Mobility Makes States

Human mobility has long played a foundational role in producing state territories, resources, and hierarchies. When people move within and across national boundaries, they create both challenges and opportunities. In Mobility Makes States, chapters written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists explore different patterns of mobility in sub-Saharan Africa and how African states have sought to harness these movements toward their own ends.

While border control and intercontinental migration policies remain important topics of study, Mobility Makes States demonstrates that immigration control is best understood alongside parallel efforts by states in Africa to promote both long-distance and everyday movements. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets. They examine short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting and urban expansion, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of gatekeepers and officers of the state who push and pull migrant populations in different directions. Through the experiences and trajectories of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this empirically rich volume sheds new light on larger global patterns and state making processes.

Contributors: Eric Allina, Oliver Bakewell, Pamila Gupta, Nauja Kleist, Loren B. Landau, Joel Quirk, Benedetta Rossi, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Simon Turner, Darshan Vigneswaran.

"With its theoretically compelling frame, this well-integrated, empirically rich set of essays helps us understand that human mobility is (and has been) not just something states must manage and contain but a key force that shapes (and has shaped) states' most central features. Countering the persistent but misleading image of the state as exercising power over a static and stationary population, this book shows how human mobility shapes, among other things, a state's spatial features, its strategies for accumulating power and managing resources, and the kinds of national and international political, social and economic actors with which it allies. In our era of mind-boggling population displacements, this innovative book offers crucial new tools for thinking about the complex phenomenon of human mobility."