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Abstract Containment, as a way of restricting mobilities, ranges from physical infrastructures to diffused control practices in everyday life. Alongside their physical, social, and political dimensions, such restrictions also engender various temporal borders and experiences of time particular to situations of containment. A prolific field of research has identified waiting and hope as strategies for both enforcing and surpassing containment. In response, anthropological research on future-making has highlighted a more diverse set of contextual and emergent practices that derive from imagining and realising migrants’ futures. Yet, in contrast to waiting, migrants’ future-making practices have seldom been related to containment. Besides containment informing future-making, migrants and control actors also manipulate time as they plan or experiment with futures to overcome or reinforce containment. Carrying elusive promises of a better future, containment infrastructures can also motivate migrants to stay put and accommodate restrictions to their mobility. This paper addresses how such different relational, often conflicting, practices of envisioning and realising migrant futures contribute to or subvert different types of containment. Building on empirical studies from Turkey, Niger and Kenya we suggest future-making as a relational, practice-oriented and contextual approach suited to trace the negotiation of migrant futures between migrants, control actors, and infrastructures in situations of spatiotemporal containment. We give special attention to resettlement as a form of containment due to its ability to limit mobility through promises of future mobility and its role in negotiating migrant futures. This article serves as a theoretical introduction into the emerging research field of contested future-making in containment and to the corresponding paper cluster.

Abstract In this rejoinder we argue, based on the papers of this commentary series, that ‘race’ is such a tricky notion because it can be used in (at least) two very different and contradictory ways—as a concept to disentangle racism and racialisation (what M’charek calls the ‘work race actually does’) and as a way of categorization and social classification, in which case it might create the very essentialised hierarchies ‘race’ as a critical concept tries to disentangle. We wonder if it is indeed possible to use ‘race’ as a concept without evoking ‘race’ as a social classification. At first, we give a short summary of the four discussion papers and then delve into two aspects the papers share, namely the need for spatial and temporal contextualization and comparison, as well as their choice not to take up our invitation to compare race as a category with gender. In a second step we will discuss two points arising from the papers, (1) ‘race’ as category, not as lens, often resulting in essentialism and (2) ‘race’ as potentially obscuring racism and racialisation. We conclude by proposing to give more space to complexity.

Abstract While at the moment the world seems to be divided along racial lines and ‘race’ appears to be a central axe of social inclusion and exclusion, in this article we ask whether it is thinkable to go ‘beyond race’. We want to explore the idea of going ‘beyond race’ in four different ways: (1) ‘Beyond race’ as a demographic reality when people of mixed origin form the majority of population; (2) ‘Beyond race’ in regard to policies that aim at combatting inequalities also along color lines, yet are no longer dependent on a notion of race. (3) ‘Beyond race’ in terms of political mobilizations, e.g. the possibility or desirability of anti-racist movements not grounded in identity politics and (4) ‘Beyond race’ as a conceptualization of race that is decoupling biology and culture, or even to stop thinking in racial categories altogether, yet without de-politicizing any marginalised group’s, history and experience. We are aware that this questioning of race, and by implication of ethnicity, may be a typical hang-up of two authors based in Europe. We have invited authors from different parts of the world, and with different academic backgrounds to reflect in a commentary on the issues we raise and to explain their position.