Blog post by Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol, UK and Ioana Vrabiescu, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

​The European Union presents itself as a global champion of human rights, yet its external borders are marked by hostility, surveillance and death. There is also an intricate network of borders within Europe that marginalizes and excludes migrants and asylum seekers. The vast majority of those excluded at the border and within Europe are people of colour. Two contemporary developments shape the context of our Identities Special Issue, Affective Control: The Emotional Life of (En)forcing Mobility Control in Europe – the global social movement for Black Lives and the COVID-19 pandemic. They have shaped conversations on structural racism and crisis-driven migration management and exposed the intersectionality of emotions and policies. For example, the invocation of national protection measures in the context of COVID-19 allowed European states to enforce border security under the guise of health protection, emphasizing the emerging pattern of governing migration through crisis management.

Gaza, Solidarity and the Right to Protest Blog Series, Guest Edited by Alana Lentin and colleagues
 
Blog post by Anna Younes
Dr Anna Younes is a scholar of race critical theories, using psychoanalytic approaches and post-/colonial theory.

​Israeli politicians, lawmakers, military personnel, as well as ordinary civilians, are talking – yet again – about Palestinians as animals: “human animals”, to be precise. For race critical scholars, or those studying genocides, it is no news that such dehumanizing language is often followed by an equally dehumanizing treatment. But what does that mean concretely for our understand of fast or slow genocide/s, and how might it propel academia to reframe our thinking around settler colonialism when viewing dehumanization through animal taxonomies? 

Blog post by Nickesia Gordon, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
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The thematic focus of the July 2023 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s (CPA), Regional Conference on Women’s Political and Parliamentary Leadership once again underscores the need for greater equity as it pertains to women’s engagement in political leadership across the Caribbean. This event was hosted by the group, Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians from the CPA Jamaica Branch, under the theme, ‘Empowering Women in Politics and Parliament: Inspiring Leadership, Driving Change.’ As much as the title theme of the conference is telling, so too is the location in which it took place; namely, New Kingston, Jamaica, an upper middle class mixed residential and business neighbourhood populated by Jamaica’s elite.