As witnesses to the ongoing genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and further afield, we will not start this editorial with the horrifying, ever-increasing statistics,¹ but instead with the words of two Palestinian writers. In November 2023, Nour al-Din Hajjaj, a 27-year-old Palestinian writer from Gaza, author of two novels and one play, wrote:

I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children's laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.

 One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings so that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold it back.²

Nour's words were written only weeks before being killed by an Israeli airstrike. We include them here and again in the corresponding “Manifesto for Bread and Roses” that follows this editorial, insisting that they continue to travel across time and space.

The second writer is the Palestinian feminist Fadwa Tuqan, born in the West Bank city of Nablus in 1917 and heralded by Mahmoud Darwish as the “mother of Palestinian poetry.” Her poem “The Deluge and the Tree” (1988) offers her vision of the future, in defiance of the war and violence of the Nakba (the Palestinian “catastrophe”) seeking to “smash” and leave “no life in the Tree,”

When the Tree rises up, the branches

shall flourish green and fresh in the sun,

the laughter of the Tree shall leaf beneath the sun

and birds shall return.

Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.

The birds shall return.³

In opening with Nour's and Fadwa's words, we write this editorial in the spirit of the critical frameworks that guide our own individual and collective work, including the work of this journal and its insistence on situating (forced) migration in its wider historical and societal context. This means dwelling carefully not only on people's experiences of migration and displacement but also on the rights of all people to be more than numbers or the “objects” of research. We thus simultaneously denounce the long histories of physical and epistemic violence, displacement, and dispossession to which Palestinians and other peoples have been subjected, while acknowledging displaced people's words and knowledge as knowledge in their own right, created by individuals and communities propelling their own dreams and insistence upon joy, beauty, and the quest for a just and better future.

Migration and Society remains a space in which we tend to the processes and effects of displacement, evictions, and expulsions experienced by individuals and communities rendered vulnerable by situated and global forces, as well as “new assemblages of urban coloniality” (Yiftachel 2020). In our previous editorial (issue 6), we denounced the “racist and orientalist double standards and ‘racial tiering’ inherent in popular and political responses to displacement,” noting at that time the inequality of response toward displaced Ukrainians, “racialized as white and Christian” and welcomed by European states with open borders, while “people fleeing other conflicts, including wars in which European governments have played an active part, notably Afghanistan, have been met with soldiers and push-backs, in violation of international and regional rights frameworks” (Berg and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2023: v). Similarly, in our editorial for issue 5, which we wrote following the withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan, we condemned the “long history of intrinsically racist and (neo)colonialist processes” that allow certain people freedom of movement (for work, tourism, family, joy) while others are prevented from crossing borders, internal or international, on the basis of their place of origin or real or imputed identities (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Berg 2022: v). We critiqued then, as we do now, the multifaceted injustices, epistemic and physical violence inflicted upon individuals, families, and communities who have been subjected to occupation, dispossession, and displacement and subsequently abandoned by states, including but not limited to those of North America and Europe. In both of those previous editorials, we decried states’ false and broken promises to migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and internally displaced people, and the failures of international systems that have ultimately sacrificed these people to uphold the status quo. And yet, in the same breath, we wrote of the vocal critiques of such failures toward, among others, members of the Windrush generation, and of the criminalization and threats of deportation of asylum seekers and refugees across Europe. We have seen these trends persist and reflected in recent migration politics, such as the EU's Pact on Asylum and Migration, which was passed in April 2024. Our words from the previous issue remain relevant: “These and other false and broken promises do not go uncontested by civil society—indeed, we are witnessing strikes and resistance to government failures across Europe and further afield, insisting on a more humane and fair distribution of resources, favoring solidarity and hospitality, and opposing hostility and exclusion” (Berg and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2023: vii). Then, and now, we continue to write “In, and For, Hope and Solidarity.”

