13. International Relations and Migration: Mobility as Norm Rather Than Exception

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.