Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk, editors. Mobility Makes States

The volume constitutes an effort to redirect current scholarly engagement with human mobility and state power in Africa. Prompted, in part, by Charles Tilly’s aphorism that “war made the state, and the state made war,” the editors’ titular contention is that “mobility makes states” and, correspondingly, states also make mobility. Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk aver that various forms of human movement have played a “central role in shaping the way states in Africa are constituted as political and legal entities and also the way these states intervene in everyday life” (2). The organizers disclose that they were motivated in this endeavor in response to the considerable focus that scholars have exhibited regarding statutory efforts to prevent human movement across sovereign territorial borders, as well as the arguably undue attention paid to intercontinental outflows of Africans. Instead, the editors implore the reader to consider the significantly more numerous “shorter and circular patterns of intracontinental mobility” (1), and the ways that states “promote” and “channel” certain types of human movement, even as they simultaneously seek to prevent other forms of mobility. In their theorization of the interplay between state power and human mobility (and the constituent components of this dynamic interaction), the editors convincingly assert that these movements dictate how and where state power is concentrated, expressed, and augmented. Particularly cogent is their contention related to state “portability,” in which power—often times embodied by state agents who relocate in reaction to migratory flows—is exercised in response to various forms and patterns of human mobility, thereby highlighting the spatial unevenness and impermanence of state authority.

Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · African Studies and Geopolitics · China's Global Influence and Migration · Computer Science · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Philosophy