Gunjan Sondhi

Note: This was given as a response to a prompt provided for the workshop After migration studies? A field under deconstruction.  The workshop took place 26-28 February, 2025, organised by IMIS Research Group The production of knowledge on migration at the University of Osnabruck.  It was delivered alongside four contributors as part of a panel entitled:  The future of critical knowledge production on migration: critical perspectives after, beyond, against, within, and without migration studies.

Thank you for organising this workshop and giving us all an opportunity to think together, to challenge and to sit with some of the discomfort. Every contribution has been incredibly thought-provoking. It’s definitely a time of massive change. It’s a regime change in Europe, and my aim is to identify the boundaries and frames within which we speak, what can be learnt from the past, and what is happening at present.

Let me begin by bringing together something that was discussed several times yesterday: the attack on liberal democracy in Europe. Shock, distress, and similar emotions were expressed regarding how Europe could have reached this point. It was said that this had never happened before. 

This last statement has stayed with me because it represents the invisible boundaries and limitations of our discussions yesterday and the limitations of the knowledge production of migration studies: the Eurocentricity.

And I want to think through postcolonial critique and Manuela’s offering yesterday to come back to Wallerstein’s  world-systems theory.

Postcolonial critique offers us thinking about the ongoing coloniality. The Eurocentricity emerged in faliing to recognise that the attack on liberal democracy, the coup and destabilisation of governments, the rise of right-wing, the economy being held hostage by an external power. – are all things that have happened before.

The global south—a discursive construction—has experienced all of this. Democratically elected governments have been overthrown, nation-states have been held hostage through Structural adjustment programs, and external powers dictate how a country’s resources ought to be used. World-systems theory helps us recognise the making of European powers through forms of extraction from the periphery. Current moves of West African countries such as Chad and Senegal reveal how these unequal relations continue. The West has perpetrated these.

This time, the difference is that this is happening here—in Europe – the centre. This has disrupted white and European exceptionalism. It has destabilised Europe’s nation-state and the EU project from its attachments to modernity.

This might not have happened before in white Europe because Europe is usually the cause of these acts elsewhere. But it has certainly been taking place globally in Europe’s ‘elsewhere’ site – it’s peripheries.

And they continue to do so. Fighting for democracy is a continual battle worldwide in the peripheries, and now its come to the centre.

So why do I make this point? Why do I start from here? This European exceptionalism and Eurocentricity of the discussion offers me the ideal openings.  It first made visible to me, and hopefully you will trust me to recognise this and accept it when I say that the boundaries of the system in which we operate. The entangled web of relations of power of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism – as bell hooks remind us.

But the point is not to critique but to make something visible—the wider system within which we operate. And really, most of the discussions yesterday were about how to operate and change within this system that retains European exceptionalism, its categories of migration and migrant, and its category of nation-state; its normative legacy attachments to ideas of modernity as seen from the centre.   

As long as these exist, migration studies will remain stagnated. And so how do we hold these in tension? To reach a point of caring, consider talking about migration without the vocabulary and construction of the ‘migrant’ other and the related modalities/conditions/processes, I argue, requires a very different type of approach and thinking – I call it an expansive approach.

An expansive approach urges us to consider the system as a whole as a problem that needs a remedy—a transformation—and not just the removal of a ‘barrier’. The object to be changed is the system, not just the barrier. aims to do things differently  demanding the transformation of structures and systems toward more equitable and sustainable systems. 

In this case, it’s about thinking expansively about migration research, knowledge and knowledge production.

It requires three moves:

1. Identify the boundaries
2. shift our analytical lens
3. alter our starting point, start from elsewhere

The aim is to not just think about how we do things differently within migration studies – but change the field of migration studies, how we produce the knowledge, about what, for whom, etc., all of those.

Identify the boundaries

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work, Queer Phenomenology, the first step is to identify and recognise the limits of the system within which we operate and the limits and boundaries of our knowledges.  This is a continual process.

Shift our analytical lens

We need to continually ask ourselves, what is being analysed when we analyse migrations and migrants?  A move we make is reversing the gaze – use migrant experiences to highlight the inequities of systems in the destination country/sites. In a recent work, we argue for provincialising patriarchy to argue that we need to bring the discourse of patriarchy back to Western discourses.

Starting from elsewhere

I think it’s useful to return to our discussions of categories in this context, that started yesterday.  As my colleague Parvati Raghuram has articulated, categories ought to be democratised, stretched, entangled and traversed. I would push this further to think about refining, redefining or expanding.

So how can we start from elsewhere in thinking about some of our familiar categories.

Let’s take the category of nation-state. Nation and state are not the same everywhere, as Mamdani reminds us. And for migrants, the idea of citizenship holds some value precisely because of the way it offers inclusion and belonging that was highlighted yesterday. The idea of the nation-state, what that might mean, and its attachments to modernity need to be perhaps rethought – and for that, my colleague Parvati Raghuram and I offer starting from anticolonialism scholarship as starting from elsewhere; equally relevant are feminist Indigenous scholars’ work on other concepts of the nation-state and other forms and modes of grouping.  And think through those ideas.

For another category of citizenship, we could start to think through anti-colonial literature, African scholarship, and Latin American scholarship, which have all theorised citizenship in other ways. And if we are looking for theory as practice, we need to look no further than the Palestinian people, poets, artists, and scholars.

Migration as a category and concept was also critiqued yesterday. Speakers yesterday pointed to migration as the representation of the relationship between capital and labour – to production.  Instead, I would suggest that we start with social reproduction – specifically, migration as a relationship between capital and social reproduction.  Where would that lead us? Perhaps that would offer us a different set of vocabulary and reveal different processes and conditions.

To think expansively, we must start elsewhere. Perhaps abolition, as Willem Schinkel proposed yesterday, is a useful starting point because it argues for changing the system and makes a case for no longer working within it. These are real issues and the key to thinking through the present conjuncture may need to start from outside Europe and what we can learn by reversing the gaze.

Thank you.