The Orders and Borders of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism

MIGMOBS investigates how borders and hierarchies are maintained between “the West and the Rest”, even as those who are internationally mobile sometimes succeed in challenging the “birthright lottery” - i.e. that citizenship at birth most determines someone’s chances in life.

It asks: How does changing categorisation of subordinate populations worldwide in terms of “migration”, “free movement”, and “minorities” relate to these in- and between- country inequalities?

It echoes critical migration, mobilities and borders scholars who argue that late capitalism in liberal democracies continues to advance through an ever more sophisticated differentiation and management of population – at the border as well as internal to states.

Such work, though, has not adequately examined variation regionally, or across historical shifts in political economy: from post-war liberalism, through neoliberalism, to the era of COVID and beyond.

MIGMOBS thus explores in unprecedented empirical breadth and detail how states reproduce sovereign power in an otherwise porous world: selecting and extracting wanted or recognised movers as “immigrants”, brutally excluding many other “migrants”, while simultaneously rendering fluid and untroubling a vast range of banal “mobilities” such as tourism and business travel.

Mapping physical, virtual and non-human mobilities, the project details demographic and social connections over time between 21 states.

This quantitative comparative historical work underpins co-productive ethnographic case studies rethinking a range of archetypal “migration systems” in and from Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. These investigate how subordinate populations resist the categories, statuses and borders imposed upon them.

With the pandemic’s impact on border crossings and transactions, new modes of classification and accreditation suggest an increasingly precise biometric control of movement and behaviour: a new phase of late capitalism I call “viral liberalism”.