Lines drawn by empire: displacement, belonging, and borders

This public event explores how the afterlives of empire continue to shape migration regimes, bordering practices, and ideas of national belonging.

It brings together educators, activists, and organisers to examine how colonial logics underpin contemporary systems of mobility control, and how these are resisted in lived experience and political advocacy. Like other events in the Reckoning with Empire series, it builds toward the 2026 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, opening space to consider how reparations and historical justice must address displacement and mobility.

Meet our speakers

Zrinka Bralo is Chief Executive of Migrants Organise – a community organising platform for migrants and refugees acting for justice. Zrinka is a refugee from Sarajevo (Bosnia), where she was a journalist and where she worked with leading war correspondents during the siege in the 90’s.

Boucka Koffi is the Chair of the Voice of the Voiceless Immigration Detainees in Yorkshire (VVIDY). Originally coming from Cote d'Ivoire, Boucka is a highly committed pan-Afrikanist who is championing decolonization of education and promoting indigenous scholar-activism and therefore working together with community educationists, particularly those of his own Akan communities at home in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, as well as others abroad, in innovatively building from the Grassroots the Akwansranimdie Communiversity as their own indigenous Akan Community educational institution.

Lucy Mayblin is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield, as well as Co-Director of the Migration Research Group. She is a political sociologist whose research focuses on borders, human rights, policy-making, and the legacies of colonialism. A central theme in her work has been how the legacies of 500 years of European colonialism continue to shape the contemporary moment, particularly in Britain.

Chair

Asha Herten-Crabb is IRD Fellow in the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her research covers international trade, health policy, and gender equality - and their intersections – with an emphasis on how global governance structures shape policy making and its outcomes at the national (UK), regional (EU, MERCOSUR), and international levels (WHO, WTO).

More about this event

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