The Proliferation of Borders and the Right to Escape

Starting from the growing instability of many categories and epistemic partitions that shape the field of migration studies (e.g. integration, forced/voluntary migration, economic migrant/asylum seeker, ‘illegal’ migrant), the article underscores the need for a new conceptual language. The concepts of ‘differential inclusion’ and ‘border struggles’ are introduced against the background of the multiplication and transformations of borders in the contemporary world. In the closing section of the article some implications of these concepts for a critical reappraisal of citizenship are briefly discussed.