Decolonising ‘A No Borders Manifesto’
Date:
Venue: City of Edinburgh Methodist Church,
Accessibility: Physically accessible, contact eafb@riseup.net for more information
Childcare: Book your space here
Directions/Travel: Detailed information here
Introductory talk by Dania Thomas of Ubuntu Women Shelter and the Unity Centre, followed by a practical
The ‘no-borders manifesto’ we uncritically rely on in our activism and define our strategic intervention with the state is defined by the violence of sustaining state borders, though it is necessary to keep this violence in sight at all times we overlook:
- the sustaining and nurturing resistance to and redefinition of borders in our everyday lives and practical politics, and
- our own complicity in perpetuating violence and exploitation through unconscious acts of everyday racism and gender violence.
This talk argues that the ‘no borders manifesto’ that we adopt reinforces centuries of colonial erasure of lived experience and as such hardwires white saviour and white guilt. This hardwiring is evidenced as a focus on political borders which overlooks centuries of institutional sedimentation to facilitate the unimpeded flows of financial capital to the ‘global north’ extracting value from the ‘global south’. These unimpeded flows have re-configured political borders, what we see in our work is evidence of only one border – ‘a border’ between the rich and the poor- the underclass – the invisible (‘the illegal migrant’) and the strategically visible (‘the asylum-seeker’ and ‘the good migrant’). In our