Abstract
This chapter engages the theoretical core of the volume from a critical perspective, aiming to problematize and complicate its underlying assumptions. While acknowledging the value of the “nomad-state” relationship as a subject of study in International Relations, we draw this emerging research agenda into conversation with work on the history, politics, and sociology of human mobility. As emphasized in the volume, nomadic groups, cultures, and peoples remain largely neglected in IR. However, we argue that this is an instance of the field’s broader inattention to migration, which until recently was consigned to the domain of “low politics” and area studies. Despite its important contribution, a focus on “nomads as the state’s other” leaves unchallenged the dominant paradigm of a world of stationary people within bounded states. We complicate (and perhaps upend) this view of mobility as exception by historicizing the relationship between states and human mobility. In particular, we draw attention to the contingency of borders and migration controls, emphasizing the recent institutional and technological developments which reified and naturalized static, territorialized populations. In doing so, we advance the provocative claim that for much of history this view of the state’s relationship to human mobility has been more myth than reality.
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Notes
- 1.
As Beck (2006) notes, methodological nationalism tends to assume the naturalness of a world of “mutually delimiting national societies”—largely neglecting both the historical contingency of such conditions and how this model remains at odds with the realities of our transnational present (p. 24). In general, this is the outlook—common among both social theorists and ordinary citizens—that assumes a “container model” of exclusively bounded national communities under which migration is treated as the exception, and that endorses the descriptive and normative claim that a fundamental aspect of state sovereignty concerns the right of states to control entrance and immigration.
- 2.
Despite this broader neglect in the discipline, it is important to note that migration has a special place in critical IR. It was an early concern for constructivist scholars, particularly the influential Copenhagen School, whose early work looked at the effects of migration on national identity, and at the securitization of migration as a threat to societal security (Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1997; Wæver, 1993). From a more regional perspective, scholars of the EU have long been concerned with the interactions between borders, migration, and regional integration. And while IR might have been late to the game in terms of studying migration, entire fields of study (i.e. Refugee Studies and Migration Studies) are devoted to the politics of human mobility. One of the central concerns of all of these veins of literature is the relationship between the fixity of borders and the desire for control. In this sense IR’s “discovery” of migration as a novel issue area seems somewhat surprising.
- 3.
Migrant remittance rates to low- and medium-income countries have grown exponentially since the end of the Cold War, from US $29 billion in 1990, to $74 billion in 2000, to $429 billion in 2016. Migrant sending states thus accrue the benefits of human development at lower costs. This relationship is not about states or even state-led institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank Group, or International Labour Organization, but rather the financial flows derived from dynamic and complex sociological phenomena, of which some can be described as “nomadic” behavior.
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Banerjee, K., Smith, C.D. (2020). International Relations and Migration: Mobility as Norm Rather Than Exception. In: Levin, J. (eds) Nomad-State Relationships in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28053-6_13
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