Affective bordering: Race, deservingness and the emotional politics of migration control

Winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2025

A brilliant, original and indispensable book for today’s world! Focusing on Germany, Billy Holzberg convincingly directs our attention to the centrality of affect in the politics of migration and borders – not just to policy or law. He disrupts common sense by showing how both negative and positive emotions such as empathy work to reproduce the racialization of the German nation-state. As one of the new leading voices on the intersections of migration studies and queer and transnational feminism, Holzberg compellingly shows that those interested in addressing the deadly violence of borders must expand our affective and political grammars towards discomfort – only then will we be able to imagine alternatives to nationalism and violence.
―Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre

As Angela Merkel proclaimed that ‘we can do this’, Germany stood as an exception in Europe, and she made clear that rationality and emotions were not incompatible. Billy Holzberg’s queer feminist reading, from Alan Kurdi’s death to sexual violence in Cologne, powerfully focuses on the affects mobilized. From hope and empathy to anger and fear, it incisively reveals how, paradoxically, ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ affects jointly contribute to bordering, i.e. drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, subjects and objects of affects respectively.
―Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Université Paris 8

Through a rich archive of political and policy moments, Affective bordering takes us under the skin of contemporary immigration politics and increasing authoritarianism. With queer theory at its beating heart, Holzberg reminds us that to build new borderless worlds, we must first think and feel differently. An urgent, energising analysis.
―Yasmin Gunaratnam, author of Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care

‘As one of the new leading voices on the intersections of migration studies and queer and transnational feminism, Holzberg compellingly shows that those interested in addressing the deadly violence of borders must expand our affective and political grammars towards discomfort – only then will we be able to imagine alternatives to nationalism and violence.’
Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre

‘From hope and empathy to anger and fear, Holzberg incisively reveals how “positive” as well as “negative” affects jointly contribute to bordering, drawing a line between “us” and “them”, subjects and objects of affects.’
Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Université Paris 8

Affective bordering is a powerful exploration of the emotional politics of borders, demonstrating how racial and national boundaries are secured through the political mobilisation and unequal distribution of affect. Examining key events in the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Germany, it traces how the initial hope and empathy of the early days of the long summer of migration of 2015 could so easily give way to national anger, fear and shamelessness in the years that followed.

In developing the concept of affective bordering, the book challenges the notion that appeals to positive affective forces like compassion necessarily work as a counter to negative emotions such as anger, resentment and fear. Instead, it reveals the racial grammars of deservingness that shape practices of affective bordering and that privilege the affective life of the nation over the concerns, experiences and demands of migrants.

Combining queer feminist theories of affect with postcolonial border and migration studies, Affective bordering offers a thought-provoking perspective on the reproduction and contestation of borders in today’s world.