BREM Upcoming Events

(Un)settling Whiteness interrogates the colonial and racial nature of Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’, specifically the increasing symbiosis between border and violence in contemporary Europe. It asks: What are the functions and implications of Europe’s contemporary methods of border violence, and where do they come from? And what does the escalation of violence at Europe’s borders tell us about the intimacies between borders, colonialism, and whiteness?(Un)settling Whiteness makes the counterintuitive move of using ‘settler colonialism’ as an analytic to understand border dynamics of violence and security in Europe (the previous ‘metropole’). Tracing the historical evolution of border regimes of migration security from white settler colonies to the ‘metropoles,’ the book reassesses Global North borders as (post)colonial tools designed to settle whiteness as the nation-state’s true ‘native’ and final ‘possessor.’ More than tools of sovereignty, Global North borders are theorised as instruments to materialise a longstanding imagery of the nation-state as a white possession. The book also provides the first systematic investigation into the colonial genealogies of contemporary methods of border violence, connecting such practices to past techniques and rationales of repression and policing deployed at the (settler) colonies. In doing so, it re-evaluates Europe’s border violence as not an exception to a post-war liberal order, but rather as recurrences of historical, colonial logics of racialised expropriation, oppression, and (dis)possession within the metropole.

Date: 22 January 2026

Venue: OC1.01

Time: 1-2:30