Nomads’ Land: Exploring the Social and Political Life of the Nomad Category

Abstract

The category of the nomad has gained a newfound salience in recent decades, ranging from public interest in “digital nomadism” to academic debates about “nomadic theory.” Faced with this upsurge of interest in nomadism, this collective discussion brings together five scholars of diverse theoretical and academic backgrounds to investigate the pasts, presents, and possible futures of the nomad category. The contributions excavate the conditions under which the category first arose in European social and political discourse, explore the historical baggage that this category has carried with it into the twenty-first century, and inquire under what conditions nomadism has come to be regarded as a promising or emancipatory trope. Keeping with the open-ended ethos of international political sociology, the aim of the collective discussion is not to seek conceptual mastery over the category of the nomad, but to foreground the multiple, ambivalent, and often contradictory ways in which this category has been deployed through space and time. More broadly, the collective discussion is an invitation for scholars to explore the international social and political lives of our concepts in a way that destabilizes disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

La catégorie du nomade a endossé une nouvelle importance ces dernières décennies, de l'intérêt public pour le « nomadisme numérique » aux débats académiques sur la « théorie nomade ». Face à ce regain d'intérêt pour le nomadisme, cette discussion collective rassemble cinq chercheurs aux bagages théoriques et académiques divers pour enquêter sur les passés, présents et avenirs possibles de la catégorie nomade. Ces contributions mettent au jour les conditions d'apparition de la catégorie dans le discours social et politique européen, explorent le bagage historique que cette catégorie a emporté avec elle dans le vingt-et-unième siècle, et s'interrogent sur les conditions qui ont permis au nomadisme d’être considéré comme un trope prometteur et source d’émancipation. Dans la lignée de la philosophie ouverte de la sociologie politique internationale, l'objectif de cette discussion politique n'est pas de rechercher une maîtrise conceptuelle de la catégorie du nomade, mais de mettre en avant les multiples façons ambivalentes et souvent contradictoires dont cette catégorie a été déployée dans l'espace et dans le temps. Plus largement, la discussion collective constitue une invitation pour les chercheurs à explorer les vies sociales et politiques internationales de nos concepts d'une façon qui déstabilise les limites disciplinaires et institutionnelles.

La categoría de nómada ha ganado una nueva prominencia en las últimas décadas. Esta prominencia incluye desde el interés público con relación al «nomadismo digital» hasta los debates académicos sobre la «teoría nómada». Frente a este aumento del interés por el nomadismo, esta discusión colectiva reúne a cinco estudiosos, que cuentan con antecedentes teóricos y académicos diversos, con el fin de investigar los pasados, presentes y posibles futuros de la categoría nómada. Las contribuciones cimientan las condiciones bajo las cuales esta categoría surgió por primera vez en el discurso social y político europeo, estudian el bagaje histórico que esta categoría ha llevado consigo hasta el siglo XXI e indagan bajo qué condiciones el nomadismo ha llegado a ser considerado como un tropo prometedor o emancipatorio. De acuerdo con el ethos abierto de la Sociología Política Internacional, el objetivo de la discusión colectiva no es buscar el dominio conceptual sobre la categoría de nómada, sino poner en primer plano las formas, múltiples, ambivalentes y a menudo contradictorias, en que esta categoría se ha desplegado a través del espacio y el tiempo. En términos más generales, esta discusión colectiva es una invitación para que los académicos estudien la vida social y política internacional de nuestros conceptos de una manera que desestabilice las fronteras disciplinarias e institucionales.

Nomads have gained a newfound salience in the public eye. With the acceleration of globalization and the advent of the digital age, an incitement to “nomadism” has become a selling point for hotel chains, for digital enterprises, and, unsurprisingly, for travel companies around the globe. The phrase “digital nomad” has become especially salient with the appearance of numerous popular handbooks and survival guides for individuals seeking a “location-independent” lifestyle (e.g., Knudson and Conaway 2017; Lonely Planet 2020; Wilson 2022). The national lockdowns imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have only accentuated these trends, with The Economist (2021) reporting record-high numbers of internet searches for digital nomadism in Western European countries. As more and more states implement “digital nomad visas” to attract foreign nationals engaged in remote work, these new figurations of the nomad are also acquiring international political and legal significance (e.g., Kington 2022). Across the social and political sciences, this widespread fascination with nomadism has been paralleled by a relentless accumulation of academic literature on “nomadic subjects” and “nomadic theory,” often drawing on the influential work of Gilles Deleuze (e.g., Deleuze 1977; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Braidotti 1994; Palan 2003; Holland 2011; Lenco 2011; Kannisto 2016). Traditionally seen as a relic of a premodern past, the figure of the nomad is increasingly associated with a postmodern future. At the same time, rather than breaking free from the sedentarist assumptions that have defined the modern world, these novel figurations of the nomad often recycle longstanding conceptions of nomadism as the romanticized “Other” of sedentarism.

