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// Issue 34

When workers meet borders: Contestation, exploitation and ideologies

By Jonathan Preminger and Blandine Emilien

Issue 34 // 27th January 2026

This editorial introduces a special issue examining borders as ideological and institutional instruments of power that shape labour, mobility, exploitation and inequality across diverse global contexts. Read more of the article

Mobility, immobility and their valorisation in transnational temporary work

By Claudia Bernardi and Nico Pizzolato

Issue 34 // 27th January 2026

The text argues that migration should be understood not as a linear journey to a destination but as a broader labour regime in which both mobility and enforced immobility generate value, vulnerability and inequality long before arrival or even employment. Read more of the article

Living on the edge: International students, borders and invisible labour in Northern Cyprus

By Aicha Lariani and Seçil Dağtaş

Issue 34 // 27th January 2026

The article shows how international students in Northern Cyprus are embedded in “nested borders” that turn higher education into a survival pathway and a form of invisible, precarious labour for displaced people. Read more of the article

The contested borders of extractive frontiers: Crepori Forest and the Munduruku

By Rosamaria Loures, Bárbara Wanderley, Brian Garvey, Steven Owens, Mauricio Torres, Deise Cristina Lima de Oliveira, Ana Carolina Alfinito and Hugo Gravina Affonso

Issue 34 // 27th January 2026

The article argues that state-sanctioned and illegal extractive activities in the Amazon mutually reinforce one another by undermining indigenous borders, legitimising exploitation of land and labour while threatening Munduruku sovereignty and ecosystems. Read more of the article

Work, borders and mobility: The Torres Strait as a fluid borderland

By Adrian Little and Sana Nakata and Felecia Watkin Lui

Issue 34 // 27th January 2026

The Torres Strait is a historically fluid Indigenous borderland where mobility, work and identity have long been shaped by overlapping colonial, national and Indigenous governance systems, producing a diaspora in which movement remains a strategic expression of belonging rather than departure. Read more of the article

The constitutive and discursive role of borders in neoliberal settler-colonialism

By Jonathan Preminger

Issue 34 // 27th January 2026

The article argues that in Israel–Palestine borders function less as markers of sovereignty than as tools that manage, depoliticise and exploit Palestinian labour while sustaining the fiction of a conflict between two separate states within a settler-colonial system. Read more of the article