Categorising movement: mobility and world order from the imperial to the international

Engelhard, Alice (2023) Categorising movement: mobility and world order from the imperial to the international. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

International Relations often starts with a static understanding of political order and treats people in movement as secondary and epiphenomenal to this order. At the same time, work on people in movement tends to approach world order as a pre-given set of constraints to movement. This thesis inverts both of these starting points, to argue that movement, and the regulation and categorisation of people in movement, are productive of transformations in world order. Understandings of movement produce opposing understandings of ‘stasis’ which constitute an effect of political order. As such, the contested regulation and categorisation of people in movement is productive of political transformation. The thesis explores how contested understandings of people in movement contribute to transformations in world order, at moments related to the transformation from an imperial to an international order. First, it analyses the role of the recodification of people in movement as ‘migrants’, ‘tourists’ and ‘refugees’ in creating an ‘international’ order, in the early twentieth century. Second, it addresses the role of debates over people in movement at key moments of British colonial expansion and decolonisation in the Indian Ocean World, between the seventeenth century and the present. These are related to understandings of ‘piracy’, ‘slavery’, ‘pilgrimage’, ‘nomads’, ‘tourists’, ‘settlers’, and ‘contract workers’. While these debates are articulated in relation to people in movement, they produce relative understandings of political space, belonging, territoriality, sovereignty, race, and class, which set the terms of political order. As debates around people in movement shift, they transform understandings of political order, and as political orders change, so do debates about mobilities. This generates new insight into contemporary world order, as well as providing an analytic approach for understanding how world orders are made and unmade more broadly.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2023 Alice Engelhard
Library of Congress subject classification:	J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration J Political Science > JZ International relations
Sets:	Departments > International Relations
Supervisor:	Barkawi, Tarak
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4699

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