In interviews, Miéville expresses discomfort with the idea of his book as an allegory, saying that such a reading is too literal and that the novel explores the arbitrary logics of borders more generally, between nations and even inside them. … Yet in the crowding of these two, twinned peoples onto this tiny sliver of territory—the wrenching intimacy of the home invasions and demolitions, the ritualistic regularity of the pummeling of Gaza, the spectacle of once-stateless refugees exiling other people into the sea of statelessness—we see in hyper concentrated form the dead end of this project that dared to call itself "civilization."

XREF: Connects to Miéville as an worldbuilding author and his exploration of arbitrary border logics, relevant to speculative fiction about states and statelessness. FICTION: The 'arbitrary logics of borders' could seed a story world built around shifting or impossible frontier logics.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 987