Im/Mobilität

This chapter focuses on the mobile turn that has left significant marks on the social sciences in the past two decades. It discusses why many refugee scholars prefer to look at displacement through the angle of im/mobility. In a first step the chapter traces back discussions that questioned classical place-based and territorial understandings of belonging that tended to stylise mobile people such as refugees into crisis figures. In a second step it discusses innovations initiated by the "new mobilities" paradigm which played a crucial role in the reconceptualisation of displacement- such as calls for a less rigid distinction between forced and voluntary forms of migration and the focus on regimes of mobilities that create uneven access to mobility pathways. In a final step, the chapter discusses the shortfalls of the mobilities paradigm that scholars of forced migration have made visible.