Description
For a long time, nomads were of little interest to IR, but this has begun to change in the last few years. In particular, there is a growing historical literature on the role of the nomadic Eurasian steppe in influencing the historical development of sedentary polities in Europe and in China. In theoretical terms, the existing literature has been defined by a binary opposition between the nomad and the state: the mobile nomad has been conceptualised as a material and/or ideational threat to the sedentary state, which in turn is used to explain why states have so often pursued policies of discrimination, marginalisation, and forced sedentarisation toward nomads. This oppositional framing between the nomad and the state, I argue, has been grounded on a ‘traditionalist’ or indeed ‘colonialist’ conception of the nomad, which depicts nomadism as a pre-modern form of social and political organisation that historically and/or logically precedes territorial statehood. In contrast, this paper shifts the focus to the myriad of ways in which the modern states-system itself is continually producing nomads of its own. This production of new forms of nomadism has become increasingly evident in the globalised world of the twenty-first century, with the rise of ‘digital nomads’ and ‘global nomads’, but their conceptual antecedents can be traced back to the consolidation of the modern state in the nineteenth century.
