Borders are often framed as neutral tools for organising political life. Yet modern border regimes are deeply entangled with the histories of empire, colonial expansion, and racial hierarchy that shaped the modern world. In this conversation, Nandita Sharma and rémy-paulin twahirwa examine how borders regulate movement, produce categories of belonging and exclusion, and define the boundaries of the human. They bring together critiques of nationalism, migration governance, and coloniality to reflect on how struggles over mobility continue to reshape our political and philosophical understandings of the world and what a borderless human might look like.

Nandita Sharma is Professor of the Sociology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and an activist-scholar. She is the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006) and Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Duke University Press, 2020).

Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Aston University (ESRC-funded project:  Peripheralisation of Asylum Accommodation), community organiser and writer based in London. They are currently completing their first manuscript, On Ghostly Lives and serve as Managing Editor of The  Philosopher and co-convenor of the BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group. rémy also organises screenings with the Haringey Community Cinema. More about their work can be found at: https://ghostlylivesaproject.wordpress.com/. You can follow them on Bleusky: @rpaulint.bsky.social.