Mobile space-times and the rescaling of political community

Loren B. Landau

Chapter 19 in Handbook on Politics and Society, 2025, pp 350-364 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores how people's fragmented social worlds, material uncertainty, and mobility are shaping political futures and the analytical tools needed to assess them. This chapter foregrounds the urban sites which are central nodes in these lives and politics. Drawing on decades of research across sub-Saharan Africa, it illustrates how the kinds of urban-based markets, social, and political institutions that delivered modern citizenship and political analysis are either absent or competing for loyalties and authority. In these spaces, there are few reasons to expect the kind of solidarities and democratic demand-making that historically emerged from industrially driven urbanisation, pre-industrial city-states, and ancient imperial urban centres. What will emerge are political normativities conforming poorly to existing ethical and epistemological frameworks. Instead, claims and mobilisation will operate simultaneously at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Demands on state actors will continue, but as states decreasingly act to regulate the production of space and meaning, formal citizenship may be supplanted by local and diasporic bonds which are private, religious, or informal. This gives cause to unsettle both normative and analytical lenses to enable the novel vocabulary needed to describe emerging trans-local and trans-temporal political forms.

Keywords: Urbanisation; Migration; Mobility; Temporality; Civic engagement; Justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035301898
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