From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining borders and migration in global politics

In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might it be possible to think beyond its limits. It starts by demonstrating that the “security-space” imaginary both excludes and relies upon highly problematic, concealed assumptions about time and race. It shows how questions of time and race continually haunt and disrupt the seemingly coherent and indomitable “security-space” way of thinking. Following a strategy of deconstruction, the article arrives at the counter-intuitive conclusion that this dominant problematization of migration is temporal and structured by a relation to the future. Building on existing critical literature produced by scholars of Geopolitics, International Relations, and International Political Sociology, it offers an alternative imaginary, “time-race,” which opens up new ground for reimagining borders and migration to overcome reproducing the never-ending cycle of “migration crises,” to which there is apparently no alternative.