In a world of massive inequalities between nations, and where citizenship at birth is the biggest determining factor of anyone's life chances, migration and international mobility are often seen as dramatic mechanisms of change. Yet strict borders and hierarchies between nations persist. The recently initiated five year ERC Advanced Grant project, MIGMOBS - The Orders and Border of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism (2024-28) investigates how and why global inequalities are reproduced through the shifting classification of mobile populations. In opening a new vision by seeing "international migration" as only a narrow and symbolically overcharged slice in a continuum of "mobilities", both human and non-human, it effects a paradigm shift in conventional migration studies, in both theoretical and operational terms. Building a global database with case studies across 23 sending and receiving countries, MIGMOBS charts how nation-states have preserved power through the era of neoliberalism by selectively opening and closing channels of mobility: making immigration and asylum the obsessive target of sovereign control while rendering invisible and fluid the mass mobilities of tourism, students, business and commuter travel. For more information, contact the PI, Adrian Favell (adrian.favell@ucc.ie), or see: https://www.ucc.ie/en/migmobs

Adrian Favell is Professor of Social and Political Theory and Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork. He directed the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, and was also Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, Aarhus University and UCLA. He is the author of various works on migration, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and cities, notably a recent book with Polity Press (2022) The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies. He directs the ERC AdG Project MIGMOBS - The Orders and Border of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism (2024-28) . Website: www.adrianfavell.com

Host
Institute for European Studies

Cosponsors
Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative
Comparative Muslim Societies Program
Sociology

Talk by Peter Lavelle (Associate Professor, Department of History University of Connecticut)

In the 1850s, when the Taiping Rebellion threw the finances of the Qing Empire into disarray, officials scrambled to prevent their empire from crumbling. In Xinjiang, they enacted a raft of measures to urgently make up for the loss of financial support from Beijing. These measures ranged from the liquidation of state-owned livestock herds to the widespread impressment of Turkestani Muslims in agriculture and mining. Conventional histories of the Taiping-era financial crisis have often linked it to the long-term institutional development of the modern Chinese fiscal state in the context of world history. By contrast, this paper takes a short-term and regionally-focused view of history in the mid-nineteenth century, showing that the financial crisis led to distinct patterns in the exploitation of people and resources in Qing Central Asia.

Peter Lavelle is a specialist in Chinese history during the long nineteenth century. His research focuses on topics related to the environment, agriculture, science and technology, and colonialism. He is currently working on a book about Chinese agricultural science and development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research has been supported by funding from a variety of sources, including the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright Program. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut, he was a member of the History faculty at Temple University.