A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of settler colonialism. Across its nation states, the unacknowledged, undead pasts of settler colonialism trouble the present as the fact of genocide is brought once again into public view.

The pandemic makes borders legible in new ways. For some, the death counts and interactive maps tracking the global movement of the virus recall the monitoring of sea journeys and charting of refugee movements. For others, the act of crossing borders is made visible anew, as different sorts of bodies are ensnared at airports and surveillance points. These redraw once again the permeable lines between rights and rightlessness, the privileges and limits of citizenship. Different biopolitical permutations are playing out before our eyes from moment to moment.

The Indigenous death in custody of Wayne Fella Morrison occurred less than a year after that of David Dungay. Both deaths evidence lethal practices of structural repetition in the correctional management of Indigenous inmates. Both deaths bring into focus the serial nature of the violence deployed against Indigenous prisoners across Australian states.