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

Kotef, Hagar

Abstract

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.

Citation

Kotef, H. (2015). Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375753

• Book Type: Authored Book
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Oct 7, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 2, 2115
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Series Title: Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
• ISBN: 9780822358558
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375753
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375753
• Related Public URLs: https://www.dukeupress.edu/movement-and-the-ordering-of-freedom