We are delighted to announce the winner of our 2025 Postgraduate Paper Prize:
Dr Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa (London School of Economics and Political Science): ‘From Migration Crisis’ to a Crisis of the Human: An anticolonial reading of the problem of the 21st Century’
This paper was recently presented at the Catalysts for Decolonisation conference in Cambridge. It draws on their doctoral research, On Ghostly Lives: Life, Death and the British Immigration Detention Estate, completed in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science in August 2025. More about their work can be found at: https://ghostlylivesaproject.wordpress.com/.
Congratulations Rémy-Paulin!
Abstract
The discourse of a ‘migration crisis’—or what Achille Mbembe (2024) has described as the ‘problem of the 21st century’—cannot be understood simply as a matter of numbers, borders, or displaced populations. What is at
stake is a deeper and more troubling crisis: a crisis of the human itself. Drawing on anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon (2008), Achille Mbembe (2001; 2019; 2024), and Sylvia Wynter (1994; 2001; 2003), this paper argues that the category of the human is neither self-evident nor universal. It is a manufactured story, a system of knowledge and power that has consistently overrepresented European, bourgeois and biocentric ways of being as if they were the only forms of human life. Building on my doctoral research on Britain’s immigration detention estate, I show how the figure of the Migrant comes to stand as a dialectical counterpart to ‘Man’, the privileged subject of the modern nation-state. The forced im/mobility of detained migrants—locked into spaces designed to render them rightless and disposable—exposes the violence inherent in the (un)making of the human. These practices exemplify what Wynter (2003) names ‘descriptive statements’: the classificatory codes that decide who can inhabit the category of the human, and who is cast outside it.
To treat migration simply as a political problem is to miss this more profound dimension. Border controls and detention regimes do more than regulate movement; they reproduce colonial grammars of personhood, sustaining hierarchies of life and death that stretch from empire to the present. An anticolonial reading of the ‘migration crisis’ therefore reveals its true stakes: it is not only about the governance of im/mobility, but about the ongoing struggle over what it means, and who is permitted, to be human.
More about this research: Methodologically, the paper draws on Poetic Inquiry, a practice of editing or reframing words, phrases, and sentences from interview transcripts into poetic or poem‑like prose. This project produces poems composed from oral and written testimony of former staff and detained people at Brook House IRC, evidence originally presented to the Brook House Inquiry established in 2019. The poems reframe bring readers into proximity with “the lived experience of confinement, rightlessness, and the state of deadness of migrants” (Twahirwa, 2025 ).
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