2025/01/21 by Olivia Maury · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #International Development and Aid #Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism #World Systems and Global Transformations
paper · doi:10.7765/9781526174741.00020
openalex publication_date 2025/01/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/12/25
Drawing on the lived experiences of persons from the Global South and East who have obtained student residence permits in Finland, the chapter demonstrates how policies aimed at attracting ‘international talent’ are firmly entangled in the coloniality of power reproduced in the world of nation-states founded on a naturalised spatial separation of national subjects from migrants. The chapter connects the student status to a discourse of innovation and talent, which relies on colonial ideals, and analyses it in relation to the governing of migrants through seemingly neutral and apolitical acts of administration based on law and policy. It contributes to research that resists static binaries and the temptation to trace global coloniality back to a single source by analysing the ‘relations of force’ stemming from political, administrative and legal procedures, which in their intersection produce the conjuncture of a racial-colonial present of the innovation economy. Via the analysis of the hierarchical ordering of non-EU/EEA student–migrants and the friction produced vis-à-vis laws and administrative bordering practices, the chapter contributes to the theorisation of Europeanisation as violence in a context of talent attraction for the innovation economy.