This chapter focuses on the various challenges that African migrant players encounter and navigate as they seek to reproduce career mobility in Europe and South-East Asia. Some of these challenges contour the African migrant experience more generally, and include adjusting to a different climate, food, language and culture. Others, though, are found to be more specific to football and incorporate the particularities of the football environment, culture, expectations and playing styles of any given club or league. African players frequently lack resources and advantageous relations while competing with thousands of others for a very limited number of opportunities. This situation is compounded by racialisation and experiences of racism. They must also negotiate and meet multiple expectations from families, agents, clubs and coaches, as well as those that are self-imposed. Therefore, most African players’ careers are dominated by pressures and ongoing uncertainty that often leads to downward mobility in the industry. Yet is argued that players’ embodied belief in their abilities to succeed, and the need to make their migration project valuable for themselves, their family and wider community frequently mitigate the disillusionment and setbacks that they often face abroad. This is because staying in the game and keeping the hope of ‘making it’ alive gives meaning to the struggle, regardless of how precarious the present may be.

This chapter analyzes recent protests and NGO activities against the open-pit gold and copper mines in the Valandovo–Bogdanci–Gevgelija and Halkidiki regions. In the most fertile region and the center of organic food production in the Republic of North Macedonia, the local population and environmental activists organized protests and four referendums, one of which was against the construction of an open-pit copper/gold mine where sulfuric acid and arsenic would be used to extract the metals. A similar open-pit gold mine was constructed on the Halkidiki peninsula in Greece, which prompted collaboration between eco-activists on both sides of the border. This is undeniably border porosity caused by transnational mining corporations and environmental activists opposing the corporate interests.

This introduction sets the scene for the so-called ‘crisis’ of 2015–16, while providing an overview of the book as a whole. It shows how, in a situation perceived as critical due to increased migratory ‘pressures’ as well as mounting deaths at sea, the EU advanced its 2015 ‘European Agenda on Migration’ based on a long-standing preventative approach. Yet the chapter also highlights the ways in which this agenda and the crisis politics in which it is grounded are politically contested, not least by people on the move themselves. As such, it makes the case for an analysis of the contested politics of testimony, based on a counter-archive co-produced with people on the move. This, the chapter argues, importantly enables appreciation of the political claims or demands that precarious migratory journeys and experiences give rise to.

This chapter will explore the multivalent discourses of civilization, savagery, and manhood that run through some of the Mexican and U.S. textual residues of the1915 Plan de San Diego uprising in South Texas, and its brutal repression. Examining the cultural texts produced during and after the conflict offers insight into the ways in which the historical violence of U.S. expansion and its contestation were imagined by U.S. authors, law enforcement, and press, as well as ethnic Mexican radicals and militants. While the Plan de San Diego visionaries called for the liberation of the black race and an end to the racist oppression of U.S. capitalism, their analysis of the present and vision of the future evoke a more ambiguous reading of blackness than their call for common struggle might initially suggest.

Chapter 2 highlights the ways in which people on the move were silenced in debates surrounding the ‘crisis’ of 2015–16, defining this as a form of epistemic violence that constitutes the knowing subject on the basis of a delegitimisation of other subjects and forms of knowledge. In order to challenge this process of silencing, the chapter emphasises the importance of engaging a counter-archive that provides openings for ‘unstated histories’ of people crossing the Mediterranean during 2015 and 2016. Setting out the politico-methodological approach on which the research is based, it emphasises the criticality of engaging people on the move as co-producers of knowledge with ‘expertise’ in their own right. Yet the chapter also points to the ongoing challenges of such research, highlighting the importance of moments where voice is ‘taken’ in disruptive terms, and emphasising that silence itself must not be betrayed through the research process.

This chapter provides an introduction to the politics of migration in the Middle East, paying particular attention to the importance of state policies. There are, broadly, four time periods that should be discussed: the colonial period, encompassing the era of the Ottoman Empire and the colonial Mandate period that ended, roughly, in the years following the end of World War Two. This is a period characterised by a rather-free circulation of movement within this broad region, as well as long-distance emigration to the Americans, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. It is also marked by waves of immigration into the region from Europe. The postcolonial period, from the late 1940s until the late 1960s, coincides with the rise of Arab nationalism, as cross-border population mobility is driven mainly by political, rather than economic, factors. The oil boom period, from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, is dominated by economically driven cross-border migratory flows, although national and regional politics continues to play an important role. Finally, the period of de-Arabisation, from the 1980s to today, is characterised by an influx of Asian and sub-Saharan migrants and the rise of irregular migration, as well as increasing cooperation between Arab and European states.

