Beyond exclusion
borders, migration, and injustice in a globalized world
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4013/fsu.2026.271.14Keywords:
borders, adverse incorporation, relational spatiality, relational justiceAbstract
This text offers a critique of traditional conceptions of justice, which tend to frame the injustices experienced by migrants primarily in terms of their exclusion from the political communities they seek to enter. It challenges the foundational assumption underlying the discourse of exclusion, namely, that a clear and definitive distinction can be drawn between “insiders” and “outsiders.” In contrast, the notion of adverse incorporation is defended as a more suitable analytical tool, revealing how migrants, rather than being simply excluded, are incorporated into transnational economic and political structures in subordinated, exploited, and precarious ways. The text proposes a reinterpretation of how political communities are delimited, encouraging a move away from the idea of borders as fixed lines at the edges of states and toward an understanding of borders as complex systems embedded throughout the social fabric, systems that are fundamental to the construction of our current global capitalist world. It is argued that achieving this conceptual shift requires incorporating multiple notions of space and time into our analyses of the territorial boundaries of political communities.
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