Mail & Guardian | 21.05.2017
Achille Mbembe
The government of human mobility might well be the most important problem to confront the world during the first half of the 21st century.
Worldwide, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies have led to the acceleration of speed and the intensification of connections. Ours is, in this regard, an era of planetary entanglement. Yet, wherever we look, the drive is decisively towards enclosure.
If this trend persists, tomorrow’s world will increasingly be a gated world, with myriad enclaves, culs-de-sac and shifting, mobile and diffuse borders.
The capacity to decide who can move and who can settle, where and under what conditions, will be at the core of the political struggles over sovereignty.