By examining the Irish context, this chapter presents the favouritism continuum as the system through which racial inequalities, injustices and economic exploitations are proliferated in modern states. It outlines how the system operates through four interrelated structures. First is group favouritism, which ensures some groups are more favoured over others. The second is social acceptance, which determines where groups are placed on the continuum. Third is psychological implicit bias, which operates in racially stratified labour markets in conjunction with the continuum. Here you see how implicit bias produces explicit discrimination and how groups on lower racial strata try to circumvent its negative effect. The last structure comprises human contact – the connectors through which the racial stratification system operates. The chapter concludes by making three key arguments. First, that the favouritism continuum determines the outcome of actors by the position they occupy on the continuum. Secondly, that although racial stratification is restrictive, the outcome is fluid and changeable due to minority agency and individual mobility. Thirdly, the continuum is the machinery which maintains homogeneity in a heterogeneous labour market, thus (re)producing racial inequality.

The book’s concluding chapter offers an overview of the main arguments presented across it. It pays particular attention to the originality of the book vis-à-vis its focus on the Global South, and its attempt to present a complex picture of how foreign and migration politics interact. The chapter also presents a number of possible avenues for future research, focusing on diverse regions of the world and a range of different types of mobility.

This chapter explores the difficulty of separating the working class from the trade unions; the party therefore accepted (albeit reluctantly) the unions’ existence whilst criticising the unions’ supposed vulnerability to control by politically motivated groups who usurped the unions’ for their own political purposes. An important figure in the development of Conservatism’s strategy was Disraeli, whose government passed legislation for the unions’ development. Many Conservatives feared industrialisation would, via the growth of democracy, culminate in socialism and saw unions as part of this trend. The response was to accord the unions a degree of legal privilege that was intended to be a settlement of the union question. Industrial conflict, however, re-emerged during the 1890s and in the years before 1914 there was an upsurge in industrial unrest that suggested a transformation of politics. This was reflected in what many Conservatives saw as granting excessive legal privileges to unions that now displayed a far higher degree of industrial and political activism, reflected in the formation of the Labour Party. The party, however, failed to develop a coherent response to the rise of the organised working class.

We do not just live with our sibling relationships, we also live with the idea of siblings. Sibling relationships are imbued with ideas, ideals and imagined connections. From, often contradictory, ideas about how siblingship ought to be done and what sibling roles should entail to lay theories about how being a sibling might affect the ways we ‘turn out’ in life, this chapter explores normative ideas about what sibling relationships should mean. The chapter indicates how, despite the differences, complexities and ambivalences in our ideas about what siblingship ought to entail, these ideals inform the ways we make sense of ourselves and our relationships. The chapter explores gaps between idealised and lived sibling relationships as well as considering the role of yearned-for or imagined siblings. The chapter concludes by unpacking the role of siblings in informing kinship expertise and lay understandings of how siblings (or an absence of siblings) affect how we ‘turn out’.

This chapter draws attention to the diverse pathways and players’ experiences as they negotiate initial transnational moves to Europe and South-East Asia. It also examines the implications that the pathways and experiences have for a player’s career trajectory. Whether following conventional pathways or less formalised routes, the ability to navigate an uncertain and unpredictable industry is shown to be a key asset for African players. The chapter also illustrates how power imbalances in the social infrastructure of football’s global production network often leaves players in a marginalised position. Many experience fraud or are left with few opportunities to achieve their aspiration to make it in professional football and ‘become a somebody’. This is a harsh reality of labouring in a highly competitive, speculative and commercialised industry. It also reflects the tension between the interests of powerful actors and those of the player. This tension is visible in both Europe and South-East Asia. In this way, players moving to these destinations share similar experiences of a challenging liminality. The chapter argues, however, that continuing to speculate on their physical capital and talent in this initial stage of a potential professional career abroad should not be seen as an act of naivety or despair. Instead, the belief in one’s abilities and a strategic pursuit of the futures they envisage is indicative of considerable resilience.

This chapter examines the multiple discourses of death and manhood that emerged around the military execution of thirteen black soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry in 1917. The presence of armed black soldiers in the nation’s uniform threatened to subvert the racial and gendered order of Jim Crow. Within this fraught context, the Twenty-Fourth’s attack on white policemen in Houston and their subsequent hanging provided a flexibly imagery for imagining black manhood. While African American writers invoked the soldiers’ manly death to denounce the racial order against which they had struck, the same imagery was used by the white press to subtly legitimize their punishment and obscure the intelligibility of black dissent.