In 1986, I was 19 and behind bars in a small prison on the border between Iran and Pakistan. I had been arrested while attempting to cross the border irregularly into Pakistan. Everyone I met in that prison had been detained in connection with the border. It was a small space, the cells overcrowded and unsanitary, but it held an extraordinary diversity of people: local smugglers, large-scale drug-traffickers, undocumented migrant workers, and refugees; Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, as well as Baluch men whose communities had crossed these lands freely for generations but who were now being punished for violating the territorial order of the nation-state. Multiple languages were spoken at once. Different histories, geographies and ways of inhabiting the world converged within the same confined space.
Yet we all shared one thing. We had refused, for different reasons, to respect the border. The state saw us through a single imaginary: as criminals, trespassers or illegal bodies to be contained. We, however, were animated by different imaginations. Each of us had imagined a life that exceeded the border and acted upon that imagination. In that sense, the prison did not simply contain border-crossers; it brought together people whose aspirations had collided with the territorial imaginary of the nation-state.
That prison experience was perhaps one reason I became a scholar of borders. It remains, even today, the most important school of border studies I have ever attended. The conversations in the cells and during brief moments in the prison yard revolved around borders; how they operated, how they were enforced and, above all, how they might be circumvented. The prison became an unlikely site of knowledge-production: not simply the sharing of survival strategies but the enactment of an imagination that paid no heed to prison walls or state borders.
Many years later, in a prison north of Stockholm, I interviewed a human smuggler who told me he saw himself as an architect: ‘I design a journey, like an architect designs a building,’ he said. The comparison stayed with me. Architects imagine and design structures that do not yet exist. Their work begins with the capacity to visualise what is not yet visible. In a similar way, smugglers design border crossings that, from the perspective of the state, would be impossible. A smuggler’s work consists of imagining routes where borders appear closed, creating connections where states impose separation, and envisioning possibilities for mobility when people are immobilised by borders. A smuggler speculates on possibilities in seemingly impossible situations. Seen this way, the smuggler’s ‘architecture’ is an enactment of an imagination that refuses the state imaginary expressed through borders.
The parallels between human smuggling and architecture helped me understand the relationship between imagination, fugitivity and knowledge-production. While fugitivity and imagination are oriented toward the future, toward not-yet-realised possibilities, state power often relies on backward-looking imaginaries grounded in myths of shared blood, origin and belonging. States are hostile to this relationship because it exposes borders as political constructions that can be reimagined, negotiated and crossed. Like capitalism, the nation-state depends upon such imaginaries to stabilise its claims to totality, making it difficult to imagine a world beyond capitalism and the nation-state system.
Precisely because imagination opens the possibility of other worlds, states often regard it as a threat
All around us, across the world, people are being confined, displaced, silenced and rendered disposable, in service of imaginaries that seek to define the limits of life, mobility and freedom. We live in a conjunctural moment shaped by the convergence of two dark forces: borderless wars that destroy lives, produce death and generate displacement, and endless borders that deny mobility to those seeking survival. Together, they produce fugitive lives and fugitive bodies. But they also produce fugitive imagination, the irreducible capacity to envision and enact life beyond the worlds that seek to contain it.
Philosophers often define imagination as the capacity to hold present in the mind what is absent from sensory perception. It is also the capacity to envision alternative ways of organising social reality. Precisely because imagination opens the possibility of other worlds, states often regard it as a threat. The state-centric imaginary presents history as coherent, and intact through symbols, narratives and rituals. The capacity to disrupt the hegemony of state imaginaries is therefore criminalised, suppressed and persecuted. In this sense, fugitivity is inseparable from imagination.
A fugitive is someone fleeing harsh institutions and conditions. The fugitive is an outlaw: a person hiding from a hostile law. Historically, the term referred to enslaved people’s resistance to slavery, its dehumanising logic, and the political economy built upon the extraction of uncompensated labour to maximise profits from cash crops like cotton, tobacco and sugar. Fugitivity was a response to captivity and, as such, an act of liberation, not only from the brutal material conditions of enslavement, but also from the imposed image of the enslaved subject produced by racist ideology. Fugitivity is a way of escaping and a way of knowing.
