This chapter studies the border from the perspective of gender, exploring the desires present in the current images and practices associated with the Finnish–Russian border and the act of crossing it. The analysis is based on long-term ethnographic work with autoethnographic observations of the border, border-crossings and the border area on both sides of Finnish–Russian border since the beginning of the 2000s. The chapter explores gendered border-produced desires through the prism of resentment and nostalgia, the sources of which we see in the perceptions and memories of Second World War and the Cold War era on the one hand, and in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Socialism on the other. This is accompanied by different desires for crossing the border among border area residents of different backgrounds. For some the border represents a guarantee of national and personal security; for others the border represents access to desired other spaces: for Finnish border-crossers the ‘home’ and battle landscapes lost in the Second World War; and for the Russian-speaking immigrants living in Finland the welfare state and social security lost after the collapse of the Soviet system, which, it is believed, can be rediscovered on the other side of the border.

Our ethnographic research aimed at exploring the communicative practices of police officers in Germany when encountering speakers of different languages. However, we soon realised that they face similar communicative issues in many other encounters. Therefore, this chapter widens the focus, not only studying communicative practices when different ‘named languages’ are involved, but also exploring encounters involving differing language varieties, styles and registers; these differences are not grounded in nationality or culture but in the citizens’ class, community, state of mind and more. In these encounters, police officers routinely reach a sufficient level of understanding by mixing languages and language varieties, by using gestures, by relying on common-sense sequences of bureaucracy, and ultimately by employing the potential to use violence. Surprisingly, the main challenge – and the main source of misunderstanding – is not translation in a linguistic sense, but the need to translate complex everyday situations according to organisational guidelines and legal norms. Communicative practices are intertwined with ‘doing police’ – the challenge of translating between citizens’ expectations and organisational rationalities of the police.

This chapter examines the ways in which women who have migrated from post-socialist countries to Italy and Finland narrate their reasons for migrating. Drawing on two different ethnographic research projects conducted in two different settings, the chapter analyses how migration can be a strategy for escaping certain gender relations or an attempt to take full advantage of other configurations of them. We explore the different dimensions of desire by looking at the continuum from sex to love as ways to ensure a better future and how this continuum sits in the post-socialist gender orders and their renegotiation in these migratory contexts. Moreover, we argue that mainstream migration literature needs to reconsider the idea of the migrant as an economically rational individual by taking into account the importance of desire as a driver of migration and as a key force which shapes gendered migratory mobilities.

This Afterword provides reflections on individual chapters and the broader project that centres imperialism and its legacies for understanding both international and global inequalities. In particular, it draws out the significance of critical analysis of the violence of colonial capitalism more generally, within which taxation was a strategy of extraction and exploitation. While the method of analysis resonates with critical historical approaches of imperialism and its lasting legacies, the rich and empirically substantiated discussions of institutional arrangements that served to uphold extraction, often through brutal violence, are acknowledged. Another theme the chapter draws attention to is that of resistance to the imperial project. It concludes by offering some observations on how imperial extraction becomes disarticulated from the post-1945 international development framework. It also raises the question of how a just reparation may be effected without reproducing the logics of colonial violence.

Largely theoretical, this chapter develops Moore’s approach to studying social movements within an integrated theory of capitalism. First, it critiques current social movement studies research, to demonstrate the need for a historical materialist approach to studying social struggles. After establishing this, it adopts social reproduction theory (SRT) as a way forward. SRT, although often applied to domestic labour or the household, should be extended to questions of ecology via eco-socialism. By employing an epistemic shift to the background conditions of possibility for both social and societal, crisis tendencies beyond the economic are revealed alongside the constitutive role of social struggle in pushing forward contradictions that mark the present. Crucially, a labour-oriented starting point is revealing for questions of ecology. Where eco-socialist theory allows the extension of SRT into nature relations, SRT recentres political potential, not on an end pre-ordained by the system's structures, but on agency and collective struggle. Building on this, the epistemic shift that reveals these background conditions also lets us withdraw from capital’s given terms, and a form of class coherence emerges. Drawing on emergent class analysis, agency is not just given; the potential for rupture is activated through struggle. This chapter also introduces the incorporated comparison.

Nationalist ways of thinking assign orderliness to the world when each person can be assigned to a (single) territory and ideally be moved to it. Maintaining the sort of order that policing requires is not prima facie nationalist, but police officers often use nationalist discourses in order to express imaginaries of nationalist orderliness. For the people they deal with are not only a threat to the moral or public order, but also to these assignations of belonging to the policed territory and the local orders. In this chapter, I shall focus of the functions of these imaginaries of nationalist belonging within police discourses, using ethnographic field work with police forces in Saxony and beyond.

