Mobility Disenfranchisement: Infrastructures of the Global Mobility Divide (MOVIDE)

Recent macro-level studies of human cross-border movement have shown how human mobility—unlike flows of goods, capital and ideas—remain highly regionalised with eight out of ten transnational movements happening within world-regions and with almost half of all world travels (46.9 percent) happening within Europe. Yet, the underlying determinants of international mobility, and their interplay, remain poorly understood. The MOVIDE project draws on advances in international law, sociology and human geography to develop novel, transdisciplinary approaches to the intersection of law, transnational human mobility and socioeconomic inequalities. Hypothesising that legal regimes related to human movement exert greater influence on global mobility patterns than previously recognised, the project pursues the following two research tracks:

1. Drawing on empirical research on visa waivers and visa costs, the project foregrounds citizenship as an organising centrepiece of global mobility law and examines the instrumental role of nationality status in the formation of a ‘kinetic elite’ for whom the legal infrastructure produces unprecedented degrees of global mobility.
2. Drawing on theoretical advances within sociology, the project conceptualises the ‘capacity to move across borders’ as a form of mobility capital in an effort to rethink how law distributes (in)access to mobility across legal, economic and spatial dimensions, and thereby shapes global mobility patterns in ways that are not always measurable as movements in time and space.