TRANSFORMING SOLIDARITIES LECTURE SERIES
Monday, 4. July 2022, 6-8 pm | Institute for European Ethnology
, Room 311
, Möhrenstr. 40/41, Berlin

›Beyond Renationalization‹

Transforming Solidarities proudly presents the first of three talks in their Lecture Series with Brett Neilson:

Even before the border closures and travel restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, the notion that a process of renationalization was beginning to reverse dynamics of globalization was taking grip. Associated with political populism, trade wars, anti-migration politics, and the persistence of realism in international relations, this perspective seems only strengthened by present geopolitical shifts. This talk revisits the conceptual history of renationalization to locate it in relation to processes of denationalization and to question its utility for understanding changing border politics in the contemporary world. I suggest the narrative of a “new Cold War” associated with claims for renationalization fails to capture the world making capacity of borders and their always tense relation with expanding frontiers of capital. Empirical focus will be on the persistence of migration struggles and proliferation of internal borders as well as the historical resonances that link current border struggles to the archives of colonial resistance.

Brett Neilson is Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author (with Sandro Mezzadra) of The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke 2019) and Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke 2013). With Ned Rossiter, Manuela Bojadžijev and others, he is currently working on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project entitled The Geopolitics of Automation.

Download Poster here.