When Frederick Douglass, one of the most important figures in the 19th-century struggle for African American freedom and civil rights, began learning to read, his enslaver Hugh Auld forbade it, declaring that, if Douglass learned to read, ‘there would be no keeping him’. Once capable of reading, Auld argued, Douglass would inevitably desire to write, and ‘this accomplished, he will be running away with himself.’
This phrase is striking. It suggests a distinction between the enslaved person and the enslaved body. To ‘run away with oneself’ is not simply to flee physically; it is to reclaim one’s imagination and humanity. Under slavery, where Black bodies were turned into capital, fugitivity was criminalised as theft. The fugitive was pursued by law because they were perceived to have stolen property from their enslaver: their own body. In reality, they were reclaiming what had first been stolen from them. If the captivity of the body depends upon the captivity of the mind, then the emancipation of consciousness becomes a precondition for bodily liberation. Such emancipation engenders new subjectivities and creates the conditions for imagining what previously appeared impossible: life beyond chains, borders and confinement. Auld’s anxiety over Douglass’s literacy reflected precisely this logic. His fear was not simply the loss of labour, but the emergence of a subject who would not obey the racial imaginary; ‘he will be running away with himself.’
Literacy was inseparable from emancipation, whereas pedagogy became fugitive
The condition of fugitivity emerged from a radical imagination capable of envisioning existence beyond oppression. As a refusal of captivity, it entailed an inner transformation – a reorientation of consciousness that makes escape conceivable in the first place. This is the transformative power of imagination: it enables subjects to perceive possibilities beyond the limits imposed by domination. As Frantz Fanon reminds us in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), resistance opens a path toward liberation through a radical transformation of consciousness. Fugitivity is therefore a refusal to be objectified, categorised and reduced to the singular identities imposed by colonial imaginaries. The passage from subjection to freedom, from a colonial imaginary to a fugitive imagination, is thus a process of self-actualisation and the cultivation of what might be called a consciousness of refusal.
Despite prohibition and danger, Douglass pursued literacy covertly. Reading and writing eventually enabled him to forge passes for himself and others and to flee bondage. Literacy was thus inseparable from emancipation, whereas pedagogy became fugitive in two senses: first, because it was concerned with experiences of flight, concealment and resistance; and, second, because it was itself practised under conditions of flight and opacity.
Knowing the emancipatory power of education, many enslaved people continued to learn despite violent restrictions and anti-literacy laws. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), the historian Jarvis Givens traces the history of criminalised Black education in the United States, documenting the struggles of Black educators and students against centuries of anti-literacy laws and racist policing. The struggle surrounding Black education did not end with slavery, continuing instead through the era of racial segregation under Jim Crow and into the present. Contemporary attacks on Black studies and critical race theory in the US are among the latest examples of hostility toward forms of knowledge that expose structures of racial subordination.
In recent years, operations by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to arrest undocumented migrants have often been conducted near schools, where parents drop off and pick up their children. Such practices have deterred many parents from sending their children to school for fear of detention and deportation. One of the consequences of these enforcement strategies is that they undermine access to education and disrupt the pedagogical conditions. A study of five California school districts found a 22 per cent increase in daily student absences following ICE raids conducted in early 2025.
The situation is not much different in Europe. Universities are increasingly shaped by hostile political climates in which curricula are regulated, funding is reduced, and critical fields of enquiry are delegitimised. In such contexts, critical knowledge itself becomes fugitive. For example, Sweden recently proposed a controversial law requiring state employees, including teachers and university professors, to report undocumented migrants to the police; following protests, the law was amended to exclude teachers and doctors, but tax officers and insurance agents must still ‘snitch’ on the undocumented.
Across different historical periods and geographical contexts, we see attempts to control or criminalise education in order to reproduce the state imaginary and suppress any stirrings of a fugitive imagination.
Palestine offers a striking example of the relationship between imagination, knowledge and fugitivity. Palestinian resistance is sustained by a fugitive imagination of freedom beyond colonial domination. Israel’s continued imposition of its colonial imaginary through occupation, genocide and scholasticide therefore targets not only Palestinian bodies and institutions but also the spaces in which alternative futures are imagined. (‘Scholasticide’ describes the systematic destruction of educational institutions and schools in Palestine by Israel.) This is why schools, universities and cultural institutions have repeatedly become targets of repression.
