Mobility Regimes, Subversive Mobilities, and Tourism

In this review article, Erik Cohen raises the question as to whether the contemporary social world is a collection of bounded entities, particularly nation-states, or an open borderless entity of global flows. He argues that while the mobilities paradigm implied a growing openness to travel and tourism flows around the globe, new mechanisms of control and surveillance deployed by mobility regimes increasingly pose obstacles in the way of those flows. But, to him, the effects of these obstacles are not equally distributed on the global level. To show these differences, Cohen discusses in some detail the concept of mobilities, the threats that engendered the contemporary mobility regimes, as well as the various mobilities that strive to subvert them. He shows how these factors impacted upon the shape of world travel and tourism flows. Cohen maintains that by privileging tourists and other travelers from wealthy, particularly Western, countries, while excluding those from poor ones as undesirable visitors, those control and surveillance mechanisms exacerbate global inequalities in travel opportunities, even as they encourage the invention of new methods of subversion of mobility regimes. He thereby concludes that the view of the social world depends on one's perspective: for the privileged people high on the mobilities hierarchy, the social world appears as a spectrum of free global flows, but for the excluded ones, low on that hierarchy, it appears as a collection of bounded entities. (Abstract by the Reviews Editor)