States are made by mobility

States are constituted by mobility. This is the key claim in Mobility Makes States, an edited volume from University of Pennsylvania Press, edited by Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk. The volume examines human mobility, power and migration in Africa, shedding new light on larger global patterns and state making processes. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets.

Senior researcher at DIIS, Nauja Kleist, contributes with a chapter on how the Ghanaian state engages international Ghanaian migrants in national development. Within the last 15 years, a range of migration-development initiatives have been passed but only few have been implemented. Rather than seeing this situation as a sign of indifference, Kleist suggests that it constitutes an attempt to symbolically include international migrants in the nation and constitute them as a patriotic and governable population with limited political rights. The state thereby shows its ambitions of performing sovereignty in the sense of controlling subjects and resources—even if they are located outside the national territory. Finally Kleist argues that migration-development initiatives function as a policy spectacle where the government signals that it is taking its responsibility as a migrant-sending state seriously and exercises legitimate statecraft.