Thematic edition: Contemporary Migrations
People are invited, summoned or even, with distressing frequency, captured in order to build cities and its goods, to fight, kill, and die to safeguard its threatened territories and worlds, to populate and discover places to be invented after their invasion… People escape invaded places… People escape persecution of their ideas, their ancestry, their beliefs… People escape hunger and thirst, disease, war… This is the case since we were aware of the world. If population fluxes travel the planet across all human memory in which it is inscribed, it is appropriate to ask, now, how these migratory travels are articulated in the imperatives of the neoliberal world-system (Immanuel Wallerstein).
If the wealth of the modern nations dates back to colossal genocides perpetrated across every continent, to this day this foundational violence has not ceased to enable the dissemination of capitalism and its array of social consequences. This way of life – of death – imposed by fire and iron since the 16th century, echoes with renewed vigour in the universal everyday life of consumerism (Zygmunt Bauman) and of labour (Byung-Chul Han) and, increasingly, of survival. There is something that is often repeated and propagated: more wealth is always required. Capitalist culture confers the principle of its own endless, carcinogenic (Claude Lévi-Strauss), growth.
New territories, new needs, new forms of exploitation: the rhythm of modernisation of the system is one of war (Werner Sombart) and of the ever-renewed imperialism (Rosa Luxemburg). Violence in capitalism is, then, a sine qua non attribute. This violence travels the planet in always-perverse migratory dynamics, sometimes making explicit the semantic (political) limits of supposedly universal rights (Hannah Arendt, sometimes re-founding new statutes of killability (Giorgio Agamben), sometimes potentializing in others new forms of exploitation (Abdelmalek Sayad). These others, the enemy vital to the political community (Carl Schmitt), are indispensable to the regime of neoliberal planetary superexploitation; available for platform work, devoid of rights, for continuous consumption, and eventually for drafting into armed conflict, legal or otherwise. In the global civil war that neoliberalism (Pierre Dardot & Christian Laval) disseminates, migrants are at mercy, are undesirables (Michel Agier), always there so that all may function: work, consumption, war, credit, police, hatred, and democracy. Against this figure in particular, contemporary fascism invests in every acting moment (Vladimir Safatle).
Amongst the persistent worsening of work and living conditions, migratory fluxes configure themselves, in popular imagination, as one of the great sources of problems. With this, the focus of political foundation is steered away from the catastrophic capitalist actuality: neoliberal logic, which aims always towards maximum profit, to the detriment of life, be it the planet’s or the workers’ – exploited to the brink of survival, preferably willingly. There is an intrinsic interweaving of population fluxes and economic dynamics; with capitalism, however, this interweaving becomes urgent and grave.
Along the violent history of capitalism, migrations have followed economic interest, being welcome in countries that traditionally receive migrants, guaranteeing the work that the local populace refuses to do. Oftentimes, migration is forced, or at least coerced, so that large contingents of migrants serve as cheap labour in their destination. In any way, such as observed by Abdelmalek Sayad, the image of the migrant is stripped of its existential complexity, silenced within this generalised simplification. In this sense, the question of migrations describes and highlights historical-political paths that question the so-called judicial territory of the nation-state.
In the development of problematisation, Sayad unveils the logical reductionism that relegated the migrant to the convenient image of one that is temporarily in a different country, merely as circumstantial, economically useful workforce to the society that takes them in. Eventually becoming undesirable (Agier) and, not rarely), killable (Agamben) when they are no longer useful for labour, the migrant begins to circulate the blindspots of societies, not event belonging to whence they came, and never to where they’ve gone. This shadow of indistinction that embraces the no-longer-useful migrant places them in social and judicial chaos.
This issue of the World Tensions Journal proposes to think on the issue of migrations as a phenomenon singularly conformed in modernity since its inception with capitalism: migrants are the true proletariat of a globalised capitalism (Safatle). An overexploited, cheap workforce – indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. From the slaver regime to the post-industrialisation platform, capitalism is ceaselessly updated, multiplying the population fluxes that are essential to the exploitation of any one place. Far from be what is left, this population is precisely what the nation-state produces constantly: the killable subject. Without it, there is no sustainable capitalism.
This call comes from the context of the research “Institutional cartography of the migratory dynamics of Ceará”, in progress since 2023, financed by the Fundação Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and conducted in the Observatory of Nationalities, in the Ceará State University. In order to composse this issue of World Tensions, we invite researchers interested in this theme to submit articles and essays that are preferably oriented towards some of the following topics:
- Migratory dynamics of Ceará
- Migration and refuge theories
- Neoliberalism and deterioration of migrant work
- Xenophobic discourse in social media and culture of hatred towards foreigners
- Representation of migrants or refugees in cinema or literature
- Media stereotypes of migrants and refugees
- Public policies for integration of migrants
- Capitalistic expansion and expulsion of populations
- Migrations in Latin America and the Caribbean
- Internal migratory fluxes in Brazil
- Penal treatment of the stateless, refugees, and migrants.
- Accords, treaties, and international organisations
- Wars and migration
- Climate refugees
- Migrant women and children
- Human trafficking
- The issue of migrations in diverse contemporary geopolitical contexts
We will also accept reviews of books published within the last two years and novel Portuguese translations of acknowledged relevance in the study of migrations. Works must be submitted in Portuguese, English, or Spanish in the World Tensions Journal’s online system no later than the 30th of April, 2026. Files submitted must be identified with the code [#TMMIGRA] in their filenames as well as being compliant with the journal’s authors’ directives.
World Tensions online system:
https://revistas.uece.br/index.php/tensoesmundiais
World Tensions authors’ directives:
https://revistas.uece.br/index.php/tensoesmundiais/about/submissions
Editors for this thematic edition:
Natalia Monzón Montebello
Denise Cristina Bomtempo
Leila Passos Bezerra
Marcílio Medeiros Silva
marcilio.medeiros@aluno.uece.br
Érica Sales
