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.

In Mobility Makes States, political scientists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists examine the role of mobility in shaping how states are formed and how they behave. Focusing on links between power and migration across sub-Saharan Africa, the book explores how and why states have sought to harness movements towards their own ends.

Chapter 1. Mobility Makes States—Joel Quirk and Darshan VigneswaranPART I: CHANNELING HUMAN MOBILITYChapter 2. Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in São Tomé and Angola, 1400s-1700s—Filipa Ribeiro da SilvaChapter 3. "Captive to Civilization": Law, Labor, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique—Eric AllinaChapter 4. Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Postgenocide Rwanda—Simon TurnerChapter 5. Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg—Darshan VigneswaranChapter 6. Policy Spectacles: Promoting Migration-Development Scenarios in Ghana—Nauja KleistPART II. MOVING CONCENTRATIONS OF POWER PowerChapter 7. Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert's Edge—Benedetta RossiChapter 8. Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa—Pamila GuptaChapter 9. Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands—Oliver BakewellChapter 10. Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa's Urban Estuaries—Loren B. LandauNotesList of ContributorsIndexAcknowledgments