To mark International Migrants Day, COMPAS colleagues, affiliates, and students reflect on the fiction and non-fiction books that have enriched their understanding of migration in 2025, with a bonus review of a musical also included.
A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on our Maps
By Jonn Elledge
This book follows the genre of historical commentary, which started (in my mind at least) with Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010). It is structured in three parts. The first looks at ‘histories’, taking in the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the Great Wall of China in antiquity, Spain and Portugal’s carve-up of the world in the late fifteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire, the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s, the partition of India, and the ‘Iron Curtain’, among many others.
We then move to some ‘legacies’ of these carve-ups, such as Israel-Palestine (which the author admits discomfort writing about), anomalies of the border between Egypt and Sudan, Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the ‘Google Maps war’, and China’s Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea.
Slightly out of keeping with the first two sections, but nonetheless interesting, the third section covers what the author calls ‘externalities’: maritime boundaries and territorial waters, time zones and the International Date Line, and, topically, given the current controversy over Israel, the strange conception of Europe built into Eurovision.
Elledge’s chatty style is generally engaging, though sometimes grates. Overall, this is a good read that can be digested in chunks, with each chapter forming four to five pages. Many of the stories have a strong bearing on the field of migration.
For those who would like to complement this book with the perspective of an illegal border crosser, check Shahram Khosravi’s ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders.
Reviewed by Nicholas Van Hear, Emeritus Fellow
Long Island
By Colm Tóibín
The sequel to 2015’s Brooklyn, Long Island traces a migration story long after the often-difficult moment of arrival. Twenty years after leaving Enniscorthy for Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey, now Eilis Fiorello, has made the familiar move from the city to the suburbs, ensconced with her Italian American in-laws and children in 1970s Long Island. An unexpected encounter on the doorstep takes her home to Ireland and everything she left behind, but she is not travelling alone this time, instead taking her teenage children along for the ride.
Long Island takes us into the reality of the human experience of migration. Things have changed since the 1950s; the once arduous boat journey is now a simple flight away. Yet the genius of the novel is in showing that it is not only physical distance that keeps us apart. Eilis has always felt like an outsider in Long Island, but, changed by her time there, she struggles to truly go home either. Those who leave and those who stay animate this novel, excavating how the choices we make echo across continents and generations. Long Island isn’t only about migration, but in its examination of how mobility affects people and their relationships, it highlights the humanity too often lost in contemporary migration debates.
Reviewed by Jacqueline Broadhead, Director, Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity
World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and the Global Order
By Rita Abrahamsen, Michael C. Williams, Jean-François Drolet, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, Alexandra Gheciu
When the USSR collapsed, those of us who grew up in the West were bathed in the warm but hubristic glow of “victory” that spawned Fukuyama's "End of History”. Liberal democracy felt like a simple, logical, technocratic system, done for us by career politicians and civil servants to manage our national and social balance sheets. It was unstoppable, all-powerful and remote, and was taking over the world because it was “common sense”. This was the 90s - time for fun - we could disengage from politics while we watched Ross and Rachel's cheerful, bumbling love affair in Friends. The millennium, this common sense told us (or at least us western romantics), would take us into a new era of democracy, equality and peace ...
The naivety of this perspective seems negligent in retrospect.
The twenty-first century has, instead, been a darker time: it has seen a disorienting lurch to aggressive nationalism and a rejection of not just the sort of technocratic and managerial politics that Fukuyama imagined structuring the world indefinitely, but of the very concepts of liberalism and democracy.
World of the Right compellingly and forensically argues that this outcome is not merely the result of a series of disjointed nationalist projects, but that it is a global phenomenon driven by a disciplined and coordinated set of actors and thinkers. Despite operating in profoundly different political ecosystems - from North America to Africa, and from Russia to the EU, India, and the UK– these actors reject managerial politics in favour of ideological conservatism and a strategy to create a cultural hegemony and a new radical conservative "common sense".
This strategy, the authors demonstrate, with innumerable examples, has been built directly and knowingly from the ideas of Marxist-Leninist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci. The book also shines a light on the hubris of modern liberal movements that, while fracturing into warring factions based on identities and single issues, have ignored the shifting sands of global politics that threaten to swallow them.
Anyone working on migration issues should read this book. The shifts it documents are already having profound impacts on the issues we deal with, from the collapse in acceptance of a rules-based system and the value of multilateral bodies such as the UN, to the emerging radical conservative "common sense" that is shaping who leads our nations.
