Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

Written by Vangile Makwakwa, Nick Estes and Robin D.G. Kelley

Narrated by Cindy Kay

Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule.



Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666107623

Vangile Makwakwa

Harsha Walia is the award-winning author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013). Trained in the law, she is a community organizer and campaigner in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist movements, including No One Is Illegal and Women’s Memorial March Committee.

Reviews for Border and Rule

[Aylea Wilkins · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book betrays its own universalism on occasion, but that should not completely hamper the provocative discussion that Walia offers. She offers a clear, unflinching, and sobering appraisal of the current configurations of the world market in a post covid-19 world. Again, I believe that some of her universalism can easily be misconstrued as a form of an erasure of difference, something which we should not do. But all in all, a pretty good read.

[river ash · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is absolutely a must read. if you read anything this year- let it be this book.