Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via "regimes of movement." Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of "liberty" in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

Author: Hagar Kotef
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/06/2015
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.73lbs
Size: 8.79h x 6.48w x 0.49d
ISBN: 9780822358558

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2015

About the Author
Hagar Kotef is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.