mobility

There has been a tendency to consider movements as either effects of power relations (labour migrations, land dispossession) or as forms of resistance from situations of subordination (modern nomadism and the flaneur as escapes from state discipline). There are some aspects of this movement that are effects of power relations: the definition of state sovereignty over the Chaco, capitalist advance over the region. We can also understand some movements as forms of escape from state control: resettlements, hunting and gathering expeditions. However, in the context of an embrace of “flexibility” as a dominant value of the economy and in the face of an increasing development of technologies of policing movement and controlling access, it would be a reduction to consider movement as only an effect or a form of resistance to power relations.