The modern border is not simply a line separating one country from another. It is a political instrument, one shaped by empire, racial hierarchy, and a capitalist world system that has never distributed mobility equally. Borders allow wealth, weapons, and capital to circulate with remarkable freedom, while people displaced by war, coloniality, economic inequality, and climate change are detained, deported or denied safety and protection. The same powers that help produce displacement frequently reserve for themselves the authority to decide who may cross, who must remain, and where each person belongs.

Bringing together writers and leading advocates Gracie Mae Bradley, Harsha Walia, and John Washington, this panel will examine the case for moving beyond borders. Drawing on abolitionist, anti-colonial and human-centred perspectives, the panelists will explore how border regimes operate, whose interests they serve, and how they might be dismantled. Most importantly, the discussion will invite participants to imagine what a border-free world could look like.

To imagine a border-free world is not to erase place, culture, or community. It is to imagine political belonging freed from the accidents of birthplace, imperial cartography, and its imaginative geographies. What might become possible if people possessed both the freedom to move and the freedom to remain? What if migration were understood not as a threat to be contained, but as an enduring and beautiful expression of human life?

Featuring:

• Activist and writer Harsha Walia, author of Undoing Border Imperialism (2013) and Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (2021)
• Writer, policy expert, and campaigner Gracie Mae Bradley, co-author of Against Borders (2022)
• Journalist John Washington, author of The Case for Open Borders (2024)
• Moderated by Dr Mujib Abid, an Afghan-Australian scholar of modern Afghan history, peace studies and political theory

Session introduced by WBW Canada Organizer Rachel Small.