Intersecting Mobilities: Beyond the Autonomy of Movement and Power of Place

It is widely understood that we live in a world where people, goods, species, and things of all sorts are on the move, and that the politics around mobility and its regulation and meaning are critical to contemporary political and social life. Human migration has been globally intensive for well over a century; industrial economic production, consumption, and trade move goods around the world; transportation infrastructure moves all sorts of cargo around, human and nonhuman; regular and irregular ecological processes and changes are creating new patterns of nonhuman movement; variants of viruses race around the world; even geological elements are far from static. This special issue tackles the challenge of thinking about mobility, not only in its individual instances where it is treated in self-enclosed containers, and not only in its usual contrast to place, ground, sedentarism, and static forms of being; but rather, in the terms of the generative forces created when multiple mobilities come together and cross paths, for better and for ill—in short, intersecting mobilities

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For very helpful conversations and comments on this chapter I am grateful to Dimitris

Social Theory of International Politics (Social Theory) has two parts, one substantive and one philosophical. The former develops a theory of the international system as an emergent phenomenon. The elements of the system are assumed to be states, which are treated as intentional actors or “people ” (also see Wendt, 2004). The system itself is seen as an anarchy, the structure of which is defined in cultural rather than material terms. The culture of the international system can take at least three different forms – Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian – depending on whether states constitute each other as enemies, rivals, or friends. Progress from a Hobbesian to Kantian culture is not inevitable, but can result from historically contingent processes of collective identity formation among states. Anarchy is what states make of it. Various parts of this argument have since been taken up by others. The claim that states are people too led to a lively symposium in Review of International Studies (2004); the three cultures of anarchy figure centrally in Barry Buzan’s (2004) majesterial reworking of the English School, Dustin Howes ’ (2003) discussion of state survival, and Scott Bennett and Allan Stam’s (2004) behavioral test of various international theories