Space, Migration & Emotions in Classical Social Thought

This project explores the interrelations between space, migration and emotions through classical social thought.

The first part of this project, published in International Theory (2018), draws on Georg Simmel's classical sociology of space (1908) to suggest a research agenda for the study of space and social relations in contemporary IR. I argue that Simmel’s approach offers scholars of world politics an innovative conceptualization of the relations between physical and symbolic space (‘the physical-symbolic axis’) and between space and time (‘the spatio-temporal axis’); and a set of practical analytical tools to apply in IR research by defining the foundational qualities of space (exclusivity, divisibility, containment, positioning, and mobility) and suggesting a typology of distinct sociospatial formations: organized space, governed space, fixed space, and empty space. The study discusses the potential of Simmel’s nuanced relational approach to contribute to the contemporary study of world politics, and demonstrates its utility in two particular areas of research: the study of unbundled sovereignty and mobility in late modernity; and the study of empty spaces in IR.

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​The second interrelated part of this project focuses on Van Gennep's classical Rites de Passage (1909), and was part of a broader research initiative by the Buber Society (MBSF) that revisited this classical text. In an article published in the Journal of Classical Sociology, I situate Van Gennep’s text in the contemporary field of migration studies, arguing that his second and third chapters allow us to reformulate how we conceptualize contemporary migratory encounters. Rather than reading Van Gennep’s classical text through the prevalent Turnerian lens of “liminality” in migration, I reread it as offering a conceptualization of migration as deriving from society’s establishment on a delimited piece of earth, constituting itself against and in relation to its own limits. The article further suggests that Van Gennep’s sociology of the limit offers the field of migration studies three practical analytical contributions: (a) its notion of the multiplicity of limits and sublimits emerging throughout the migratory encounter; (b) its emphasis on the sanctification of the limit, which opens up the possibility of analyzing the relations between migration and emotions; and (c) its pointing to the potential cycle of dread elicited by this sanctification—a notion highly relevant to analyzing contemporary migratory encounters.

In a third article published in International Studies Review (2019), I utilize van Gennep's neglected theory of territorial passages to answer two key questions in the contemporary study of ontological security (OS) in migration. First, why do the members of the host society lose their perceived sense of OS in face of a mass of strangers arriving at their gates? Second, how, if at all, do they attempt to reconstitute it while incorporating the strangers into their world? Following the recent call within OS studies in IR to spell out the social mechanisms that facilitate the anxiety and uncertainty of the agents, I use the case of the German societal response to the 2015 refugee crisis to demonstrate that van Gennep's classical approach, far from being structural and functionalist, offers an advanced, power-informed, and processual perspective for uncovering a possible sociosymbolic mechanism behind the perceived “losing” and “re-finding” of OS in migratory encounters. I argue that van Gennep’s processual approach allows us to analyze how OS in migration is shaped via the power relations and continuous negotiations among various social, political, and religious agents, such as the German government, border control agencies, the German Protestant church, civic society movements, and individuals, and highlight how OS is ultimately unattainable as an essentialist category that is either ‘present’ or ‘absent’ throughout the migratory encounter.