Since the start of the recent genocide in Gaza, more than 95 per cent of schools have been damaged or destroyed, disrupting the education of nearly 700,000 students. All 19 of Gaza’s recognised higher education institutions, including 12 universities, have been destroyed, and approximately 100 university professors have been killed. Yet attacks on Palestinian education did not begin with the current war.
Called ‘cells of illegal education’ by the Israeli authorities, underground schools were frequently raided
Systematic destruction of educational infrastructures has been part of the war against Palestine since the early 1970s when the first higher education institutions emerged. Birzeit University, one of the most important centres of Palestinian intellectual life, was repeatedly closed by Israeli authorities. Between 1973 and 1992, the university was shut down 15 times, including a closure of almost four and a half years during the First Intifada. Starting in 1987, this period saw Palestinian education literally criminalised; repression only intensified. All six universities, 13 colleges and approximately 1,200 schools were closed.
Yet the suppression of formal education also generated fugitive pedagogical practices. As schools and universities were closed, teaching moved into homes, churches and mosques. Called ‘cells of illegal education’ by the Israeli authorities, these underground schools were frequently raided. ‘Soldiers would throw teargas grenades into the room to force all the students out, then split up so one group could arrest those who fled while the other would destroy science equipment or photocopiers and, later on, computers,’ writes Gabi Baramki in Peaceful Resistance: Building a Palestinian University Under Occupation (2009). Students escaped through windows or across roofs. Teachers and students who got arrested for organising and attending ‘cells of illegal education’ were charged with a ‘public order offence’.
The Palestinian case demonstrates that education is never merely about knowledge. It is also a site of political struggle because it cultivates the fugitive imagination, the capacity to envision freedom beyond the colonial imaginaries that sustain occupation.
Since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, they have systematically restricted the rights and freedoms of women and girls. One of their earliest targets was female education. In March 2022, the Taliban banned girls and women from attending secondary schools and universities. According to UNESCO, by August 2025 nearly 2.2 million Afghan girls were barred from education beyond the primary level.
The criminalisation of female education has, however, generated resistance. Across Afghanistan, underground educational initiatives have emerged to challenge these restrictions. In parts of Kabul, local networks have organised clandestine schools hidden from the authorities. Living rooms, basements and private halls have been transformed into classrooms where small groups of girls continue to learn, despite the risks involved. If fugitivity in relation to education was historically shaped by race in the US, in Afghanistan it is profoundly shaped by gender. The struggle over women’s education is about regulation of who may know and imagine otherwise. What the Taliban fear is not women’s education but the fugitive imagination it cultivates. The Taliban know that literacy transforms consciousness. It enables women to refuse the patriarchal imaginary and to imagine lives beyond the confines it imposes.
The Taliban’s fear echoes Auld’s reaction to Douglass’s literacy. Auld warned that if an enslaved person learned to read, ‘he would at once become unmanageable’. The Taliban’s concern follows the same logic: a woman who acquires knowledge runs away with herself.
The history of fugitivity is deeply entangled with the history of modernity itself, a modernity grounded in racial capitalism and constituted through colonialism and the nation-state system. This connection can be seen in the continuity between enslaved people fleeing plantations and refugees crossing contemporary state borders – indeed, the words ‘refugee’ and ‘fugitive’ share the same etymological root in the Latin fugere, meaning ‘to flee’. So, it makes sense that Moria Camp on the Greek island of Lesvos, once the largest and most notorious refugee camp in Europe, offers another insight into how fugitivity and imagination are interlinked.
Set up in January 2013, the camp’s harsh militarised regulation, spatial design and material conditions produced what might be called a camp imaginary, an expression of Europe’s border regime and its political desires, positioning refugees as unwanted, unfree and disposable subjects. Yet Moria was also a site where refugees created alternative spaces of learning, artistic expression and collective care. Through education, music, art and everyday acts of mutual support, they generated conditions that made survival possible. As Yannis Hamilakis demonstrated in his archaeological study of Moria, refugees created spaces for imagining precisely what the camp sought to render impossible: life beyond its spatial and political boundaries. In this sense, the camp was not only a space of confinement but also a site of fugitive imagination.
