How to chronicle the border crisis? From my privileged vantage point, that of a white male mobile academic securely employed in a global university, the most striking feature of this crisis is its worldly nature. What is immediately evident to my eyes is that exploitation, coloniality, death and violence are constitutive elements of a transcontinental migration containment machine which, in its current conjuncture, is heterogeneously but simultaneously realized in Macerata, the English Channel, the Darién Gap, Cox Bazaar, the central Mediterranean, Beitbridge and elsewhere. In fact, from the privileged vantage point of development studies, the transdisciplinary field that informs my academic gaze, these are constitutive elements of an always already global historical project of differentiation and hierarchization of territories and populations that marginalizes, dispossesses and subordinates the (im/mobile) majority world. From my privileged vantage point, exploitation, coloniality, death and violence constitute an analytical starting point rather than something in need of confirmation. This is precisely where the problem of chronicling the crisis begins.

If a chronicle is understood to be a report, and specifically a report that is given in a chronological order,1 what sort of chronological order should I use to talk about the European Union (EU) border and its crisis in Macerata? One that privileges the historical and conjunctural resonances and synchronicity that subsume this province within global space-times?