Despite its enduring appeal, the nomad category has received only sporadic attention from scholars (e.g., Dyson-Hudson 1972; Humphrey and Sneath 1999; Engebritsen 2017; Howarth 2022). By and large, existing work has understood nomadism as a category of analysis used by academics rather than a category of practice deployed by social actors themselves (on this distinction, see Brubaker and Cooper 2000). “Nomadism is a category imagined by outsiders,” as Humphrey and Sneath (1999, 1) put it. Consequently, existing analyses of the nomad category have tended to revolve around its theoretical value and empirical validity, while neglecting its social and political applications beyond the academy. This overlooks how categories of analysis can be taken up by social actors, thus transforming them into categories of practice, and vice versa, how categories of practice can seep through the walls of the ivory tower and morph into categories of analysis. Another limitation of existing work has been its segregation into disciplinary silos. Thus, the wealth of anthropological fieldwork on nomadic groups has had relatively little to say about the phenomenon of digital nomadism or the growing interest in nomadic theory (for an exception, see Sneath 2007, 198-202). On the flip side, the recent fascination with digital nomadism and nomadic theory has been largely removed from anthropological, archaeological, and historical studies of (what are commonly termed) nomads. The upshot is a disciplinary division of labor where anthropologists and area specialists study “real” nomadic communities, while political scientists and social theorists grapple with “metaphorical” nomads, with limited cross-fertilization between these fields.

The goal of this forum is to destabilize these conceptual and disciplinary boundaries by bringing together a diverse set of scholars to explore what Anthony Howarth (2022) has elsewhere called the “socio-political life of the nomad category”: How the concept of the nomad has been taken up by different social actors, mobilized in the service of different political projects, and shaped our imaginaries of the international. Exploring how the concept of the nomad has traveled not only across disciplines but also between the academy and the social world reveals a complex mosaic of changing meanings and applications that exceed scholarly definitions. We contend that understanding the present appeal of the nomad category requires a deeper understanding of its rich and multifaceted history.

The five contributions to this collective discussion provide a series of windows into the social and political uses of the nomad category from its inception in nineteenth-century Europe to the present day. The forum opens with Anthony Howarth’s analysis of how this category took shape in European social and political imaginaries via discourses of vagrancy and disorder. Despite its etymological roots in the ancient Greek nomos, Howarth demonstrates that the nomad category does not owe its inheritance to pastoralism alone, but also to discourses of undeserving social waste, criminality, and itinerancy. Building on this argument, Jaakko Heiskanen shows how the coupling of nomadism to industrial modernity also paved the way for the imagining of nomadic futures. As the spread of technological innovations such as the wireless telegraph and the steamship revolutionized travel and communications, nomadism became associated not only with the figure of the vagrant or drifter at the bottom of the social ladder but also, increasingly, with the dynamism of civilization itself. While some interpreted this “new” nomadism as the degeneration of civilization from within, others embraced it as a solution to the social issues of the time. The question of why nomadism came to be seen as a promising trope is picked up in Sina Steglich’s intervention. Interpreting the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “age of territoriality,” Steglich suggests that the embrace of nomadism since the mid-twentieth century can be understood as a response to the experience of intensified cultural hybridity and a perceived loss of national roots. Finally, the two contributions from Nivi Manchanda and Adib Bencherif challenge the positive characterization of nomadism that has acquired salience in recent decades. Focusing on the fetishization of mobility in some versions of queer theory, Manchanda explains how the (partial) metaphorization and adaptation of the nomad category have led to an elliptical understanding of how the politics of mobility and containment work in conditions of racial capitalism. Echoing some of these concerns, Bencherif shows how orientalizing and securitizing discourses have produced an exoticized and depreciative image of nomadic communities as being at the heart of the political crisis in the Sahel. We conclude by reiterating the multivalence of the nomad category and encouraging further inquiry into the international social and political lives of our concepts.

