5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The segmentation of the international labour market is even more visible at the borders of countries, whether in their ports, concession areas, free trade zones or transit zones. Often organised around the migration/mobility of people, these dead-ends of capitalism are becoming places of circulation, extraction, storage and recycling. This session will look at these spaces/impasses, which intersect with or capture the mobility of migrants, or the obstacles they face in working on these international labour markets. One example is waste management (from scrap metal to second-hand goods), a sector that is structured in places that make the management of waste and discarded materials temporarily invisible, and therefore confine certain territories to developing economies of recovery and repair. But it is also in these free port zones that industrial activities are concentrated, where all the goods are exported and where migrant and refugee labour is in the majority and is assigned to produce, as in the "catplaces" of Tripoli in Libya.

The structuring of international labour markets today combines several dimensions that call into question the principles of justice. The aim of this session is to take seriously the issues of inequality, justice and exploitation of migrants by examining production systems that threaten the equilibrium. We suggest that the presenters link up the issues of migration and the movement of labour with places of intense production and recycling, in order to open up a debate on the dead-ends of capitalism.