The final act of this fugitivity came in 2020: after years of overcrowding and unsafe conditions, the camp burned down. Yet the most enduring expression of fugitive imagination was not the end of the camp itself but the lives that emerged from it. Many former residents became filmmakers, musicians, poets, researchers and activists, demonstrating that, while the camp sought to contain people physically, it could not extinguish their capacity to imagine and create otherwise.
A fugitive imagination emerges through the practical and intellectual labour of navigating violence
Survival under conditions of violence requires an intimate knowledge of violence – its logics, structures and repetitions. Such knowledge is necessary not only to endure violence but also to resist the imaginaries that sustain it. Drawing upon the idea of ‘borderland thinking’ – a concept originating from the Chicana scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, which centres knowledge produced through the lived experience of physical and cultural borders – I think of fugitive imagination as a form of situated knowledge produced by people who must survive systems of capture, confinement and bordering. Anzaldúa, who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, on the US-Mexico border, conceptualised the borderlands as a space of imagination through what she called la facultad:
… the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface … When we’re up against the wall, when we have all sorts of oppressions coming at us, we are forced to develop this faculty so that we’ll know when the next person is going to slap us or lock us away.
For people of the borderlands, la facultad is both a method of knowledge-production and a vital survival skill; it emerges not despite conditions of vulnerability and violence but through them. In the same manner, a fugitive imagination emerges through the practical and intellectual labour of navigating violence, even as it envisions possibilities beyond it.
To gain access to imagination, to learn how to cultivate and enact it, is to break with the imaginaries that make every future appear the same. It is to create, within the present, the conditions for something that does not yet exist. Politics, then, is not only a struggle over power. It is also a struggle over images, imaginaries and imagination itself. It is a battle over what can be thought, what can be desired, and what can still be made possible.
Earlier this year, I received a WhatsApp call from a childhood friend. We had grown up together in a small village in southwestern Iran, and it was the first call I had received from Iran in more than three months. The latest dreadful period had begun in December 2025 with the violent suppression of public protests; initially sparked by frustration over an economic crisis, they’d soon developed into a broad uprising. The Iranian state’s response was brutal. Thousands of people were killed and many more arrested. The state had cut off not only internet access but also much of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. Iranians were still in shock from the militarised crackdown when an intense US-Israel war with Iran began on the last day of February 2026, bringing even more death and silence.
When my friend’s name appeared on my screen, I hesitated before answering. I felt ashamed: I did not know how to speak to someone who had lived through so much violence while I remained safe. I called him back later that day, after collecting myself. The connection was poor and our conversation fragmented: a word here, a phrase there, only occasionally a complete sentence. But I was surprised – unsettled, in fact – by what I was able to piece together. Spring, I heard him say, had brought abundant rain. Alongside bombs and bullets, rain had fallen, more than in previous years. What arrived through his fragmented voice was not words but imagination.
I imagined the mountains saturated with water, the springs running full, the wheat fields nourished and waiting to be harvested. Even as US bombs materialised a colonial imaginary that sought to reorder the world according to imperial logics of domination, people continued to imagine rain, harvests, seasons. To look toward the sky and see rain falling alongside bombs was a refusal of the imperial imaginary – an imagination of life, despite everything, an imagination that cannot be killed, bombed, stolen or abducted, and from which the seeds of an alternative future might emerge.
From the plantation to the border, from the genocide in Palestine to the Taliban’s war on women, and from refugee camps to the war on Iran, we encounter recurring attempts to preserve regimes of truth and imaginaries that seek to define the limits of life, mobility and freedom. Yet these projects of domination continually generate their own negation. Wherever people are confined, displaced, silenced or rendered disposable, fugitive forms of knowledge, pedagogy and imagination emerge. This is why history never ends.
Author’s note: a version of this essay’s opening story appears in my book ‘Illegal Traveller’: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (2010) and in The Funambulist magazine.
This essay is supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.