In recent years, European and global immigration enforcement regimes have expanded, and deportation practices have become increasingly brutal. Understanding their (post)colonial and racist dimensions, and their structural role in contemporary capitalism, is essential. But meaningful resistance must also engage with how these regimes are contested by those directly affected. My first book project is an ethnographic study of conflicts in the German deportation regime, examining how people threatened with deportation navigated, contested, and critiqued deportation in Germany after 2015. Based on long-term fieldwork and activism with migrants from West African countries, diaspora activists, and various collectives, the project maps the dynamics of struggle and state violence across institutions at the nexus of the German deportation regime, the asylum system and the Euro-African border regime. The study explores the experiences, knowledge, and political imaginaries that emerge from these struggles, and engages diaspora activists’ antiracist and anticolonial critiques of deportation and borders in dialogue with scholarship on racism, capitalism, and post-, decolonial, and abolitionist critiques of the nation-state order.

Positioned at the intersection of anthropology, critical border studies, and engaged research, the book contributes to debates on deportation, law, state violence, racism, and resistance by dispossessed groups. It builds on my dissertation, based on fieldwork primarily conducted between late 2017 and early 2020 in Germany, with additional remote research and short visits to other European and West African countries thereafter. For the monograph, I will conduct complementary fieldwork in West Africa. Adopting a scholar-activist approach, the project addresses how borders create and maintain global inequality—particularly through racism—and how this is actively contested. It foregrounds the critical analyses, proposals and organising models developed by those most affected, showing how precarious actors articulate not only powerful critiques but also practical alternatives to European deportation and border policies.