ABSTRACT
There has long been an underlying assumption in social theory that the interactions constituting and influencing peoples’ lives are shaped by their stagnant relationships to place. Sociologists, for instance, have conventionally studied societies as definable collectives of people knowable by their geographical position and political geographers and international relations scholars have examined the world as constituted by sovereign states governing bounded territories. This chapter explores a shift within scholarship that questions these traditional spatial assumptions and argues that theoretical frameworks based solely on analyses of spatially delimited relations obscure a vast array of social interactions and behaviours that are constituted by their movement. This critique led to the development of the new mobilities paradigm, a theoretical framework designed to investigate the role played by movement in influencing and constituting social and cultural relations. The key components of this paradigm are summarised and some of the main criticisms that have been levelled at it will be addressed. Finally, the new mobilities paradigm will be employed to examine how one of the traditional targets of mobilities theory, state sovereignty, is itself constituted through a series of governmental and territorial mobilities.
