Nomads and international relations: post-sedentarist dialogues

Abstract

The key concepts and reference points of International Relations (IR) are informed by a sedentarist worldview anchored on the territorial state. IR’s conception of its subject-matter is thus ‘static’ in both senses of the word: state-centric and immobile. One of the consequences of this sedentarist worldview has been a neglect of the world’s nomads. Defined by their spatial mobility, nomads have been either ignored or, less frequently, brought in as an exceptional ‘Other’ against which concepts such as statehood and territoriality can be defined. The interventions in this forum challenge IR’s sedentarism by recovering the world’s nomads as international political actors past and present, thus enriching the range of empirical cases upon which IR scholars may build their theories and challenging teleological narratives that view the history of the international system as the inevitable triumph of the territorial state. At the same time, the forum cautions against the reification of the nomad as the ‘Other’ of the state by disaggregating nomadism from mobility and problematising the sedentarism/nomadism binary. The goal of the forum is not to provide a blueprint for how IR scholars should study nomads, but to promote a critical reflexivity about IR’s sedentarist assumptions.