory that we've got to a kind of point of no return here. So as I said, the new pact, it doesn't give me much to be optimistic about. But again, of course, you know, thinking about all that work as a huge amount of critical work going on to challenge the worst aspects of these developments to provide support mechanisms also for people who are affected by them. Thank you. And I agree with a lot of what you're saying, because I've been reporting on migration for over a decade now. And the way that EU policy has gone from about worse is something that I did not expect. And I'm a very negative person in my thinking generally. So a large part of your work has focused on migration in the Mediterranean and your 2020 book, Europe's migration crisis, both the deaths and human dignity looks at the EU's role in migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. In what ways is migration governed through death if it is at all? Yeah, thanks. So a lot of my work in the mid and late 2010s was focused on the Mediterranean as I've indicated. And yeah, I continue to do work. I've seen some smaller scale research in Sicily at the moment as well. So while this idea of governing migration to death, that's one I sort of developed while doing that work in the Mediterranean. So I also came from observations I made during earlier work I did at the US-Mexico border region, where there's these similar tendencies to disregard the value of human life. So in the US context that can be traced to the 1990s, this language of deterrence was already circulating there. There was a policy called prevention by deterrent, which began to divert all funnel people who were migrating across the border through remote hostile terrain. So away from urban crossings that were safer for people to do. So that included Operation Blockade in El Paso in 1993 on the wider size Western strategy of border control. And this really effectively meant that people more and more having to pass through really dangerous desert terrain. And that of course led to increased numbers of deaths during those boarding crossings with many people dying from dehydration and exposure to extreme temperatures. And then of course, you know, working in the Mediterranean, the increase in migrant deaths has happened across various contexts over, you know, the past years and decades. But particularly evident in people at that time and people crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat, exacerbated by the withdrawal and criminalisation of sea rescue. That was already well underway in 2015. Todd Babassu and wrote a great article in security dialogue about how legal sanctions against seafarers produce collective indifference to people dying at sea. So to put it most simply, I was using this term, I've used this term governing three deaths to highlight the ways in which those migrant deaths are integral to the institutionalisation of policies that are designed to deter unwanted migration from the global south to the global north. I always think back to some of that work we did in the Mediterranean and different things that people said to us in our interviews and quotes offerings of jump out or sort of stick with me. And there was one person from Syri re-interviewed in costs in 2015 and they said that if policy makers really cared about the lives of people making those journeys, then they'd take people legally. So no one had to die in this sea. So this lack of care or lack of regard for life has been evident for some time in different contexts and has become further embedded over recent years. And that's really how I kind of see this idea of governing three deaths as a concept that we can think through in that light. Have we normalised birth and migration? Well, if we mean binormalisation of death as a situation where it's routine or standard or it's expected and even acceptable for people to die in contexts like the Mediterranean Sea, the Sonar and Desert, the Channel. Yeah, I think migrant deaths have been normalised within policy and within wider public imaginaries around migration. Simon Robbins described it as a manifestation of netcropolytics and sovereign power, which is implicated. He says in different rituals around death that are essential to inscribing social order based on the grievability or more importantly in this case. The lack of grievability of some lives over others. Another way I've been thinking about this so is in terms of what I call less than human governing practices. And by that I mean governing practices where people are subject to erasure in different ways. So we can think about erasure of course in epistemic terms. So Tom Davis and others have argued that epistemic border work is integral to the ontological violence of borders. I think when it comes to the normalisation of death, we need to think also about how less than human governing practices involve a form of violence. I've called it by physical violence. We can think about it as a dramatic violence that works on the biological functioning of migrating bodies. For example, when people are abandoned to the lethal forces of desert and sea. But I think we can also think more broadly about these less than human governing practices. They can involve processes of dispossession, dehumanisation, such as where people have belongings confiscated. That's something I've also been looking at where they're treated in ways that reflect the racialised limits of appeals to human dignity. I say recent book, but it's my forthcoming book. I've finished it recently. So I'm thinking about it in a past or a ruddy. But in my forthcoming books I've been thinking about those processes as less than human governing practices in a more than human world. So thinking about the ways in which objects and place and the environmental forces all kind of form part of those less than human governing practices. But also the