We're entering a new era, alright, but Ross and Rachel at the end of history, it certainly is not ...
Reviewed by Rob McNeil, COMPAS Researcher and Deputy Director, The Migration Observatory
The Fatal Shore
By Robert Hughes
Published nearly forty years ago, Robert Hughes’ magisterial history of the convict settlement of Australia resonates ever more powerfully today in the age of mass migration. The fear and violence that permeate the ontology of a nation are exhibited and analysed in shocking yet almost poetic detail, and while Australia’s example is unique, its founding dynamics are widely applicable.
The creation of space on the terra nullius of the vast southern continent begins with the first penal colony at Botany Bay, created under the bewildered gaze of the indigenous population. The encounter between the aborigines and the Enlightenment rationale of the prison bureaucracy, and its feral convict charges, is one of the earliest acts of European colonialism. Hughes confounds simplistic assumptions by highlighting the relatively benign approach, at this early stage, of the British naval and penal authorities towards the natives. This, of course, did not last, as competition for land intervened. The initial delicacy of the authorities contrasted with the rapacious savagery of the convicts, who, once freed on tickets-of-leave, were placed in direct competition and left to fend for themselves in the wilderness. The term ‘genocide’ may be contested in today’s currency, but the systematic extermination of the native aborigines of Tasmania (formerly Van Diemen’s Land) merits that designation.
Transportation is a form of migration. As wave after wave of convict immigrants arrive, first in New South Wales, then later in what became Victoria and Queensland, a generation of free Australians arises. They aspire to nationhood and citizenship and progressively resent the cloacal destiny reserved for their increasingly prosperous and desirable homeland by their conservative overlords in London. By the rarest of ironies, the penal colonies, devised to drive terror into the hearts of would-be criminals, have become, through the sweat and toil of despised and abandoned outcasts (and, it should be said, a timely discovery of gold in the accessible interior), a utopia to which free settlers, like Dickens’s Mr. Micawber, will now willingly flock.
Perhaps Hughes’s greatest achievement is to reflect the mechanism by which transportation’s ordeal of cruelty and exile created a distinctive identity and way of being-in-the-world: freedom-loving, demotic, with sympathy for the underdog, united in the solidarity of ‘mateship’. In other words, Australian.
Reviewed by Dominic Martin, Postdoctoral Researcher, Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy after (Post) Socialism
Incommunicable: Towards Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine
By Charles L. Briggs
Incommunicable: Towards Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine is an excellent read for any anthropologists, medical professionals, and researchers interested in health, justice, and migration. Anthropologist Charles Briggs describes how racialised populations are ostracised from the communicative frameworks of dominant forms of knowledge — in particular from the communicative models employed by health professionals and biomedical authorities. He traces how these models can further entrench health inequalities as well as empower communities to engage alternative models of communication. His text is an incredibly rich theoretical resource, with important implications for medical practice and for research into the health circumstances of migrant populations. I've found his work incredibly generative for my own research and highly recommend the book to the COMPAS community and beyond!
Reviewed by Ellen M. Burstein, MSc Candidate in Migration Studies
Come From Away
By Irene Sankoff and David Hein
The musical Come From Away is set in Gander, Newfoundland, on the morning of 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, US airspace is shut down, and 38 planes carrying over 7,000 passengers are diverted to the town’s small airport. The townsfolk are faced with a mass of people from all over the world and must pull together to welcome, house, clothe and feed these 'refugees' (called 'come from aways'). Gander suddenly becomes a city of sanctuary: a mix of nationalities, religions, cultures and accents (including the almost unbelievable Newfoundland English - a blend of Irish, Cornish and Canadian), forcing the characters to face their differences and similarities.
Based on the true stories of the residents of Gander and the stranded passengers, we see relationships form and break, fears and prejudices come to the fore, and finally, hope, humility, and empathy prevail. Mostly. As passengers finally re-board for take-off, one Muslim passenger is humiliatingly strip-searched, though his situation is no different to that of other passengers.
Woven into this brisk, energetic modern pop/rock musical is the folksy, 'sea-shanty'-style Newfoundland music. A stand-out moment is the song "Prayer", which seamlessly blends the sung prayers of four major religions into one song.
Although I saw the show in 2024, more than two decades after the events of 2001 and several years after its 2017 debut, the themes remain strikingly relevant today. With no current plan for this musical to tour again, I highly recommend listening to the original Broadway cast recording, as it’s just as evocative as seeing the live show.
Reviewed by Nathan Grassi, COMPAS Administrator
