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This article explores the relationality of governance and resistance in the context of the constitution of refugee subjectivities in Malaysia. Whilst recognising their precarity, the article moves away from conceiving of refugees merely as victims subjected to violence and control, and to contribute to an emerging body of literature on migrant resistance. Its contribution lies in examining practices of resistance, and the specific context in which they emerge, without conceptualising power-resistance as a binary, and without conceiving of refugees as preconstituted subjects. Rather, drawing on the thought of Michel Foucault, the article examines how refugee subjectivities come into being through a play of governance-resistance, of practices and strategies that may be simultaneously affirmative, subversive, exclusionary, and oppressive. The relationality and mobility of this play is illustrated through an examination of practices surrounding UNHCR identity cards, community organisations, and education. Secondly, governance-resistance is conceptualised as a play of visibility and invisibility, understood both visually and in terms of knowledge production. What I refer to as the politics of (in)visibility indicates that refugee subjectivities are both constituted and become other than ‘the refugee’ through a continuous play of coming into being, becoming governable, claiming a presence, blending in and remaining invisible.

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and nondiscursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope.

This article engages in an experiment that aims to push critical/post-structuralist thought beyond its comfort zone. Despite its commitment to critiquing modern, liberal ontologies, the article claims that these same ontologies are often tacitly reproduced, resulting in a failure to grasp contemporary structures and histories of violence and domination. The article brings into conversation five selected critical scholars from a range of theoretical approaches and disciplines who explore the potential of the notion of 'fracture' for that purpose. The conversation revolves around political struggles at various sites -migrant struggles in Europe, decolonial struggles in Mexico, workers and peasant struggles in Colombia -in order to pintpoint how these struggles 'fracture' or 'crack' modern political frames in ways that neither reproduce them, nor lead to mere moments of disruption in otherwise smoothly functioning governmental regimes. Nor does such 'fracturing' entail the constructing of a 'complete' or 'coherent' vision of a politics to come. Instead, we detail the incoherent, tentative and multiple character of frames and practices of thought in struggle that nevertheless produce an (albeit open and contested) 'whole'.

This article explores dimensions of political action that transgress the limitations of traditionally modern, opposition-focused conceptualisations. While there has been a turn to new nonoppositional ontologies in the last decades, there has been less exploration of what this could mean concretely for a political activism that aims to go beyond mere 'micropolitical' transformation. To address this lack, this article examines the tensions between binarity and complexity through an engagement with political resistance against genetically modified organisms. This brings to light that the ontology of complexity pursued by some antigenetically modified organism activists is ultimately grounded in a binarisation of both politics (one is either 'for' or 'against' genetically modified organisms) and life (which is either 'natural' or 'unnatural'). Whilst problematic, this binarisation also informs the success of anti-genetically modified organism activism. An engagement with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, especially through the notion of the 'encounter', brings out this paradox and serves to radicalise the ontology of complexity argued for by anti-genetically modified organism activists in order to open up different avenues for thinking about and 'doing' political resistance.