ways in which people on the move contest violence through even through things right by the autonomous or self repossession and dispossession or by appealing to life and humanity through things that they leave behind in the desert environment. So that's something I've been thinking through quite a lot in my book and I'm really interested in the ways that people with lived experiences. of percarious migration and even the dead can refuse and disrupt those various forms of violence. So generating alternatives to that normalisation of death to the less than human policies and imaginaries that that's bound up with. I guess so in some have we normalised death in migration, I think we's quite a broad category, but yeah I would say in terms of policy and collectively in a more general sense that's happened but it's not a smooth process, it's important not to overlook those frictions, those contestations that arise and that continue to persist around those developments. Hey, this is just a quick bulletin, quick memo, quick moment, yeah we'll go with memo. This is just a quick memo to remind you to click on that little subscribe or follow button because I know you've not done it yet. So make sure that you click on that button to get all the content the thinking global podcast has to offer and don't forget to like, e-international relations on social media on all of the platforms and that way you'll be able to keep up with all the content that e-international relations produces. I'm finding that you can go to e-international relations at e-hi-fin-ir.info and there on the website you'll be able to find the daily articles that are published, interviews, book reviews and books, full books, yes you'd heard me right you don't have to adjust your iPhone or your device. Free books as PDFs just click and download and read. Yeah so you can find that at e-hi-fin-ir.info and don't forget all of the content that you see, read or listen to by e-international relations is brought to you by volunteers so please do consider a donation if you enjoy the content and there is a link to that in the description box. Okay let's get back to the episode. I have so many follow-up questions. Do you think there's an inherent tension between humanitarian imperatives and security logics in contemporary migration management? Yeah that's an interesting question and I mean there's been a huge amount of work hasn't there over recent years pointing to the continuities between humanitarianism and securitisation when it comes to governing migration. I'm thinking of Claudia Aradayas early 2004 article on Trafficking in Millennium where she talks about the ways in which there's a kind of continuity here between perceiving people as threatening or risky but also as at risk. So scholars have talked about this relationship I think between the humanitarian and the sort of security and the governance logics in terms of care and control, care and management, care and enforcement, care and punishment I could go on but I think these all reflect what did you Fassan talks about as a complex ontology of inequality where humanitarianism is a form of moral reason and I quote Fassan differentiate in a hierarchical manner the values of human lives. So that hierarchical differentiation of human lives it's evident in what Michael Barnett describes as humanitarianism's initial connections to displaced refugees after World War I and this involved he says the attempt to alleviate the suffering of distant strangers but based on international concerns that mass movements were undermining peace and security. So Barnett highlights how from the 70s onwards as well states were really rolling up the welcome map refusing to let refugees cross the border and this reflects what BS chimney of course is highlighted as the racial hierarchies and legacies of colonialism that are integral to this history of humanitarianism as well as refugee studies. So I think all of that suggests humanitarian imperatives, security logics they're not inherently opposed or intentioned they can be seen as continuous in terms of the racialized liberal logics within which they grounded but I think whether or not humanitarianism then forms a ground for contestation of those logics of securitization, racialization, governing migration through death. To me that's a really important question. Miriam Tickton in a 2016 article in social research she argued that humanitarianism is not an appropriate framework for migrant justice she says that because it relies on a binary of victims and saviors and provides little impetus to animate political change. I think Sanjay Mazzanger's 2020 article in Citizenship Studies on Abolition this also speaks to this question but is more ambiguous I think so he talks about humanitarianism's governmental twist from the 1990s and implies that solidaristic movements expose the limits of humanitarianism in its managerial form. So I think how I interpret Miriam Tickton's piece here is that it's pointing to the ways in which humanitarianism itself can also function as a field of struggle. So I talked about this a bit in my 2015 book actually about the sort of difference between humanitarian politics and humanitarian government we can think about this also in terms of more solidaristic and more charitable movements for change. Humanitarianism is a kind of space or a field of struggle around those sort of different politics. I guess coming back to your question then where does it all where does it leave us in terms of that relationship between humanitarianism and security logics. I mean of course we can't overlook that really important critical work exposing the continuities between those two forms of logic and reason but at the same time I think we do need to be attentive to the ways in which humanitarianism is a field of action it's quite complex it's quite messy it can involve refusals