Book launch: 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. InMobility Makes States, an edited volume from University of Pennsylvania Press, 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 Statesdemonstrates 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.

Center for Advanced Migration Studies (AMIS), University of Copenhagen, and DIIS co-organize a book launch of Mobility Makes States November 2, 15.15-17.00. The following authors and editors of the book will be on hand to engage in a lively conversation on the book’s efforts to provide a new voice for African research in the study of the politics of migration:

• Simon Turner(AMIS, University of Copenhagen)
• Nauja Kleist(DIIS)
• Filipa Ribeiro da Silva(International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
• Darshan Vigneswaran(Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, University of Amsterdam).

The book launch takes place 2 November 2015, 15.15-17.00, Room 22.0.11, Karen Blixens Vej 4, 2300 Copenhagen S (KUA).