Feminist Geopolitics of Bordering: Refugee Bodies, Temporal Violence, and Counter-Geopolitics

This special issue advances a feminist geopolitics of bordering by examining how migration, displacement, and resettlement are governed through the intertwined regulation of bodies and time, and contested through everyday forms of counter-geopolitical agency. Against a backdrop of persistent global displacement, restrictive asylum regimes, and humanitarian contraction, the collection brings together case studies from Turkey, the Thailand–Myanmar border, Mexico, Colombia, Nordic countries, and the United States. Moving beyond dominant Euro–Mediterranean frameworks, the articles show how bordering extends far beyond territorial edges through dispersed practices of categorisation, waiting, care, surveillance, labour, and belonging. The collection demonstrates how embodied experiences and temporal discipline are mutually constitutive mechanisms of border power, while displaced people generate alternative political geographies through practices of solidarity, strategic (in)visibility, re-existencia, and world-making. Through feminist collaborative and methodologically plural research, the issue illuminates how refugees experience, interpret, contest, and transform contemporary bordering regimes.