Recent politics of migration in Europe and beyond conjure up alarming scenarios. The push for restrictive border politics of the agendas of Donald Trump in the US, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Scott Morrison (and his predecessors, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott) in Australia have reached unprecedented levels of cruelty. These agendas are increasingly built around metaphorical and material walls against migrant women and men who escape from different areas of the world.
Compare the dissonance of terms like borders, walls, xenophobic behaviours, and racism with the watchwords of globalisation as ideology and as world order – mobility, freedom, inclusion, integration, affluence, prosperity, and development.
The inaugural issue of the journal, Socioscapes aims to tackle with this profound contradiction.
In the context of capitalist economies, the watchwords inspired by freedom and mobility (of goods, capitals, knowledges, people) have marked the rise of accelerated, late liberalism we live in since its inception. The reality shows us a rather different picture, with the majority of states, as well as supra-national organisations and networks, denying the freedom of movement to a wide number of people fleeing inequalities, military and political conflicts in their countries of origin.
The watchwords that belong to ideologies and to the actual policies applied by contemporary States are two contradicting vectors; is there an inverse relationship between them? And, how can we, as critical thinkers, probe at these questions? What is their relation to, for instance, politics, economics, and culture(s)?
