Mobility and Globalization

Mobility, viewed empirically as the movement of people, capital, technology, institutions, ideas, ideological systems, and knowledge, is the most visible face of globalization. Mobility is central to the process of globalization marking ageless continuity. Although some writers define the present phase (twentieth and twenty-first century) of globalization as the “age of migration,” historical human migration—both involuntary and voluntary—characterized earlier phases of history just as well. The so-called free movement of labor in the present phase of globalization hides forms of slavery and bonded labor that continue to characterize twenty-first-century globalization. An examination of the mobility of people in the first quarter of the twenty-first century will illustrate the seesaw-like tendency of a borderless and bordered world, which reveals the contradictions of globalization with implications for both mobilities of people and dissemination or mobility of scientific knowledge and technology. The present chapter takes an interdisciplinary perspective to examine the intersectionality of mobility and globalization.