Abstract
Globalisation is the current Zeitgeist, praised and blamed for the most astonishing human achievements and disasters of the recent decades. The best friend on another continent feels as close as Auntie Sophie 10 houses down the street.
In his book, Emanuel Deutschmann creates a new approach to analyse mobility beyond the seeming duality of localism and globalism and proposes a concept of social integration in world regions. Using different indicators for transnational human action (THA) and communication (THC) between international countries, the book assesses the role of regions, country characteristics and patterns of movement for human mobility over time.
The book starts out with a diligent review of theories from sociology and political science to propose its own line of Comparative Sociology of Regional Integration. This approach criticises the main neglect of global regions as the realm most mobility is organised in. To test this theory, data on eight different types of mobility and communication between 196 international countries are combined and transformed into a global network. Using different analysis and visualisation techniques, evidence is provided for a stronger regional clustering than general global flows. Both using different conceptualisations of world regions and unsupervised community-detection algorithms supports the claim.
Moving beyond mere descriptives of mobility flows, the book further explores potential explanations for regionalisation by including country characteristics in regression analyses for networks. As the main driving factor for most forms of mobility and communication, it is not culture, religion or political alliances that are presented, but ‘simply’ spatial distance and the adjacency of countries. This contradicts the common belief that through the drastic improvements in transport and telecommunications, geography would decline in importance, joining the body of literature countering the distance is dead theorem made in the 1990s.
To define a general ‘law’ of human mobility in relation to spatial distance, the movements are plotted on a log-log-scale. Showing a pattern of many short-distance and fewer long-distance movements, the book claims that human mobility follows a power law, resembling the random exploration pattern of many animals but on a larger scale. Two explanations are proposed: first, the maximum distance that can be crossed by any species defines the expansion boundaries of their territory, and second, variances in resource stocks and type-specific opportunities, that is limited resources, making large distance movements more costly and nearby opportunities more appealing. The human pattern comparison over time shows increased mobility on all scales and not only at the global level. Taken together, the book contributes to the literature in three major ways: first, transnational human mobility happens mostly regionally and not globally. Second, mobility is mainly driven by spatial distance and not political or cultural factors. Third, the increase of global movements is the outcome of a rise in mobility at all levels with the lion’s share still happening locally – hence an explosion of mobilisation, not globalisation per se.
This eminently informative book has its strengths and weaknesses on the same flank.
The important contribution of shifting the research focus from macro- or micro-level mechanisms to the regions in between misses going further down to the intranational and local level. The achievement of comparing different types of mobility and communication is not gilded by a thorough exploration of the underlying mechanisms but is set aside in favour of developing a general ‘law’ of mobility.
Therefore, either a stronger argument should be made as to why nations are of particular interest in the study of regional mobility, for example, for institutional and legal reasons, or a more open and refined definition of geographical regions should be considered. Moreover, the analysis would benefit from a more in-depth assessment of the mechanisms involved and the analysis of mobility at a lower level, as it is not countries that send people around, but people themselves who move within and between countries based on their agency when laws and resources allow.
The book follows a very rigorous route in disentangling the overwhelming stream of increased mobility at all scales that makes globalisation seem to be on the rise while turning a blind eye to the increase on the local and regional level. The benefits of a structural exploration through social network analysis and a creative combination of interdisciplinary approaches prove to be fruitful and a promising starting point for analysing mobility at several levels simultaneously.
Overall, the book serves as an excellent overview of different theories of human mobility from various fields and combines interesting approaches to analyse and visualise transnational mobility. A particular strength is the discussion of a meso-level analysis to ‘abandon [. . .] the binary of “the local and the global”’ (p. 163).
The comparison of different types of mobility like migration, asylum-seeking or tourism and communication such as online friendships and remittances additionally allows a more fine-grained understanding of the motivation and interrelation of both kinds of transnational flows.