MMB Reading Group – ‘(B)ordering Britain’ by Nadine El-Enany

MMB is running a new reading group for its members in 2021! This is a forum to discuss migration and mobility-related texts that members have enjoyed reading and are keen to debate. Please contact Sarah Kunz (sarah.kunz@bristol.ac.uk) or the MMB team (mmb-sri@bristol.ac.uk) if there is an article or book you would like to discuss with the group. Where possible we can invite the author to join us. Details of the first meeting below.

(B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire by Nadine El-Enany

Chair: Sarah Kunz

In the first meeting we will be joined by Dr Nadine El-Enany to discuss her recent book (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (2020, Manchester University Press). In this study El-Enany shows how British immigration and nationality law has emerged as an extension of British colonialism. In her own words:

‘Britain’s borders, articulated and policed via immigration laws, maintain the global racial order established by colonialism, whereby colonised peoples are dispossessed of land and resources. They also maintain Britain as a racially and colonially configured space in which the racialised poor are subject to the operation of internal borders and are disproportionately vulnerable to street and state racial terror. Britain is thus not only bordered, but also racially and colonially ordered, through the operation of immigration control’ (El-Enany, 2019).

Dr El-Enany is Reader in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law. Her research lies in the fields of migration and refugee law, European Union law, protest and criminal justice and she has widely published in academic and media outlets. An introduction to (B)ordering Britain can be found here. 

If you would like to join the meeting please fill in this form by 18th January.