ABSTRACT
The current moment of globalisation is witnessing an extraordinary movement of people, legitimate and illegitimate, across national and international borders. These movements are exposing the porosity of borders, the transnational reality of subaltern existence, and the contingent foundations of international law. I examine how encounters with these constitutive Others, quite specifically the transnational migrant subject, disrupts and disturbs the universalist premise of international law. At the same time, these cross-border movements are countered, curtailed, restricted and even resisted, by a modernist narrative of international law, the legitimacy of which is constructed along the axis of progress, relations between sovereign nationstates, and the sovereign subject.