Ongoing injustices and extensively documented forms of violence and repression have been, and continue to be, resisted at all levels: from the international to the collective and the individual. In the case of Gaza, formerly and still colonized states and peoples have led movements for international justice, accountability, and reparations, continuing their long histories of challenging the “international world order” in the process.⁴ The very UN agencies and NGOs that have been extensively critiqued for their complicity with White saviorism, neocolonial, and neoliberal humanitarianisms have also been at the forefront of vocally opposing genocidal violence, demanding an immediate ceasefire and seeking sustainable political solutions rather than funding for palliative humanitarian band-aids. This is not to romanticize either the roles of NGOs, the UN, or actors from across the Global South. Indeed, not all citizens of southern “solidarity states” or universities based in solidarity states are active in solidarity.⁵ At the same time, as noted above, the citizens of states across the so-called Global North have been highly vocal, visible, and effective in organizing peaceful mass protests, boycotts, and strikes, including widespread student encampments on university campuses, demanding a ceasefire and that their universities divest from the arms industry. There have also been demonstrations led by indigenous and first nations people to close arms factories and prevent military weapons from crossing borders.⁶ While not idealizing these responses, we recognize that this is nonetheless an era that will be remembered for its intersectional and transnational solidarities, as reflected by scholars, activists, and poets who identify as (inter alia) Black feminist, indigenous, first nations, Jewish, Muslim and/or Christian (see, e.g., Abdou 2023; Abu Lughod 2023; Ahmed 2023, 2024; Alkahlout et al. 2024; BDS 2020; Black Women Radicals 2023a, 2023b; Butler 2023a; Butler et al. 2024; Butler and Khalidi 2024; Coates et al. 2023; Davis 2024; Farazi Saber 2024; Fraser 2024; Houska 2024; Hurowitz 2023; Kaplan 2024; Khalidi et al. 2024; Musaddique 2024; Omer 2024; Palestinian Feminist Collective 2023, 2004; Pappé 2024; Philosophy for Palestine 2023; A. Roy 2024; Scholars Against the War in Palestine 2013). It is our hope that research will continue to build on these transversal, intersecting, and intersectionalist knowledges to create more just, equitable, and inclusive ways of understanding and being in the world.

It is, we maintain, through engaged critique, critical thought, and critical action that more humane and just systems can come about (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2021). Yet we are witnessing the ever-increasing spread of censorship and restrictions of academic freedoms. These are rapidly escalating against the backdrop of what the Palestinian Feminist Collective (2023, 2024) and the Scholars Against the War in Palestine collective (2023) have denounced as intersecting processes of sophicide, scholasticide,⁷ and epistemicide in Gaza. All of Gaza's twelve universities have been destroyed over the past six months, and over 100 academics have been killed in Gaza, including Dr. Refaat Alareer who completed his Masters studies at UCL where the Migration and Society editorial team are based, and whose call, “If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story,” has inspired so many (Alareer 2023). As scholars, we join colleagues worldwide in denouncing these intersecting processes of epistemic, political, and physical violence, and we echo the collective and transnational call for academic freedom, and for the defense of scholars and students who have been subjected to and are at risk of censorship and silencing. These include Jewish students and academics who have vocally taken part in pro-Palestinian protests, defying the crude conflation of critique of the Israeli state and anti-Semitism. As student and human rights activist Lela Tolajian writes: “We, Jewish students, must not be silent on the genocide in Gaza: The suppression of pro-Palestinian voices is not fighting anti-Semitism because there is nothing anti-Semitic about opposing genocide” (2024).⁸

While these protests denounce the complicity of universities with state surveillance systems,⁹ research institutions and states have been canceling visiting professorships and denying visas for scholars to speak at academic conferences,¹⁰ and both funding bodies¹¹ and universities have been policing and suspending academics and entire advisory boards,¹² silencing students,¹³ and arresting hundreds of peacefully demonstrating university students and faculty.¹⁴ Like the tens of thousands of Palestinian scholars and university students killed, injured, displaced, and dispossessed in Gaza, these are our colleagues and (current, former, or future) students whose rights and lives are at risk. We stand with the members of these interlocking communities and hold this space as a journal for ongoing critical reflection on the implications of these threats for the future, including as they pertain to researchers’, scholars’, and students’ ongoing relationships with universities, research funders, and broader systems of knowledge production per se.

As we continue to contemplate what solidarity and humanitarianism, and, indeed, research, mean today and for the future, this issue builds on previous editions of Migration and Society to explore the past, present, and future of critical humanitarianisms and the significance of postcolonial and decolonial approaches to the study of (forced) migration. Following Fiddian- Qasmiyeh's “Manifesto for Bread and Roses” (“created around and centering the words and worlds” of displaced and dispossessed Palestinians in Gaza in the midst of the ongoing genocide), these are respectively the focus of two special themed sections included in this issue.

