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Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations

Author

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  • Engin Isin

    (School of Politics and International Relations, UK / University of London Institute in Paris, France)

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to think ‘mobile peoples’ as a political concept. I consider mobile peoples as a norm rather than an exception and as political subjects rather than subject peoples. After discussing the tension between ‘mobile’ and ‘peoples’, I draw on Ian Hacking’s historical ontology for understanding how a people comes to be. For understanding how the people comes to be, or rather, how the tension between a people that constitutes itself as a whole and those peoples that remain as residual parts, I draw on Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Ernesto Laclau as authors who identified this tension as a fundamental problem of ‘Western’ political thought. Yet, their inattention to territory draws me to James Scott whose work on early states challenges how we have come to understand the people as sedentary in the first place. His account of how ‘barbarians’ (mobile peoples) came to be seen as a threat to sedentary peoples enables us to understand that tension. Then a path opens toward thinking about mobile peoples as a political concept.

Suggested Citation

  • Engin Isin, 2018. "Mobile Peoples: Transversal Configurations," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(1), pages 115-123.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:socinc:v:6:y:2018:i:1:p:115-123
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    Cited by:

    1. Peter O'Brien, 2019. "Bordering in Europe: Differential Inclusion," Border Crossing, Transnational Press London, UK, vol. 9(1), pages 43-62, January-J.
    2. Peter Kærgaard Andersen & Lasse Mouritzen & Kristine Samson, 2018. "Becoming Citizen: Spatial and Expressive Acts when Strangers Move In," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(3), pages 210-228.
    3. Ulrike Hamann & Gökçe Yurdakul, 2018. "The Transformative Forces of Migration: Refugees and the Re-Configuration of Migration Societies," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(1), pages 110-114.

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