“Vagabond Savages”: Moving from Vagrancy to Nomadism in European History (Anthony Howarth)

Nomadism is the quintessential category applied to those on the move. Although the category has been met with intense criticism, it has had, and continues to have, a dynamic social and political life (Howarth 2022). Despite its etymological roots in ancient Greece, the nomad category took shape in European sociopolitical imaginaries via discourses of vagrancy and unproductive classes. This means that the nomad category does not owe its inheritance to pastoralism alone, as many scholars contend (Khavanov 1986; Humphrey and Sneath 1999), but also to discourses of social waste, disordered criminality, and itinerancy. Through adopting this line of inquiry, I extend previous work focusing on the notion of nomos (Howarth 2022), suggesting that during the onset of industrial capitalism, as many Europeans moved from more or less sedentary agrarian lives to being more mobile, the terms vagrancy and nomadism became synonymous. In fact, at the dawn of industrialism, pastoral imaginaries were based on nostalgic yearnings for an idealized vision of a time before the unprecedented changes then sweeping Europe.

At that time, the nomad category and those so described were met with intense ambivalence: on the one hand, romantically portrayed as prelapsarian leftovers, exemplifying freedom from and critique of the prevailing sociopolitical climate (Cresswell 2011, 247); on the other hand, depicted as an uncivilized underclass faulted for their inability to keep pace with industrial transformation. Therefore, in order to more fully understand the social and historic life of the nomad category, particularly its more defamatory characteristics, it is pertinent to examine discourses of vagrancy and disorder. A point of clarification may be in order here: My concern is not whether a class of people known as nomads or vagrants (or a subtype of vagrants) actually existed during the period under discussion; instead, my focus is centered on “the nomad category’s socio-political life” (Howarth 2022, 248).

Building on previous engagements with this conceptualization, the nomad category’s sociopolitical life refers to the ways particular figurations are constructed historically and how they take on a life of their own, resulting in very real sociopolitical effects on those imagined to fall within their categorical parameters. In this sense, the social and political life of categories refers to generative processes in which concepts, similar to the social relations that animate, and in turn are shaped by, them, are fashioned by temporal entanglements that produce polythetic categories and make these appear as natural, empirical, and self-evident. We may say that meaning-making practices, enfolded into semiotic palimpsests within which particular interpretations endure, some transform and others lie latent, are shaped by the co-constitutional involvement of people and categories entangled in the processual dynamics of time; this produces the worlds in which we live. Thus, categories such as vagrancy and nomadism consist of processes of ideation, interpretation, and empirical-normative instantiation that animate our imaginaries and constitute connotative sociopolitical alterity and otherness. Categories, therefore, do not simply play a crucial role in our cognitive, semiotic, and historical experience, but are fundamentally involved in generating and reproducing it.

A word should also be said regarding the title. The phrase “vagabond savages” is not simply employed as an enticement to draw the reader’s attention, but instead it encapsulates how those categorized as vagrants and nomads were viewed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century imaginaries. In fact, it was Henry Mayhew, the proto-ethnographer of British “low-life,” who coined the term. Since then, the latter has been reconfigured, undergoing several iterations, such as “vagrant hordes” (Mayhew and Binney 1862), “savage mobility” (Negri and Hardt 2000, 214), and “Egyptian vagabonds” (Okely 1983, 3; see also Radakrishna 2001). Indeed, in the literature and in public discourse from this period, the terms “savage,” “vagrant,” and “nomad” were used interchangeably.

One may assume that the usage and interchangeability of these terms were an artifact of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social imaginaries; however, it was not until 1993 that the British State issued a circular distinguishing between vagrancy and nomadism (see Gilbert 2014, 157). More contemporaneously, during the mid-1980s, the group known as “New Age Travellers” were described by the then British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd as a “band of medieval brigands” (Hansard 1986). For the Conservative Government, Travellers, as they referred to themselves, ranged through the British countryside, wreaking havoc on all those within their path. This not only demonstrates how historic tropes of nomadism, vagrancy, and disorderliness remain extant in contemporary discourse but also how states envisage particular forms of mobility. Before continuing, we must exercise caution as the word “vagrant” contains many negative associations, and I do not intend my material to be misused as a means to undermine Gypsy, Traveller, and Roma political campaigns that have repurposed the nomad category as a marker of cultural identity. It is important, therefore, to state that the correspondences I draw between vagrancy and nomadism are based on discursive tropes, and in no way am I equating Travellers, Gypsies, and Roma with the unproductive figure of the vagrant.

