In contemporary sociology, there has been significant interest in the idea of mobility, the decline of the nation state, the rise of flexible citizenship, and the porous quality of political boundaries. There is much talk of medicine without borders and sociology without borders. These social developments are obviously linked to the processes of globalization, leading some to argue that we need a `sociology beyond society' in order to account for these flows and global networks. In this article, I propose an (...) alternative analysis. There are important developments involving the securitization of modern societies that create significant forms of immobility. One striking illustration is the increasing use of walls to quarantine or secure territories and communities against outsiders or to regulate the flow of migrants in Israel, in Europe and along the Mexican-US border. Modern societies are in particular characterized by a deep contradiction between the economic need for labour mobility and the state's political need to assert sovereignty. Gated societies, ghettoes, quarantine zones, prisons, camps and similar arrangements are in many respects pre-modern institutions of spatial regulation for political ends. Contemporary technical developments in biomedicine offer new opportunities for political control and spatial regulation in terms of forensic policing, bio-tattooing and bioprofiling. Globalization paradoxically produces significant forms of immobility for political regulation of persons alongside the mobility of goods and services. (shrink)

In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.

A stimulating appraisal of a crucial contemporary theme, this comprehensive analysis of globalizaton offers a distinctively cultural perspective on the social theory of the contemporary world. This perspective considers the world as a whole, going beyond conventional distinctions between the global and the local and between the universal and the particular. Its cultural approach emphasizes the political and economic significance of shifting conceptions of, and forms of participation in, an increasingly compressed world. At the same time the book shows why (...) culture has become a globally contested issue - why, for example, competing conceptions of ′world order′ have political and economic consequences. (shrink)