Mobility Makes States

Mobility Makes States is an edited volume that brings together nine empirical case studies of mobility in, to, and from Sub-Saharan Africa, covering both historical and contemporary mobility. The introduction by editors Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk is engaging and thought-provoking: having claimed that by using empirical examples from the case studies, they are able to make meaningful generalizations about how mobility makes states, I was incentivized to read more to establish if the book could justify their bold statements. They successfully achieved some, while leaving room for debate regarding others. The book introduces mobility as its key concept. Although mobility has gained popularity since the ‘mobilities turn’, it is all too often used as a mere synonym for migration. However, the book’s empirical chapters convincingly show how the concept of mobility can be used to analyze contemporary cross-border migration and diasporic engagement (Turner, Chapter 4; Kleist, Chapter 6) alongside historical accounts of colonial ‘free and unfree’ settlers, the movements of their subjects (slaves, forced labourers), and the relocation of their possessions (Ribeiro da Silva, Chapter 2; Allina, Chapter 3; Gupta, Chapter 8), the segregated freedoms of movement within or through cities (Vigneswaran, Chapter 5, Landau, Chapter 10), the focus on access to mobility in nomadic societies (Rossi, Chapter 7), and borderland movements (Bakewell, Chapter 9). With this rich comparative work, however, the volume could have made a more explicit contribution to the conceptual understanding and applicability of mobility. Furthermore, the subtitle ‘Migration and Power in Africa’ incorrectly maintains the tendency to equate mobility with migration

Mobilities · Political science · Popularity · Power (physics · Relocation · Social mobility · Social science · Sociology · African Studies and Geopolitics · Computer Science · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Identity, and Health · Law