Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade Review"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." * Lidwien Kapteijns, Wellesley College *
"'Mobility makes states, and states make mobility': that is the bold claim made by the editors of this fine volume. Eschewing the tendency to view states solely as agents that prevent mobility, the book focuses on the ways in which states promote and channel human movement for their own purposes. The book reminds us that states may do very different things in different contexts, and that they should not necessarily be judged by a putatively normative European experience. This volume is a major contribution to thinking both about human mobility and about African society and politics that should be read by anyone interested in either." * John Torpey, Graduate Center, City University of New York *
Table of ContentsChapter 1. Mobility Makes States
—Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran
PART I: CHANNELING HUMAN MOBILITY
Chapter 2. Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in São Tomé and Angola, 1400s-1700s
—Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
Chapter 3. "Captive to Civilization": Law, Labor, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique
—Eric Allina
Chapter 4. Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Postgenocide Rwanda
—Simon Turner
Chapter 5. Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg
—Darshan Vigneswaran
Chapter 6. Policy Spectacles: Promoting Migration-Development Scenarios in Ghana
—Nauja Kleist
PART II. MOVING CONCENTRATIONS OF POWER Power
Chapter 7. Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert's Edge
—Benedetta Rossi
Chapter 8. Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa
—Pamila Gupta
Chapter 9. Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands
—Oliver Bakewell
Chapter 10. Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa's Urban Estuaries
—Loren B. Landau
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