and disruptions of those racial hierarchies colonial legacies within which it's entwined. Before I go to the next question you mentioned your forthcoming book quite a lot in the interview would you like to tell us a few words about it. No thanks for asking that Mariana. Yes so my new book is called Making and Unmaking Global Citizenship. Subtitle is lived experiences of precarious migration. Yeah there's a lot to say about this book it's really in a way all my research ever most of it put into one book and what I really wanted to do in that book is look at the claims making of people in situations of precarious migration but I guess two key things there one is this the point about global citizenship so I really raise in that book citizenship is a question because I think it's been heavily contested in the fields of migration citizenship studies particularly migration border critical studies of migration have kind of critiqued that term but on the other hand we've also had people using it in critical ways like the acts of citizenship literature so I really wanted to ask the question you know is citizenship a helpful framework for us to understand the politics of precarious migration from the perspective of those people making those journeys not from the perspective of academics who have got you know who want to put the push of concept forward or pull a concept back right so that was one intuition around that and the other is around the claims making I wanted to make a contribution because I could see you know much of the more conventional claims making literature focuses on explicit verbal claims and so many of so much of the politics I think of precarious migration can be much more implicit is not necessarily claims and not always openly directly expressed for a range of different reasons but can still be really significant contestations of what's happening so so the book is yeah as I said a kind of drawing together of different research to to unpack those questions and those the dynamics around the politics of precarious migration it sounds such an important work and I cannot wait to read it what ethical responsibility to do migration scholars have in shaping public discourse, especially Amid Horizons Enophobian and the Migrant Sentiment. It's a good question. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this Maryhanna because I think it's a collective question for us, isn't it? And of course, there's lots of migration scholars, people define themselves, they define their work in very different ways. People are going to play different roles, have different strengths, have different philosophies or perspectives on the role of research and scholarship. So I guess that's all to say that I don't think it's my place to put ethical responsibilities on scholars of migration writ large. I think we all know, of course, how challenging it is to shake public discourse around migration and all and also as anti-migrant sentiment has been actively mobilised and intensified for political purposes. And also when it comes to policy, of course, it's really difficult for migration scholars to have any impact. There's been an active debate about why that's the case recently with regards to academic tribalism and I'm thinking about the work of Katarina Natterin, Natalie Welfrens here and they suggest that fragmentation, competitive dynamics within migration studies, scholarship actually mutually de-legitimises research and can undermine the potential impact of this. So I'm sympathetic to that argument but of course there's also wider issues, isn't there around the ideological framing of migration, work against openness of research findings and that can also drive challenges to academic freedom even in some context for colleagues. So I think given the hostility towards expertise also associated with post-truth politics, having any role in shaping policy or public discourse is really challenging. So there are really important initiatives at play here bringing scholars together in response to the challenge of the far right, rising xenophobia anti-migrant sentiment that you highlight. So Nina Glick Schiller and Bella Feldman Bianco recently initiated the migration scholars, global solidarity and resistance network and I'm creating here the same to publicly support migrants and refugees and challenge anti-migrant policies and narratives while at the same time defending each other against a repression of academic freedom and scholarly speech. So I think that's really important work it speaks you know it works directly to break down that fragmentation of migration studies scholarship and then build a collective movement to challenge xenophobia and anti-migrant sentiment. I mean I think for me personally I've always tried to embed different types of public engagement or sorry for that horrible word impact which is what we call it in the UK. I've always tried to embed those of those in my research to try and reshape debates or actions in an any way I can or at least to you know to be a voice or an influence in there. I guess that approach for me is based on my assumption that no actions too small. It can be sometimes surprising that small things can snowball like and have ripple effects beyond their original vision so I think it's really important not to give up on that work even though it's really hard for us to shape public debates and policy. I think for me it's often been a more local human to human interactions that seem to make a more meaningful difference so I have done some media work you know but it has been doing those engaged activities where you really see how people start to think differently about migration by viewing it from a different angle that's been the stuff that I think is most meaningful. I've also done policy related work so connecting different organizations presenting research findings in forums