the idea of a borderless world

The capacity to decide who can move, who can settle, where and under what conditions is increasingly becoming the core of political struggles over sovereignty, nationalism, citizenship, security and freedom. With western colonial expansion, and more decisively with the advent of capitalism, the raison d’être of the border attends to key questions such as: to whom does the earth belong? Who can lay what type of claims to what part of it and to the various beings who inhabit them? Who determines its distribution or partition? In this essay, first delivered as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Yale University in March 2018, Achille Mbembe argues that the power of the border lies in its capacity to regulate the multiple distributions of populations on the body of the earth, and in so doing, to affect the vital forces of all kinds of beings.