Movement fracturing “the international” —or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?

Abstract

Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite us to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. Drawing on Malkki (1992 #3729@31, 34), sedentarism is defined as combining four elements. (i) Being rooted to a territory, or more generally soil, is the condition of identity and stability, the condition of proper being. Being a refugee, for example, emerges as being uprooted from the soil or territory where one belongs. (ii) The world exists by segmenting space into discrete territorial and cultural units. Borders and boundaries are constitutive because they define the units by partitioning insides from outside. (iii) This understanding of matter and life as rooted into segmented territorial entities is naturalised through various practices that make it a commonsense, self-evident imagination of the nature of life and matter. This process includes daily expressions like ‘home sweet home’, cartographic representations of migration, and representing human history in terms of an evolution from early hunter-gatherers to agricultural communities that expand into cities and later nation-states. (iv) Displacement is pathological in a sedentary world, an uprooting that pulls the living from the soil where they thrive.

This article contributes to the work that has developed mobility agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means establishing conceptions of it as the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement, and that movement is continuous and undivided.

Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another.

A sedentary world is not without movement. There is lots of movement — trade between states, migration of people, flows of viruses, migration of animals, tourism and so on. Of interest here is not a list of movements or the tension or relation between movement and sedentary entities, but the specific nature of movement as it emerges in sedentarist metaphysics. Our way into this is to look closer at the kind of line privileged in drawing a sedentary space. In sedentary conceptions of worlds, the defining lines are partitioning lines, lines separating insides and outsides by drawing perimeters that divide an existing space into enclosed figures. They separate an entity from the environment in which other entities exist. Once we partition space into insides and outsides, movement can appear as crossing from inside to outside and vice versa. Movement takes the form of border or boundary crossing.

If we change the defining line from the one separating A and B to the connecting one, the one crossing the distance between A and B, do we enter a different world? We do, and it is a relatively familiar one. We move from a world of states or sedentary communities to networks. Instead of drawing enclosed figures on the page to visualise a social or political space, we draw points and lines connecting the points. The dots, or nodes, can be territorially circumscribed places, like cities or ports, but they can also be computer servers or individuals. Movement connecting makes the network different from the sedentary conception of space. What matters are the speed, density, and intensity of the movement of goods, people, animals, and services that connect the nodes. The multiple lines of transport that connect the dots create the network.

Networks retain an awkward static-ness, however, not in the sense of ‘absence of movement’, but as letting movement arise from positions. The nodes are spatial positions — a city, a server, a port. From the point of view of circulation, they are projected onto the flows as positions where movement arrives and stops before moving on. Even if the nodes change location or relevance at different points in time, the movement is sensed through a series of positions rather than through the movement itself. The life being lived along the lines is not important. In that sense, we can say that a juxtaposition of immobilities — the nodes — organises the network; movement becomes simply the bridging of the distance between these points of immobility. That explains why, for circulation through networks, the life being lived and the entangling and encountering that takes place while moving along the line are not crucial for understanding movement. Migration, for example, is imagined and regulated as movement connecting nodes that represent ‘transport hubs’, which can be train stations, coastal areas, detention centres, etc. The connecting lines are not the actual route the migrants take but represent the crossing of distance between the hubs.

A third conception of movement displaces both a sedentarist and network metaphysics and starts from taking everything as movement and nothing else. Giving primacy to movement then refers to specific modes of thought that foreground movement as continuous passing and refuse conceptualising movement in relation to stasis or non-motion. It holds that movement slips through our fingers when we recognise non-motion — stasis — exists. We render it as positions in space or time by drawing lines to enclose perimeters or connectors between points. Instead of connectors, it conceptualises the lines of movement as threads. Threads are drawn in a continuous movement rather than from point to point. A thread bends and entangles but is not cut up in points. It moves and is moved by other movements like the wind, someone running into the thread, and so on. Transitions and changes are bending the thread rather than cutting it or partitioning it into discrete bounded sections. The thread is a line that remains continuous, undivided. Movement is passing. What matters are the experiences, encounters and forces along the lines and the meshing of various filaments moving in relation to one another. The network nodes fade, and the lines meander as lines without points. The movement of a ship, for example, entangles with movements of wind, water, and barnacles. But the ship and its movement are also linked to the entangling movements of people living on the ship that create and alter the patterns of social relations and the changes made to ships, for example, in repairs or when taken over by pirates. Life on and off a container ship becomes important, transfiguring the container ship from a vehicle into the entangling of multiple threads that continue outwards. Analytically, the ship is understood in terms of the bendings and tensions between threads; it is a knot or meshwork of knots rather than a place.

Movement as threading introduces a point of view that refuses stasis by taking everything as in continuous motion. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference with which to organise the analysis as long as the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing. When saying that such a conception of movement makes it impossible for ’the international’ to be the analytical driver, it does not mean that the matters of concern that drive IR, such as questions of borders, territorial rule, logistics, and war, disappear or are written out of the world. They exist from a transversal point of view but are sensed differently — they are transmuted. For example, borders transmute into mobility regimes — into confluences of movements moving — and thus are no longer ‘borders’ that draw partitioning perimeters rooting life, matter, and rule into exclusionary territories. That does not mean violence, suffering, and relocating are no longer analytically present. They are, but they must be thought through the inter-twining of movements rather than fixing perimeters.