Patterns of Im/mobility, Conflict and Identity

Birgit Bräuchler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Aus- & Einwanderung

Patterns of im/mobility, collective identity and conflict are highly entangled. The im/mobility of a social or cultural group has major impact on how identity narratives, a sense of belonging and relationships to 'others' are shaped, and vice versa. These dynamics are closely interlinked with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups and power structures that involve a broad variety of actors from local populations, to migrants, government institutions and other intermediaries.

Mainly looking at patterns of internal mobility such as 'traditional' or strategic mobilities and mobilities enforced by crisis, conflict or governmental programmes and regimes, this book aims to go beyond currently predominant issues of transnational migration. Dynamics of non/integration and belonging, caused by im/mobility, are analysed on a cultural and political level, which involves questions of representation, indigeneity/autochthony, political rights and access to land and other resources. With ethnographic case studies from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Bangladesh, East Timor and Indonesia, this volume provides a comparative perspective on the multifold dimensions of im/mobility in contexts where changing mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion trigger or settle conflicts and social identities are constantly re/negotiated.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Social Identities.

Patterns of im/mobility, conflict and the re/making of identity narratives

Birgit Bräuchler and Anaïs Ménard

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the interrelationship between patterns of im/mobility on the one hand and the reconstitution of social collective identities and the related emergence or settlement of conflicts on the other. The main arguments are (1) that the im/mobility of a social or cultural group has major impact on how identity narratives, a sense of belonging and relationships to ‘others’ are shaped, and vice versa, and (2) that these dynamics are closely interlinked with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups and power structures that involve a broad variety of actors. Mainly looking at patterns of internal mobility such as ‘traditional’ or strategic mobilities and mobilities enforced by crisis, conflict or governmental programmes and regimes, the contribution provides the conceptual background for a special issue that aims to go beyond currently predominant issues of transnational migration. Established or emerging dynamics of (non-)integration and belonging, caused by im/mobility, are analysed on a cultural and political level, which involves questions of representation, indigeneity/autochthony, political rights and access to land and other resources. Conflict situations in contexts of mobility involve changes in the social understanding and renegotiation, reconstruction or reproduction of group identities and narratives with reference to certain socio-political and historical patterns. The legitimation of rights and access to various forms of citizenship and mobility need to be understood against the backdrop of emerging or established mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion between groups, which trigger or settle conflicts and make social identities to be constantly renegotiated.

This special issue analyses the interrelationship between patterns of im/mobility on the one hand and the building or reconstitution of social collective identities and the related emergence or settlement of conflicts on the other. Situations of im/mobility offer a productive way to reflect on identity as a relational process. The main argument is that voluntary or forced im/mobility of a social or cultural group has major impact on how identity narratives and relationships to ‘the others’ are (re)shaped, as the construction of identity rests on power relations between groups and the existence of mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion that inform people’s stay in (or departure from) a certain locality and their sense of belonging. This conceptual paper aims at introducing the concepts used in this special issue and positioning the contributions in a thriving broader mobility debate.

The mobility paradigm

Current images of overcrowded train stations in European cities where refugees and asylum seekers wait to be ‘processed’ and a highly mobile terrorism that strikes globally very much coin contemporary public notions of mobility and migration. At the moment, they overshadow more prominent and established forms of mobility such as tourism or business-related travel that have been in the focus of academic research for some decades now. New developments in media technologies and in transport infrastructure have tremendous impact on scale, kinds, speed, coordination and control of mobility worldwide. The resulting multiple mobilities, including physical and virtual travel, in turn, critically impact people’s lives and perceptions, as the promoters of the ‘the new mobility paradigm’, Sheller and Urry (2006, p. 207), emphasized (see also Grieco & Urry, 2012, p. 1). The mobility turn was asking to make mobility the concrete focus of research on social, economic and political life, which would challenge social sciences to change and adapt ‘objects of its inquiries and the methodologies for research’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 209), but also often simplistically subsumes different kinds of mobility under one paradigm by looking at them through the same kind of analytical glasses (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 184).

This special issue is mainly concerned with patterns of internal mobility (or immobility) that tend to be comparatively left out of consideration (see also Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 184). Beyond the currently predominant transnational dynamics, the authors in this issue explore forms of internal im/mobility that may be either voluntary, such as economic migration and internal migration promoted and legitimized by ‘custom’ (Ménard, 2017; Bedert, 2017), or enforced, whether through crisis and conflict (Siraj & Bal, 2017; Sakti, 2017; Bräuchler, 2017) or through governmental policies and international programmes (Borch, 2017; Siraj & Bal, 2017; Bräuchler, 2017). In Sakti’s (2017) and Siraj and Bal’s (2017) contribution, patterns of internal im/mobility are closely linked with the im/possibility of crossing (newly established) national borders and state politics that, in most of our cases, adds yet another dimension to the complex local mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing upon various case studies (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste), the authors show that contexts of mobility can change or trigger such mechanisms, including strategies of marginalization or stigmatization, which are informed by the power relations of the involved groups. It is various sets of actors employing such mechanisms, be they local populations, migrants, states and government institutions, international agencies or other intermediaries, which create the conditions for cooperation or conflict at the local level.