In this chapter, I reflect on the relation of police–minority interactions to the contexts that condition the shape of these encounters and which the encounters, in turn, sustain. These are the context of law (the relation of ‘underground’ categories of race to supposedly race-neutral bureaucratic and legal processes); the context of work (the relation of police race-making to the tragic properties of the police mandate), and the context of inequality (the relation of situated police re-enactments of difference to the already existing structure and cultural representation of racialised injustice). My claim is that police action draws upon a system of racialised categorisation and puts its categories to work situationally, while also re-authorising and putting back into circulation social knowledge about racialised difference, as well as the generic idea that ‘race’ is and should be a relevant category for thinking about crime, ordering and justice.

Not all borders are the same, and they have a habit of both changing over time and being different according to where you have come from and where you are going. Asylum seekers and other migrants arriving on the island of Lesvos were attempting to cross into the European Union and had mostly come from war-torn regions further to the east and south, and were looking for a better life. Yet there were different kinds of borders being crossed on the island, triggered by different kinds of desire: Euro-American women visiting the island because of its association with the poet Sappho were crossing from what they saw as heteronormative space into lesbian-friendly space; and some women residents of the island would cross the Greek–Turkish border on a weekly ferry to go shopping (both for goods and occasionally illicit affairs) in the bazaar in the Turkish coastal town of Ayvalik. The chapter shows that the borders that people cross or transgress generate different kinds of desires according to the historical moment and where people are coming from.

The migration and deportation regime is characterised by uneven power relations between state actors and non-citizens – in this context, those with precarious legal status. While both sides possess a certain range of agency, which is constantly challenged and contested, non-citizens with precarious legal status rely not only on information dispersed within various networks, but also on the transmission of information by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). Based on this information, non-citizens can contest bureaucratic decisions and organise their own actions and reactions. Moments of porous or lacking information that reduce knowledge and action potential thus become crucial, because they inhibit individuals from making ‘informed decisions’. In this contribution, I examine ‘deportation talks’ that happen prior to deportation procedures through the lens of ‘translation’ and critically analyse how deportation orders and dates are communicated by SLBs, how information is shaped by SLBs and how power asymmetries come into being. The chapter develops three modes of translation that could be found in the collected data and argues that these shape everyday migrant–bureaucrat encounters and affect negotiations between officers and migrant individuals concerning their respective deportation. These three modes of translation lead to different stages of non-citizens being ‘lost in translation’ and portray the absurdity and abundance of these deportation meetings, in which more confusion is created than knowledge produced. The presented data derives from participant observation in a Swiss cantonal police unit and two Swiss migration offices, all in charge of planning (and implementing) deportation orders.

This chapter investigates the colonial tax system in Indonesia under Dutch rule. It demonstrates how in contemporary colonial logic, taxation, socio-economic development, and equality were seen as intrinsically connected. Taxation, and integrated systems of coerced labour, were presented as important pillars in colonial ‘civilisational’ projects of state formation, governance, and bureaucratisation. Far from simple extractive instruments deployed to fund empire, taxes were seen as integral administrative and disciplinary instruments to enhance economic centralisation, equality, capitalisation, monetisation, and the political transformation and reorganisation of colonised societies. The monetary tax system was designed to curtail the exploitative character of previous systems of labour exploitation and distribute the tax burden more equally among colonised populations across the archipelago. However, the limited capacity and considerable dependence of the Dutch administration on local rulers obstructed the supposed transformative power of taxation. Tensions between colonial policy and practice were resolved on the spot through negotiation, rendering a weak institutional infrastructure and preventing the emergence of a transparent and just bureaucracy, which ultimately only enhanced political and fiscal inequality.

This chapter analyses the configurations of a transnational cooperation police programme for Portuguese-speaking African students in Portugal (PALOP). I show how the policy of Lusophony, which aims to promote the translation of late postcolonial differences, in practice produces spaces of othering and racialisation. In a learning context charged with national and historical references, the African cadets witness another side of the virtuous Lusophony. Based on historical and ethnographic data, I describe how despite the promised solidarity of the cooperation, the imperative colonial past still claims dominance, generating multiple ambiguities in the learning and social environments.

This chapter links the historic Antemurale Christianitatis narrative of Croatia’s role as a bulwark separating ‘Christian Western civilisation’ from ‘Balkan barbarism’ to recent policies and media representations that gender and sexualise the nation. Croatia’s liminal position between Europe and the Balkans epitomises the desire for the respective ‘other’ on both sides, while it draws its own raison d’être from separating the two. Hence, Croatia can best be conceptualised as an ambiguous, contested site that is constantly (re)produced by and simultaneously produces desire. Politicized representations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity are most visible in the discourses on the ambiguous role of Croatian ex-generals in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Homeland War’ (1991–95) in which Croatia gained independence from Yugoslavia. In public discourse, the military success of Croatia – and ultimately the image of Croatia as a nation – is closely linked to the sexualised, mythic image of one man, former Lieutenant General Ante Gotovina. The chapter analyses a 2001 biography of Gotovina and ensuing film and television series adaptations from 2019. It argues that the narratives sketched therein construct the nation as being in need of a male protector and locate Croatia as wedged between an immoral Europe on one side and an uncivilised Balkans on the other.