Logistification of migration: corridors of circulation, bordering, and rebellion 

Somayeh Chitchian

- completed -


The colonial and racial project of capitalism, since its emergence in the sixteenth century up until the present moment, has relied on a deadly logistical landscape for its expansion, accumulation, and management of circulation. Consequently, the field of logistics is not only concerned with the circulation of commodities and the accumulation of capital, it is simultaneously entangled with the strategic - often violent - channeling of human bodies, as well. Since the 1960s, however, supply chain capitalism has taken on a different scale and has resulted in the so-called ‘logistical reorientation of the economy’ based on the military logic of efficiency of movement and the maximization of profit. This doctoral project centralizes the question of logistics/migration, and focuses on the extended corridors and infrastructures of circulation of ‘Fortress Europe’ as complex (post)colonial and racialized (new)bordered spaces of controlled and preselected circulation of bodies and commodities, on the one level, while simultaneously opening up grounds for fugitive, migratory spatialities from below. By using logistics as both a material and theoretical lens, this doctoral project aims at respatializing migration studies’ inherent methodological nationalism and to challenge the object, scale, and spatialities that have been more conventional in migration research.

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