This chapter seeks keywords and concepts that will enable us to grasp the contradictory and conflictive globality of the current moment and sharpen our analysis of equally contradictory and conflictive global pasts. In a plea to move beyond equating the global with openness, connection, and integration, I address the role of closure, boundaries, and limits in global history in a wider sense. For this purpose, I explore in an experimental and deliberately open-ended fashion how thinking about global spherescan be utilised fruitfully for the current practice of history writing. The first part explores the radically inclusive yet claustrophobic vision of the globe as a closed sphere from which there is no escape. Building on earlier closed-world and one-world discourses, this thinking gained prominence after the Second World War in the face of the threat of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation. I then move to think about the globe as composed of many bounded spheres – geopolitical but also social. Here, I take central examples from the realm of communication and language and discusses the public sphere as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary figure of thought.

The All-Affected Principle (AAP) is a simple idea that captures a core democratic intuition: enfranchising the people who are governed. Yet democratic theorists have often shied away from the various conceptual challenges that explicating its meaning arises. This chapter therefore articulates a reformulation of the AAP that is (a) pluralistic, which means it is more flexible in terms of both the kind of effect it examines as triggering right for participation as well as the kind of influence and forms of participation that may be required and (b) refocuses the principle around social power rather than mere affectedness. The implications of this reformulation are briefly considered in the context of referenda as a tool for determining the boundaries of political communities and it is concluded that such referenda need to be institutionalized and built into democratic system, in the same way procedures for constitutional amendments allow for infrequent but crucial examination of the political communitys foundations.

The All-Affected Principle is of limited help in thinking about immigration. Immigration raises important normative questions about who should have access to citizenship, what is required for the full social and economic inclusion of immigrants, what legal rights immigrants admitted by a state should have, how migrants who enter and settle without permission should be treated, what criteria should be used in selecting and excluding immigrants, what states ought to do in dealing with refugees, and whether controlling immigration is really morally justifiable at all. The All-Affected Principle is directly relevant only to the first question of who should have access to citizenship, and even in that case, it needs to be supplemented. The other questions are not primarily about who should participate in democratic decision-making but about what justice requires and about the moral constraints on democratic discretion. So, using the All-Affected Principle to think about those questions would not help, and starting from that principle in thinking about immigration might lead us to miss the key normative issues.

This chapter discusses the entanglement of Brexit with the subsequent pandemic and the war in Ukraine, both of which have been used to muddy Brexit’s economic impact. It first analyses the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and of those politicians advocating for and negotiating Brexit. Those negotiations are bound to continue while politicians are reluctant to acknowledge Brexit as unfinished business. It then contextualizes contemporary fears of unlimited immigration as an echo of postimperial anxieties about British identity. These also feature in literary responses to Brexit which make them condition-of-England novels rather than investigations of wider Anglo-European relations. Forging a dialogue between the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the fourteenth-century bubonic plague suggests that political leadership and economic steer are crucial in determining a country’s recovery. How the pandemic was handled in the UK, paired with the economic impact of Brexit, aggravated the global supply issues caused by the war in Ukraine. This was not an inevitable outcome.

This chapter traces the rise and decline of the conviction that Britain was a nation uniquely hospitable to refugees and especially proud of its longstanding traditions of asylum. In fact, social attitudes and state policies towards migrants fluctuated dramatically throughout the modern era, triggered by a variety of controversial or destabilizing events ranging from dynastic royal marriages to continental revolutions and international conflicts. By 1905 Britain had passed its first general immigration control act, providing a framework governing who could be permitted to enter the country and under what conditions, regulations that have continued to be refined and extended to this day. Yet this legislation also took up issues about statehood and citizenship that can be traced back to the French Revolution in 1789 and which reverberated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, issues that have been represented and explored in a wide range of literary and cultural genres by writers and artists including Charlotte Smith, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Agatha Christie, and Iris Murdoch. By 1960 a new post-war recognition of the scale of what was increasingly recognized as a fully global migration crisis had changed these insular local debates forever.

In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown – exiled from southern Chile – who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region.

This chapter considers non-EU nationals. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union provides common policies on borders, immigration and international protection, albeit that there are special regimes for Denmark and Ireland. The Schengen Borders Code governs the treatment of non-EU nationals at external borders. However, it is supplanted for many non-EU nationals by out-of-area border controls such as visa policy, carrier liability regimes and interception of non-EU nationals out at sea. Immigration policy requires States to deport non-EU nationals who are irregularly present in the Union unless there are strong compassionate grounds. EU law grants significant social rights to two types of non-EU national and their families: the worker resident and the long-term resident. Those seeking international protection can make only one application in the EU, which, usually, has to be in the State where they first enter the EU. They have a right to remain within the State pending consideration of their application. During this time, they must be provided with housing, food, healthcare and education for minors. These benefits are sparse and contingent on the applicant complying with reporting and accommodation requirements.

Popular sovereignty suffers many fictions, principally regarding equality. This chapter addresses a neglected form of inequality, by focusing on the concerns of borderland dwellers – citizens of the polity who reside at the outermost territorial reaches of the state. On paper, peripheral citizens are identical to any others. But borders necessarily operate over and against peripheral interests, representing the polity against its periphery. This chapter provides an in-depth illustration of security in the US–Mexico borderlands. It foregrounds three features of the borderlands: Surveillance, or the broadening of physical and technological infrastructure; heterogeneity, the multiple forms of authority; and vigilance, the increased role that citizens play in law enforcement. It advances two claims. The first is that state authority is heterogeneous and increasingly personalized in the borderlands and thus unaccountable to democratic control. The second is that policies in the borderlands are designed not in the name of peripheral citizens but against them – a condition that resembles a kind of colonialism.

When arriving by boat in Malta from Libya, migrants encounter a strong state and legal framework that shapes their mobilities and journeys. This chapter brings forward migrants’ lives in Malta’s reception structures. It reveals how people experience mobility as a form of stuckness, influenced by bureaucratic techniques of governance.

This chapter opens up space for rethinking the experiences, economies and governance of mobile life. It sheds light on aspects of comparison between migrants’ experiences in the fragmented context of Libya and in Malta’s legal framework, enabled through the book’s unique analytic of the journey. Journeys foster novel understandings of the intersections between economy and unauthorized migration, encapsulated by the concept of mobility economies. The ethnographic and analytical insights of the book furnish a new anthropology of mobility and economic life.

This chapter offers a temporal view on mobility: the ways in which migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system. Showing how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a bureaucratic landscape, it front stages the importance of the journey as an analytic for theorizing mobility.