Border Abolitionism as Decolonization in a World of Nation-States by Nandita Sharma

"Decolonization" has mainly come to be associated with the nationalization of state sovereignty. Yet, national sovereignty is also the legal and ideological basis for the regulation and restriction of people whose nationality does not correspond to that of the state. It is a crucial basis for the construction of the state category of "migrant." I trace the historical relationship between the ways states govern mobility and the form that state power takes, with an emphasis on how mobility regimes changed along with the shift in state sovereignty from imperial to national from the mid- to late-19th century and the hegemony of national sovereignty after World War Two. This shift marked a new intersection of technologies of domination with technologies of the self, making nationalism the governmentality of what I call the "postcolonial new world order." Uncannily, at the same time that nationalisms are everywhere intensifying, the "native," an imperial state category, has re-emerged as the center of nationalist politics. The figure of the "migrant," in turn, is increasingly decried as a "colonizer." I discuss such politics as well as those challenging them, with a focus on the politics of No Borders movements.

 Nandita Sharma is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is an activist scholar and the author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020) and Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006). She is currently co-editing three forthcoming volumes, Hydra Rising! The Ongoing Struggle for Freedom, Mobility and the Commons (with Bridget Anderson and Cynthia Wright, Duke University Press), Maritime Solidarities, Past and Present (with Marcus Rediker, Niklas Frykman, and Pepin Brandon), and Against Nations: A Manifesto for a Freer & More Equal World (with Steve Sacco).

Tuesday February 17th, 2026

11:45 am, McLaren 251