In contexts of mobility, the reterritorialization of identities plays a predominant role in reshaping intergroup relations and structuring local processes of conflict or cooperation. The new mobility paradigm is promoting new conceptualizations of space by moving away from notions of space ‘as spatially fixed geographical containers for social processes’ and dichotomies such as the local and global, to the notion of space as a fluid concept, as travelling, and the dissolution of boundaries (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 209). This resembles changing notions of culture in anthropology after the writing culture debate in the 1980s, when the idea of culture as processual and contested systems replaced the long-prevailing container model, the idea of culture being a fixed and spatially bounded isolated whole with a specific set of characteristics (Lentz, 2013). Yet, territorially bounded places still play a major role in patterns of mobility and identity formation. Reterritorialization is a key factor in the reconfiguration of identities, either through ‘necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities’ (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006, p. 3) or the re-grounding taking place in people’s travel destinations or new dwellings (Sheller & Urry, 2006, pp. 210–211). Mobilities and moorings are complementary and occur dialectically (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 2).

The reterritorialization of identities questions the notion of belonging, namely ‘how’ and ‘why’ does one belong to a specific place, not only outside national borders but also within them, with regard to smaller political entities. Reterritorialization takes place where people migrated to, or where state borders changed as part of conflict settlement, thereby reopening debates about the rights associated with belonging. Place and territory also gain renewed importance given the promotion of cultural and indigenous rights, anti-globalization and decentralization movements, as well as rising competition for land as a scarce resource. The contributors of this issue powerfully articulate, in diverse geographical locations and historical contexts, the relationships between mobility, reterritorialization and belonging by highlighting the relevance of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in these processes. At the same time, they show that the collective identities thus constructed often transcend geographical and political boundaries. This dual process demonstrates that studying identities in contexts of mobility requires a permanent move between the particularity of territorialized experiences and the construction of larger identities across space, sometimes through the construction of smaller social spaces.

Im/mobility and power

Mobility is often depicted as the ability to move freely. The emancipatory character of mobility appears as ‘the ideology and utopia of the twenty-first century’, the realization of ‘the neo-liberal dream’ – despite the increasing numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and slaves (Urry, 2012, p. 4). The right to move freely (in the state’s territory) has thus become a human right for each citizen granted by the UN Charter on Human Rights (Article 13) and by numerous state constitutions. Multiple mobilities imply physical movement, movement enhanced by technologies, movements of images and information, communications and immobile infrastructure (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 212; Urry, 2012, pp. 4–5). However, the capacity, or lack thereof, to access and make use of multiple mobilities also creates social exclusion and situations of immobility (Sheller & Urry, 2006, pp. 207, 210). As illustrated by Lucas (2012, p. 212), the ability to be mobile is determined by three factors: activities (settlement type, topography, environment, infrastructure etc.), individual features (age, gender, skills and ability, ethnicity/race, dependants, responsibilities, available resources) and transport (type, availability, suitability, cost of travel, information, staffing).¹ Less mobile people, communities or even nations become excluded from what Urry has coined hypermobility, that is ‘the way in which people, goods and services need now to be in perpetual motion (physical and virtual) in order to match the production and consumption demands of … contemporary societies’ (Lucas, 2012, p. 217). Moreover, the current global economic crisis (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 184), but also global forms of terror and worldwide processes of decentralization seem to reintroduce or normalize national and sub-national borders and ethnic boundaries.

Our case studies show that mobility and immobility are often closely connected. People can physically move to a certain location, as e.g. settlers in Sierra Leone (Ménard, 2017) or Butonese migrants in Eastern Indonesia (Bräuchler, 2017), but become immobile in their place of destination due to their status as cultural outsiders. They are immobilized in their new places, for instance through the denial of basic rights to land or political representation. Such mutual causality of mobility and immobility is exemplary shown by Derks’ (2010) study of Cambodian fishermen in Thailand. Cambodian migrant workers are free to move to their neighbouring country to take up work in the fishing industry, when they are out at sea and when changing their employers, but they are immobilized in the harbours they work in through their financial dependency on their employer who is also the only one that can protect them from police raids. Mobility thus places individuals in situations of social ambiguity that reflect the complex social experience induced by both movement and reterritorialization. It challenges dichotomies related to the mobility debate, such as ‘victims’ versus ‘agents’, ‘force’ versus ‘freedom’, ‘exploited’ versus ‘successful’, ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ (Derks, 2010, pp. 916, 918, 931). With their regimes of mobility approach, Glick Schiller and Salazar (2013, p. 183) express the need for researchers to explore the ‘relationships between mobility and immobility, localisation and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Patterns of im/mobility, conflict and the re/making of identity narratives
• 2 ‘Hunger has brought us into this jungle’: understanding mobility and immobility of Bengali immigrants in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh
• 3 Interpreting conflict and integration through the reciprocity lens: mobility and settlement in a historical perspective on the Sierra Leonean coast
• 4 The complementarity of divergent historical imaginations: narratives of mobility and alterity in contemporary Liberia
• 5 Changing patterns of mobility, citizenship and conflict in Indonesia
• 6 Im/mobile subjects: identity, conflict and emotion work among East Timorese Meto diaspora
• 7 In ‘no man’s land’: the im/mobility of Serb NGO workers in Kosovo
• Index