Amnesty Book Club - Border and Rule by Harsha Walia

How are contemporary border policies rooted in histories of violent territorial expansion, settler colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology?
How is immigration diplomacy and the externalization of borders used to maintain colonial power in the present?
How is temporary labour migration in Taiwan and around the world used to regulate citizenship, control labour, and produce precarity?
How is racial violence escalating deadly nationalism, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere?

For our next book club, we will discuss Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism.

In Border and Rule, Harsha Walia traces the systemic roots of today’s intersecting planetary crises of globalized capitalism, imperialism, racist nationalism, exclusionary borders, and climate change. Challenging the narrative of a “migrant crisis,” Walia reveals how borders function as tools of labor control, capitalist accumulation, and imperial domination, producing cycles of displacement, detention, deportation, and death, while masquerading as the status quo.

Drawing connections across global geographies, Walia shows how border regimes reinforce racial hierarchies, facilitate exploitation, and divide working-class solidarity. She argues that confronting these systems requires more than reforming border policies: it demands dismantling the political and economic conditions that produce displacement and exclusion in the first place. Border and Rule invites us to imagine a world beyond borders, rooted in international solidarity and the freedom to move or to remain.

Together, we will explore the connections between migration, racial violence, and rising nationalism, examining how borders uphold liberal and neoliberal ideologies, reinforce colonial power, and facilitate racialized exclusion and state violence. We will discuss the global consequences of border regimes, from mass displacement and the exploitation of migrant workers to the growing crisis of statelessness, and consider what it would mean to challenge the political and economic systems that make these forms of violence possible.

You can currently download the ebook for free on the publisher’s Haymarket Book’s website!

Date: Tuesday, 17th November
Time: 19:00 – 21:00pm
Location: 牆頭馬上游藝舖
2F, No. 4, Alley 9, Lane 316, Section 3, Roosevelt Rd, Zhongzheng District, Taipei
羅斯福路3段316巷9弄4號2樓
RSVP: https://forms.gle/2aRkAbVd6XJkz6EEA

This event is free to attend

About our Book Club:

Reading and discussing books broaden our world, and action improves it. Amnesty Book Club explores human rights stories from around the world through literature, creating space for reflection, discussion and action. By reading together and engaging in guided conversations, we aim to deepen our understanding of global injustices and strengthen our personal and collective responses.

Our meetings focus on:
- Finding personal lessons in texts
- Learning from each other
- Connecting with local activists
- Supporting each other to take action
- Joining our resources together

We aim to create a thoughtful, respectful space for shared reading and discussion. We invite participants to read through our book club’s community guidelines before attending: https://shorturl.at/StwrW

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