The first special themed section, Critical Humanitarianisms: Neoliberal Temporalities and Expertise in Migration Governance, is guest edited and introduced by Sara Riva, Tessa Altman, and Gerhard Hoffstaedter. The section focuses on the neoliberal entanglements of humanitarianism and migration management that has had a depoliticizing effect and has led to a weaponization of humanitarian discourses and actors. The five articles in the section critically examine “the political effects of humanitarian-neoliberal temporalities and expertise” through a range of ethnographic cases from Asia Pacific (Sharples), Brazil (Alexander), Malaysia (Jalil and Hoffstaedter), and Australia (Altman), as well as in a transnational humanitarian organization (Haggar). Individually and collectively the articles show that “urgent temporalities and global expertise work to amplify neoliberal values of efficiency, productivity and universality while marginalizing alternative and local knowledges.” At the same time, the articles also highlight how humanitarian actors and migrants challenge and push back against such dominant modes of governance.

The second special themed section, Colonialism, Postcoloniality and the Study of Forced Migration, guest edited and introduced by Martin Lemberg-Pedersen, Kate Pincock, Clayton Boeyink, and Laura Rosanne Adderley, emphasizes the urgency of re-historicizing and re-politicizing analyses of forced migration through careful attention to continuities and ruptures alike between colonial and imperial practices and politics on the one hand, and current and ongoing forms of “subjectification, governance and control within the management of mobilities” on the other hand. They do so through cases that include critical historiographies of the rescue and resettlement of “nominally freed Africans in British Caribbean colonies” in the early nineteenth century (Adderley); the legacies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British imperial legislation on postcolonial migration and asylum management in Tanzania and Sierra Leone (Boeyink and Koroma); the ongoing impacts of French colonization on women migrant populations in Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean (Sahraoui); and the co-option of brutal colonial encounters with indigenous peoples for the purposes of Australia's current-day border control of forced migrants (Reardon-Smith). The pertinence of these sections to ongoing dynamics is undeniable. Continuing reflections and debates raised in earlier issues of Migration and Society, notably the section on “The Role of ‘Voluntariness’ in the Governance of Migration” in volume 5 (2022), and in Fiddian-Qasmiyeh's interview with Juliano Fiori in volume 3 (2020), we are committed to continued critical interrogation and empirical exploration of the interface between humanitarian actors, governments, and people who have been forcibly displaced.

These special themed sections are followed by the General Articles Section, in which Jennifer Allsopp considers the role of narrative genre in how young migrants and refugees express their life projects, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied young men in Italy and England.

In the People and Places section, Tiana Bakić Hayden's article reflects on the challenges for migrant shelters in Mexico in feeding people on the move, considering the theoretical and practical stakes of ensuring food security for a transient and changing population.

The Reflections section includes an interview by Sarah M. Hughes with Jonathan Darling and edited by Olivia Sheringham, about Darling's 2022 book Systems of Suffering: Dispersal and the Denial of Asylum, focusing on the UK asylum system. This section also includes a piece by Noor Amr, Madeline Bass, Ulrike Bialas, Elisa Lanari, Katharyne Mitchell, Eric Schoon, Jagat Sohail, and Paladia Ziss who reflect self-critically on the complex ethical dilemmas associated with scholarship that holds an engaged activist register.

This volume's Creative Encounters opens with an introduction by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, which extends the spirit of this Editorial and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh's “Manifesto for Bread and Roses” (immediately following these pages) by emphasizing the multiple ways that migrants and refugees “assert their persistence (and insistence) on life and living.” Following Ngoi Hui Chien's poem, “The Radiator,” Hanno Brankamp and Kodi Arnu Ngutulu reassert the role of poetry as a form of knowledge in the study of refugeehood in a piece that centers the poetry of Joh Magok Kuerang (“Unrelenting Pursuit”), Chol Reech (“Planted Thorns”), Atem D. Alaak (“Away from Home”), Mary Aluel (“Empty Pockets”), and Mamer Amou (“Escaping My Identity”); together, these five poets, who are all currently residents of Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, explore questions of escape, belonging, immobility, and what it may mean to be forever “on the run.”

We conclude this volume with a welcome penned by our new Book Reviews editors and colleagues, Nassim Majidi and Olivia Sheringham, to whom we in turn extend a warm welcome. This section includes a series of reviews exploring a range of migration and mobility issues across diverse contexts, united by a commitment to critical engagement.

We are very fortunate that our colleague and friend Tatiana Thieme has joined us as co- editor—we look forward to working together on the journal over the coming years. It is our collective hope that Migration and Society will continue to evolve as a platform for critical scholarship and for careful engagement with the politics of knowledge production as it pertains to migration and society. We continue to hope that doing so will contribute to the archive that refuses to normalize ongoing injustices and struggles associated with displacement and migration but also persists in holding space for vital global and intersecting solidarities that animate hopeful pathways.