Toward Border Abolition

Toward Border Abolition:

Migrant Struggles and the Law

Duke University Press (in press, August 2026)

co-edited with Daniel I. Morales

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“Examining struggles to move about or stay put, Toward Border Abolition casts stark light on how criminalization and militarization reconfigure geographies without revising maps. How? By sliding partitions through individuals, households, and communities, and regions. A must read for teachers and organizers.”

-- Ruth Wilson Gilmore,

author of

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

“Radically refreshing, Toward Border Abolition bridges disciplinary boundaries and dispenses with methodological nationalism to make the case—thoughtfully, creatively, and unapologetically—that it isn’t people who should be shunted across borders but borders themselves that deserve to be relegated to the past.”

- César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández,

author of Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien,”

and Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants

Read the Editors'

Preface and Introduction

HERE

Toward Border Abolition is an interdisciplinary exploration of border abolition that brings together scholars of international migration, border studies, and law who historicize the current border regime, critique the violence of border policing, and consider alternatives. The contributors explore the ways that migrants practice objective border abolitionism by circumventing the sociopolitical order imposed by nation-states. They illustrate how various methods of migrating, from seeking asylum to “unauthorized” border crossing, all enact a fundamentally human freedom of movement that precedes state border control as it exists today. Ultimately, Toward Border Abolition questions the assumed legitimacy of borders, nation-states, and immigration law while simultaneously showing how migrants’ transgression of borders opens new vistas for remaking the world.

CONTENTS

Preface

Nicholas De Genova and Daniel I. Morales

Introduction

Border Abolitionism:

Migrant Struggles, the Law, and Remaking the World

Nicholas De Genova and Daniel I. Morales

Chapter 1

Abolition and the US Immigration Law Context

Leti Volpp

Chapter 2

Law Against Law:

Immigration Eugenics, Family Law, and Border Abolition

Audrey Macklin

Chapter 3

Struggles for Freedom in a World of Nation-States

Nandita Sharma

Chapter 4

Abolishing National Borders:

Citizenship After the Nation

Jacqueline Stevens

Chapter 5

Border Abolitionism:

Commoning Beyond the Opposition of “Community” and “Nation-State”

Martina Tazzioli

Chapter 6

Scales of Abolition:

Mapping Multijurisdictional Border Abolitionist Engagements

David Moffette

Chapter 7

Of Aid and Abolition:

Humanitarian Innocence Between Encampment and Resettlement Futures

Hanno Brankamp