Rethinking Freedom from the Perspective of Refugees helps dismantle the colonial imaginary the generates limiting and damaging perceptions of refugees and works to expose and dismantle the border regimes that try to erase them in every way. Nasiri's book is a vital contribution to discourses pertaining to the relationship between freedom and unfreedom, the study of border violence, and the knowledge created by people abandoned and excluded by bordering practices, whether physical, epistemic or symbolic. One of the key aims of this innovative and sophisticated study is to examine the meaning and significance of freedom removed from theoretical visions committed to nation-state frameworks – the state-oriented and citizen-centric paradigms that dominate political philosophy, critical border studies, and related fields. The author achieves this through profound and careful engagement with critical contributions by the enslaved, the colonised, excluded women, and displaced and exiled peoples. Nasiri does not simply include refugee voices; he respects and foregrounds their political and socio-cultural agency, honours their activism, positions their ideas and theories as integral to contemporary debates, and sees them as knowledge producers and indispensable philosophical and political interlocutors.

Omid Tofighian, author of Creating New Languages of Resistance: Translation, Public Philosophy and Border Violence (2025), collaborator on and translator of Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018), and Honorary Research Associate for the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Australia

Rethinking Freedom from the Perspective of Refugees is a study as original as it is topical, for we live in times where people tend to speak of and not with refugees. Drawing on phenomenology and other strands of continental philosophy and backed by the results of his own interviews with refugees, Nasiri seeks to uncover how refugees themselves experience their (un)freedom. This thoughtful and important book is compulsory reading not only for academics and students in philosophy, political theory, migration studies etc., but for everyone who wants to make a more (philosophically) informed contribution to the debate on refugees and migration at large.

Luigi Corrias, author of Law and Inhumanity: Dehumanization, Silent Claims and Atrocity Crimes (2025)