This could scarcely be a more timely volume, making its appearance in the early stages of the mass migration from war-torn, failed, and impoverished states into Europe that peaked in 2015, the year of its publication, during which more than 1.8 million persons crossed illegally into Europe. Africa, Eritrea, and Nigeria made the list of the top ten countries of origin of this migration. The African Center for Strategic Studies estimated displacement that within the continent swelled to more than 18.5 million persons in that year, led by Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Additionally, the International Displacement Monitoring Centre estimated that internal displacement affected some 40.8 million people at the beginning of 2016, led in Africa by those same five countries plus the Central African Republic. Indeed, the Fund for Peace treats the pervasiveness of refugees and internally displacement persons, as well as human flight and brain drain, as two of the defining features of fragile states, the ten most fragile of which in its 2016 index include the same six African countries, with Nigeria at 13th, but adding Chad.

Against this contemporary perspective on migration as indicative of state fragility, editors Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk remind us in Mobility Makes States that managing mobility is an important, even defining, dimension of all states’ powers and functions. They do so at a time when managing human mobility has become a central political issue in the United States, Western Europe, and other well-established states, as well as a consequence of weakness and failure in some of the world’s poorest states in Africa and elsewhere. They argue that “human mobility has long played a foundational role in determining what states look like as spatial and political entities, how they accumulate power and resources, what types of policies and strategies they pursue and how they relate to their peers and other political, social, and economic actors. In short, mobility makes states” (p. 2).

The editors build their overarching case in the opening chapter, illustrated and supported by subsequent chapters on managing mobility in colonial Mozambique, post-genocide Rwanda, segregation in Johannesburg (South Africa), migration in Ghana, wartime and peace along the Zambian-Angolan border, mobility in desert African societies, and decolonization in Lusophone Africa. Collectively, the case studies drive home the importance of human mobility management across the continent, not just in states where internal displacement and out-migration toward Europe have been the greatest.

The central contention of the editors is that mobility has too often been treated as an “external aberration or intrusion that states must address rather than a key ingredient in the constitution of state authority,” a failing, they contend, that is grounded in prevailing state theory suggesting an image of “a static, sedentary, and homogeneous population over whom state power is exercised” (p. 2). Instead, they stress “the central role of mobility in shaping the way states in Africa are constituted as political and legal entities and also the way these states intervene in everyday life” (p. 2). They seek to correct shortcomings in the way the state is generally conceived in African contexts as afflicted by 1) “an inordinate focus on movements across fixed sovereign borders”; 2) “an uncritical attachment to the ‘modern’ state and the degree states in Africa ‘fail’ to satisfy Eurocentric criteria of statehood”; and 3) “a tendency to approach Africa as an ‘outlier’ or ‘exception’ that deviates from European norms” (p. 3).

The authors’ critique of the manner in which the state is explicitly, but more typically implicitly, conceived is an important one whose implications extend well beyond the scope of their study. Theirs is an implicit critique of Max Weber’s theory of the state as a compulsory, territorially defined community possessed of a monopoly of legitimate coercive power. The meaning of a “modern” state may be different, at least in Africa, wherein they recognize that states promote human mobility in a variety of ways and for a range of purposes, as well as attempting to limit and control it, even as borders are also porous and complex places. The late Charles Tilly was careful not to assume that outside of Europe, states would come into being as the products of war making and war preparation. The literatures on colonial and postcolonial states, perversions of the Weberian model inter alia in the form of neopatrionialism, sublimate the more basic question of just how legitimate states do or can come into being in Africa.

Mobility recognizes a range of powers to extract resources, administer justice, and many other functions that all states can exercise (their emphasis), asserting what many would question: that even states regarded as failures “have little difficulty satisfying these overall criteria.” They go on to assert that “mobility makes states” because “the movement of people has consistently shaped how and why state power has come to be distributed and concentrated across space” (p. 7). The movement of state agents and civilian populations, they assert, has “consistently defined the spatial extent and temporal duration of state power” (p. 7).

The authors focus on channeling of state power, by which they mean a balancing of human mobility prevention and promotion in order to “capture the irregular and intermittent way in which states seek to determine the speed, rhythm, routes, and meaning of mobility” (p. 19). They perceive channeling not as an exercise of “ubiquitous or omniscient” power by a unitary state but instead as a “variegated, incomplete, and dispersed network of order and control.” They focus on “state portability,” recognizing that topographies of state power vary spatially over time and, implicitly, intensity as well. “When people move,” they note, “so, too does the state” (p. 26). They are careful to note that state centralization is pervasively complicated and compromised by countervailing power at local and regional levels, even, as they might also have noted, by factional strife at national levels as well. Imbedded in these observations is the important point that state power is grounded in competition, even consent, as well as coercion, and that significant ranges of viable and legitimate state capability exist between omnipotence at one end and fragility and failure at the other.

Future works, perhaps subsequent editions of this volume, building on its important work, will need to broaden the focus to the ways in which states actually can evolve and gain strength to exercise effectively, even democratically, their governance of human mobility. The findings of this subsequent work will need to address how even established states, as well as nascent ones, can sustain their stable and democratic character, or acquire these attributes in managing human mobility.

In the end, the spatial topographies of human mobility and its interaction with government attempts to restrain or promote are inextricably bound up with efforts to advance or restrain socioeconomic mobility upward out of poverty and government’s critical roles in that quest. Nowhere on the planet is that more the case, as it has been for half a century and more, than in Africa.