The un-human beings: the denial of Muslim migrants' bodies in India and Poland

This paper traces the political and legal discourses migrants 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 bodies of Muslim migrants are dehumanized and constructed as threats denying their humanity in the process. We do this through two cases of Ayub and Ameer; two Muslim men navigating their ‘illegality’ in two different contexts in India and Poland. This paper is a contribution to the literature on postcolonial and postsocialist theories and critical debates about the possibilities of dialogues between postsocialist and postcolonial geographies. The examples that 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.

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Interventions: Kumar, M., & Narkowicz, K. (2023). The Un-Human Beings: The Denial of Muslim Migrants’ Bodies in India and Poland. Interventions, 25(4), 413–430. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099942 . It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.