Description
States engage in re/bordering efforts in the name of national security globally. Increasingly, these take the form of migrant detention, extra-judicial deportations, and border militarisation. In this context, the notion of ‘migrant struggles’ constitutes a key conceptual device for understanding subjective responses to many of these pervasive and unequal bordering practices. These struggles may either directly confront dominant systems of migration governance or manifest as everyday acts of refusal/resistance that do not necessarily take the form of overt political contestation. In this paper, I build on new materialist, feminist, and performance studies scholarship to articulate the notion of ‘more-than-human migrant struggles’. In observing states’ instrumentalization of nature to re/border, control and deter unwanted forms of cross-border mobility, I trace how migrant struggles can be shaped by the mediated agencies of non-human lives (such as plants and non-human animals), geomorphic bodies (such as rivers, mountains, drylands, among others), and inanimate things – in short, the more-than-human. In unpacking the complexity of these exchanges, I illustrate my view in the example of contemporary precarious mobilities across the Americas and suggest alternatives for further exploration in other locations worldwide.
