Action-Guiding for Whom? Social Movements and Political Theory of Migration

A number of recent articles have sought to carve out space for more feasible and action-guiding political theories of migration. These accounts have focused on policy-makers as target agents. I suggest an alternative approach that targets migrant and refugee-led social movements who can generate social and political goods that are crucial in non-ideal conditions. These include situated social critique, embodied non-oppressive alternatives and community-building. Making these goods salient renders three desiderata for normative theorising. Movement-oriented theories need to be intelligible to such movements, they need to provide a framework for transformative worldmaking and they need to attend to affective relations created in and by social movements. Engaging with migrant and refugee social movements, I suggest that a movement-oriented theory of migration renders ‘no borders’ more action-guiding by focusing on how border regimes sustain a hierarchical international order that makes some people more vulnerable to displacement and its associated harms.