The Mobility-Security Nexus and the Making of Order: An Interdisciplinary and Historicizing Intervention

The book explores the complex, multi-directional connections of the "mobility/security nexus" in the re-ordering of states, empires, and markets in historical perspective. Contributing to a vivid academic debate, the book offers in-depth studies on how mobility and security interplay in the emergence of order beyond the modern state. While mobilities studies, migration studies and critical security studies have focused on particular aspects of this relationship, such as the construction of mobility as a political threat or the role of infrastructure and security, we still lack comprehensive conceptual frameworks to grasp the mobility/security nexus and its role in social, political, and economic orders. With authors drawn from sociology, International Relations, and various historical disciplines, this transdisciplinary volume historicizes the mobility-security nexus for the first time. In answering calls for more studies that are both empirical and have historical depth, the book presents substantial case studies on the nexus, ranging from the late Middle Ages right up to the present-day, with examples from the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, Papua New Guinea, Rome in the 1980s or the European Union today. By doing so, the volume conceptualizes the mobility/security nexus from a new, innovative perspective and, further, highlights it as a prominent driving force for society and state development in history. This book will be of much interest to researchers and students of critical security studies, mobility studies, sociology, history and political science.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Introduction 1. Historizing the Mobility/Security Nexus: Introductory Remarks Part II: Conceptual and Theoretical Reflections 2. The Security/Mobility Nexus as an Analytical Lens: The Cases of Counterterrorism and Infrastructure 3. Ordering Movement and Mobilizing Security: On the Production of ‘Critical Infrastructure’ 4. Thresholds of Threat in (Historical) Security Cultures: Overcoming the Good-Versus-Bad Mobilities Dichotomy Part III: Case Studies Section 1: (Re)Ordering States and Societies 5. Securitization as a Driving Force for Political Mobilization of National Movements 6. State Order, Mobility, and Policing in the Trust Territory of New Guinea. Patrolling the ‘Periphery’ 7. Spatial (Im)Mobility as a Threat to Social Mobility: Roma in the Peripheries of Rome and the NIMBY Politics of campi nomadi Section 2: (Re)Ordering Empires 8. Struggles with Mass-Migrations, National- and State-Interests in the Late Habsburg Empire: Security through Mobility or against Mobility? 9. Nineteenth-Century Labor Migration and Fear of Epidemics in the British Colony of Mauritius (c. 1834-1910): A Danger to Public Health? 10. Securing the Flows of Oil in a Transottoman Context: Baku’s Oil, Infrastructures of Transportation, and Mendeleev as an Imperial Expert of Securitization (1850–1918) Section 3: (Re)Ordering Markets 11. Securitization Practices of Traveling Merchants and Mercenaries (14th-17th century) 12. Anti-Nuclear Activism, the State, and the Energy Market in the Federal Republic of Germany: Mobilizing Power 13. ‘Critical’ Financial Infrastructures and the Securitization of Calculative Micro-processes Part IV: Concluding Remarks 14. Security, Mobility, and the Colonial Connection: Concluding Remarks