with different policy representatives. It's of course important alongside public engagement work and I think those two aspects do work together right because you know policy and political debate shapes public opinions, public perspectives, well public opinion also can influence player political influence. So we need to attend to the entwinement and to both of those things but at the same time there's a scholar at University of Bristol called Gemaderoque talks about grim facts so the problematic outcomes and rising from impact activities. So I'm you know always very mindful of that in such a politicised and difficult area and I think there's a huge range of considerations and that come into play what sort of findings we can share which are better not shared, how might things be framed to disrupt and refuse dominant narratives and the assumptions they rely on, questions around the costs of doing that sort of work for researchers as well as the communities they seek to represent and so for me there's really a lot of difficulties here but at the same time and I think as you indicate in your question I feel sense a sense of responsibility as well and by that I mean I recognise I'm in a position where I'm sometimes enabled to respond and put forward ideas and knowledge in places or two people that are important to reach. So there's loads to impact there right but I guess where I've come to it all for me is that the more established I am in my research career the more I need to step up to the challenge myself of speaking out against the horrors that we're seeing every day in terms of hostility towards people in situations of precarious migration, the violence is accompanying that and I need to do that even if it means putting myself in difficult or situations you know or situations I just would prefer to avoid and I think you know I'm a white British academic my role's limited in many ways but we also will have a place in initiating change and supporting change and for me it's just about using the privileges I have based on a granted commitment to people with those lived experiences their claims and realities and some respect and make space for those in any way I can I'm not alone in that of course you know it's a collective effort and I think it's about each of us doing what we can where we can in our very unique ways. So I deliberately added this question because it's a question of a struggling quite a lot myself I'm still struggling with the characterization of migration scholar for me I still have this dual identity of journalist slash scholar one thing I decided very early in my career in journalism was that I will not call myself an activist and it's something that I don't like this characterization especially in my work in journalism that was not activism it was it was a job it is a job but the more the first of all the first time I did I did my first story ever it was a quite big story for Channel 4 News it was about an Afghan smuggling gang that was kidnapping refugees primarily from Syria inside Macedonia and they were asking for ransom so we did this story with Channel 4 News and I said I remembered very vividly I will never do anything related to migration ever again but I kept on going to the Greek Macedonian border and I just couldn't stop and I was going with volunteers I was going with activists I just couldn't stop going and 10 years later it's the topic that I've been associated with the most and I do feel that I have an ethical responsibility to speak out and to write about those things but at the same time I have muted myself in certain ways because things became quite dangerous in Greece especially with the Moria fire that destroyed the camp in 2020 that from 2020 up until this year I wasn't as active as I was because of the threats that I received so it is it is a big responsibility but one thing that someone told me a few years ago is that we don't work with refugees we don't work for refugees we stand in solidarity with refugees and I think this is what has changed my perspective quite a lot so yeah I think it's a question that is not easily answered yeah I agree would you call yourself an activist now? No I don't think I'm doing enough to call myself an activist and I'm also used to completely different forms of activism but that might change in the years to come yeah those identities are not easily accepted or embraced I think yeah I've also been hesitant to label myself as activist because I agree with you that's not first and foremost that's not what I'm doing in my day to day a'u lif, at the same time my affinities are very much there as well. But also because I think sometimes if you're labours as an activist's scholar it also means that you don't get into certain spaces. And to me that's been just a decision to make. I can see other great activist scholars who do brilliant work, who really own that term. Yeah and I just found I fall a slightly different way actually. And as I said it's about each of us doing what we can where we can. If we're all doing the same sort of stuff it's actually not that helpful. But if we're working collectively in different spaces in different ways I think that's the important thing to be doing to be working on. I agree and I remember. And every time I talk about this issue I remember what Janis Behraki said, the photojournalist from Roy Torres. But my mission is to make sure that nobody can say I didn't know. And the way that I see and the way that I approach my own work is that my work is to tell stories either in journalism or in academia and this is what I'm trying to do in general. So now the two questions that we don't normally share. If you had one word to describe your experiences and work with borders, which word would you use? It's very tricky that question. One word is like difficult. But actually I would use the word solidarity I think. That's