The Un-Human Beings

This essay traces the political and legal discourses around migrants and refugees in two distinct conditions: the postcolonial and the postsocialist of India and Poland, respectively. The two countries have recently turned to nationalist right-wing politics with an increasingly hostile focus on foreign Others, particularly Muslims. In the context of increased global surveillance and criminalization of Muslims, we show how the bodies of Muslim migrants are dehumanized and constructed as threats, denying their humanity in the process. We do this through the two cases of Ayub and Ameer, two Muslim men navigating their “illegality” in two different contexts in India and Poland. This essay is a contribution to the literature on postcolonial and postsocialist theories and critical debates about the possibilities of dialogue between postsocialist and postcolonial geographies. The examples we use demonstrate that the postcolonial and postsocialist nation-states respond to global phenomena such as migration and Islamophobia in ways that have discernible traces of their histories and are constituted distinctively from the western metropoles.