Transformative and decolonial migration justice and reparations

What would it mean to decolonise the processes and visions of justice and accountability that we pursue as a community of practice in the migration justice space? How can we centre struggles against epistemic and other injustices, often reproduced by our understandings and responses to state violence? By centring transformative and decolonial justice, we promote the commitment to ending violence and oppression through healing in community and through life-affirming, non-carceral forms of justice and accountability grounded in our connectedness and interdependence.

Organising with direct-action activists and community-based researchers, we aim to create and hold space for collective reflexivity, inquiry, and visioning around migration justice and reparations by generating affective counternarratives around the limits and im/possibilities of legal struggles against borders. We centre the collective grief around justice struggles situated at the intersection of the ‘non-profit justice complex’ and hyperlegalised bordering regimes that have invisibilised, exceptionalised, and irresponsibilised the structural and historical conditions of border violence, making only “narrow perimeters of change possible and allowable” (Lorde).

In these conditions of im/possibility, legal interventions have often reproduced the “⁠tangled and expansive web of relationships through which carceral logics and practices operate” (Massaro & Boyce). We thus aim to reflect on and embody our individual and collective relational responsibilities around the violences of bordering and the borders between us, including both carceral and punitive logics that often obscure and obstruct visions and possibilities for relational and decolonial justice and accountability. Centring relational and transformative justice—‘no justice, just us’—as part of a prefigurative affective politics (Robins) and practice of rehearsal of freedoms (Gilmore; Healing Justice Ldn), we aim to develop and nurture everyday debordering praxes.