because that's the spirit with which I've always advanced my research agenda. That's always been there. So I guess just as a bit of background I came to academia a bit later than some of my peers. I was a so-called mature student with a young family. And I'd had experience of working in a third sector. So I really thrived, really enjoyed academic study when I came along to university that little bit later. And I enjoy reading, thinking about different theories and issues a lot. But I did come into academia because I had concerns about the direction policies and societies we're heading in, particularly in relation to migration and asylum. So it's always what I studied from my BA dissertation to my MA dissertation to my PhD and now through my career. Obviously I've bored in that research agenda. But I've always been concerned to generate knowledge in some way creates value in the midst of all this hostility and violence. And also sort of personally I'm a Buddhist. I've been I've been Buddhist for many years before I became an academic. So my life philosophy is really very much grounded in respect for each person's Buddhahood or their own ability to live based on qualities of wisdom, courage and compassion. So to me, you know, we were talking earlier about humanitarianism, this sort of charitable or pity based approach such as that that technocratiques that has always been very alien to me. So I see my work much more embedded in this commitment to solidarity, allyship. And so I think that's why I do use that word probably to sort of describe the thread that keeps everything I do together. Yeah, thanks. It's a great question. I really it's really nice to think about that as a set difficult. But yeah, I think it is the question that I have asked everyone from migrants to politicians, to scholars. And it's the question that gives the best answers always. Really. That's great. So what does it mean to think globally? Yeah. Well, to be honest, I tend to use a concept of the global with caution, because it's such an all encompassing term. So it sort of implies the whole world or, as I know, some universality that I'm not comfortable with. At the same time, like many other scholars working with an IRR, I also draw on the idea of global politics to highlight the limits of the concept of the international, of course, brings with it a whole load of baggage associated with the state system. So I wrote an article in International Relations actually in 2020 about how white subjects from the global North are privileged in this framing of the international. And I started thinking in my forthcoming book about how that's bound up with what I call, I've just started to call it the status quo. And what I mean by that are inequalities that are driven by the dispossessive powers of capitalist extraction by unjust sovereign border controls by paternalistic practices of aid and development. So I started sort of critique the international from the perspective of global politics in that way. But I also started to think about how politics can be worldly. So I think that idea of worldliness that resonates, doesn't it, with the idea of thinking globally? Because it just gestures towards the way that people places things they connect and interconnect in complex ways across time and space. And thinking in worldly terms also feels a lot more grounded to me. So as I said, my book's looking at the sort of claims that people make when they've had lived experiences of precarious migration. And the sort of worldly claims that come out, for example, a critique of the impact of border controls, of militarism, of ongoing relations of coloniality. But also grounded appeals, just appeals grounded in life really, wanting a decent life, wanting to make a change in the place that they come from, wanting to kind of live in societies and a world that moves forward rather than backwards. So I think those grounded worldly claims are something I really start to sort of frame that book around. So my interest there is in this emergent politics of precarious migration. And I think that politics of precarious migration is significant inwardly, if not strictly global terms. In the sense it's grounded in people's everyday struggles and speaks to those wider interconnections that don't fit within a statist frame work of the international. But rather kind of highlight the finances that come about when trying to fix that frame of the international against the mobile and complex worlds. Thank you so much Vicky and thank you for joining Thinking Borders. Thanks Mary Ellen. That was Vicky's choir, professor of international relations at the Warwick University. Vicky's most recent book is making and making global citizenship, lived experiences of precarious migration published by Endyburg University Press in December 2025. I'm currently reading it and I have to say it's absolutely fascinating. So go grab yourselves a copy or order it for your libraries if you are at a university that is. I cannot not mention two pieces of work that I absolutely love, Europe's migration crisis, border deaths and human dignity, and reclaiming migration, voices from Europe's migrant crisis, co-authored with Nina Perkovski, the Lals Stevens and Nick von Williams. This was Thinking Borders, a podcast series hosted by EIR's Thinking Global Podcast. I'd like to thank Thinking Global's executive producer, Kieran Omira and our international relations theme and of course all of you for tuning in. Thinking Borders is hosted and produced by me, Mariana Karakulagi, and part of the international relations, the world's leading source for international relations scholarship and insight, music by material music. Make sure you listen to our podcast on all major platforms and follow EIR on all social media, including substack where you can get our content straight to your mailbox. See you next time.