Movement lawyering and the violence of the laws of borders

For decades, legal interventions have attempted to resist and contest borders by seeking to (re)claim law as a tool of protection, or at least harm reduction, in the struggle against the racist state violence of borders. Yet, justice struggles—in particular those situated within the ‘non-profit justice complex’—have often contributed to the invisibilisation and irresponsibilisation of the structural and historical conditions at the root of intersecting forms of violence.

Given the limits of legal pathways for justice and accountability—and as part of our commitment to movement law/yering as a praxis of uplifting the visions of justice of migrant communities and no-borders social movements—we aim to co-create space for collective reflection, inquiry, and cocreation of strategies, tactics, and experiments of resistance and contestation (Akbar, Ashar & Simonson) to resist deadly bordering regimes.

Centring no-borders imaginaries of transformative and decolonial justice, we seek to collaboratively design and explore new trajectories to further social and political struggles against (violent) borders that centre a systemic critique of the laws that constitute and entrench the global im/mobility regime, and to promote transformative migration justice for the invisibility and erasure of the violences of borders and their laws.