Between mobile corridors and immobilizing borders: race, fixity and friction in Palestine/Israel

This article wrestles with the question of ‘national’ borders in racial capitalism. We do so through an examination of border and capitalist corridors. We focus particularly on the Israeli border, branded and then sold to the rest of the world by the epistemic community of border-makers and interlocutors. In tracking the Israeli border and showing the implication of the experts and their markets, we ask how the border reflects and is refracted through a global order organized by the twin dictates of racism and capitalism. We are especially interested in how racialized processes of bordering, ostensibly governed by national exigencies, are transplanted on to other contexts. Two points emerge from this: in the first instance, we ask who and what enables this movement of the border. And in the second, we interrogate which logics and practices are transplanted with the border, as it is reproduced and seemingly fixed in a new place. We examine the violent ontologies that give shape and reputation to Israel's high-tech border industry, which has become a model for the ever-growing global homeland security industry. We ask: has Israel's border become an exportable commodity and who are the actors who have enabled this ‘achievement’? Related to this, what sort of occlusions and structural violence does the fetishization of the Israeli border rely on?

Out of the cauldron: lessons from Cedric Robinson

This is an abbreviated account of the UK webinar launch in October 2021 of the biography, Cedric Robinson: the time of the Black Radical Tradition, written by Joshua Myers. Moderated by James Pope, panellists, including Myers, Colin Prescod, John Narayan, Avery Gordon and Elizabeth Robinson present their takes on Robinson in relation to the UK and especially his relationship with the Institute of Race Relations and the journal Race & Class. They discuss key aspects of Robinson’s work, including the meaning of racial capitalism, his understanding of time, and how for him historical materialism was grounded, not in the mode of production but in the primacy of social struggle and in a dialectic of power and resistance to its abuses.