Migration 1

Europe is not situated outside the postcolonial world. Colonial history still forms transfer of resources, neo-colonial domination, creditor-debtor relation, labour migration, imposition of wars on ex-colonies, etc.). Migration shows that the distance between the erstwhile colonised country and the colonial power is not great. People are coming to Europe. And it is a history of power. Europe does not have colonies any more but there is the whole question of neocolonialism, which is an integral part of global neoliberal capitalism.

*Ranabir Samaddar (2017, in German): Die Krise des Kapitalismus bedeutet nicht das Ende des Kapitalismus. In: glokal e.V. (Hrsg.): Connecting the dots. Lernen aus Geschichte(n) von Unterdrückung und Widerstand, p. 72.

Prof. Ranabir Samaddar is the director of the Calcutta Research Group and conducts research on migration and flight, the theory and practice of dialogue, nationalism and post-colonial statehood in South Asia, and new regimes of technological restructuring and labour control.

Samaddar is posing a central question in current debates: how can one grasp the historical and global dimensions of migration? How does the global division of the world relate to neo-colonial relationships of dependency? Does migration only move from the Global South to the Global North, as an attempt to escape from the effects of global patterns of dependency? Does it in this way propel the realities of post-colonial exploitation and oppression into Europe’s “white field of vision”? Wars are mostly take place in the Global South. Poverty, hunger and drought, on the other hand, are not social phenomena that can be explained purely in local and regional terms. Their relationship with global capitalist contexts, in which the Global North continues to be hegemonic, is patent. The wars in the Global South are being waged with weapons made in the Global North. Debt in the Global South leads to profits and economic power in the Global North. Samaddar's position is key to the argument for a global understanding of responsibility, which perspective is currently insufficiently reflected in debates about migration.

Ranabir Samaddar (2020): The Postcolonial Age of Migration. New Delhi: Routledge.

2017