Affective Bordering

Winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2025

A brilliant, original and indispensable book for today’s world! Focusing on Germany, Billy Holzberg convincingly directs our attention to the centrality of affect in the politics of migration and borders – not just to policy or law. He disrupts common sense by showing how both negative and positive emotions such as empathy work to reproduce the racialization of the German nation-state. As one of the new leading voices on the intersections of migration studies and queer and transnational feminism, Holzberg compellingly shows that those interested in addressing the deadly violence of borders must expand our affective and political grammars towards discomfort – only then will we be able to imagine alternatives to nationalism and violence.
—Miriam Ticktin, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre


As Angela Merkel proclaimed that ‘we can do this’, Germany stood as an exception in Europe, and she made clear that rationality and emotions were not incompatible. Billy Holzberg’s queer feminist reading, from Alan Kurdi’s death to sexual violence in Cologne, powerfully focuses on the affects mobilized. From hope and empathy to anger and fear, it incisively reveals how, paradoxically, ‘positive’ as well as ‘negative’ affects jointly contribute to bordering, i.e. drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, subjects and objects of affects respectively.
—Éric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Université Paris 8


Through a rich archive of political and policy moments, Affective bordering takes us under the skin of contemporary immigration politics and increasing authoritarianism. With queer theory at its beating heart, Holzberg reminds us that to build new borderless worlds, we must first think and feel differently. An urgent, energising analysis.
—Yasmin Gunaratnam, author of Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care