Racial Borders

Racial Borders

This Article explores the treatment of race and racial justice in dominant liberal democratic legal discourse and theory concerned with inter-national borders. It advances two analytical claims. The first is that contemporary national borders of the international order — an order that remains structured by imperial inequity — are inherently racial. The default of liberal borders is racialized inclusion and exclusion that privileges “whiteness” in international mobility and migration. This racial privilege inheres in the facially neutral legal categories and regimes of territorial and political borders and in international legal doctrine. The second is that central to theorizing the system of neocolonial racial borders is understanding race itself as border infrastructure. That is, race operates as a means of enforcing liberal territorial and political borders, and as a result, international migration governance is also a mode of racial governance. Normatively, this Article outlines the specific relational injustices of racial borders.

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