The Social-Construction of Vagrancy

The Black Death, the Enclosures, the end of the English Civil War, and industrialization resulted in a variety of groups and individuals being categorized as vagrants. Although this situation arose in different geopolitical contexts, “vagrancy,” and the subsequent laws to prevent it, followed similar logics. Under its broad rubric, Gypsies and Travellers, mendicants, and the migrant poor were denounced as socially unproductive, strengthening the divide between those thought to be engaging in deviant forms of mobility (Hansen 2004) and those understood as sedentary (Lucassen and Willems 2003, 299). In this sense, the imaginaries shaping the nomadic/sedentary binary cannot be fully understood without considering how the figure of the vagrant was historically constructed. From the latter part of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, a period of intensive social transformation, the trope of vagrancy was harnessed by states as a response to people moving from rural to urban areas in search of subsistence. At this time, vagrancy was viewed as being opposed to prevailing norms and values; whereas orderliness, productivity, improvement, and temperance were valorized, vagrants represented disorder, uselessness, stagnation, and intemperance (Nicolasso 2014, 6; see also Scott 1998).

Similarly, according to Katherine Little, pastoral imaginaries typically appear as “the opposite of something else” (Little 2020). From this, it is easy to understand how pastoral imaginaries were often a response to rural despoliation, and a critique of the transformations taking place in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such critiques were not simply the preserve of Romantic writers and artists, who felt repugnance for the ways they believed modern industry was laying the countryside to waste, but also found their way into political discourse regarding the poor’s emancipation.

Into this environment enters the vagrant, the figure of despoilment, opponent of stability, predictability, and temperance: In short, all of the attributes thought to put enormous strain on the backbone of an ordered and organized society. Although vagrants were understood as an undeserving element of the poor, as opposed to their deserving counterparts, influenced by the ideas of commentators such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, romantics viewed their mobility as the epitome of freedom. This not only resulted in appeals to social justice for all classes, but produced an imaginary in which tribes, nomads, primitivism, and the Orient were viewed as nobler than modern man and closer to the apex of human development. Thus, so-called savages, vagrants, and nomads were once more grouped together and deployed as a foil against the ostensible degeneration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society. From this period onward, we can see how the dual nature of these tropes, often ambivalent; sometimes polarized, played out in imaginaries of nomads and Gypsies, Travellers, and Roma. However, as is often the case with antinomies, one pole dominates, and the other negates the user’s ambivalent intentions. Put differently, when romantic tropes are deployed by outsiders, they have a habit of either glossing over the challenges mobile people face or augmenting these by projecting stereotypical characterizations that suspend them in the aspic of the past (Howarth 2019). Therefore, although repackaged in contemporary garb, tropes of nomadism and vagrancy move through time from the eighteenth/nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Conclusion: The Nomos

While the transformation of the figure of the vagrant into the trope of nomadism took place against the backdrop of European bucolic nostalgia, the nomad category was not derived from mobile pastoralism alone. Instead, the category also owes its meaning and existence to discourses of social waste, disorderliness, and cultural critique. This contention provides us with the means to bring disparate engagements with the notion of nomos, together. For sociologist Peter Berger, nomos refers to cosmological constructions of, and the preconditions for, social order: A situation where the world’s chaotic multiplicity is structured by meanings that, through processes of objectification, produce stability and predictability (Berger 1967; see also Walker 1993, 45). Conversely, for jurist Carl Schmitt, nomos is the foundational right authorizing “all other laws” and is therefore “the measure by which the land in a particular [juro-political] order is divided and situated” (Schmitt 2006, 70, cited in Howarth 2022, 247). In Schmitt’s account, “reflecting the foundational axiom of nation states, the right to use land pertains to the normative rootedness of society whereby nomadism is considered a paranachronistic aberration” (Howarth 2022, 247).

In contrast to Schmitt’s sedentist metaphysics, Delueze and Guattari’s conceptualization of nomos derives from the Greek terms nemo: to distribute and nomas: to move (Moll 2023, 589). By focusing on the distributed mobility of groups that exceed state-ordained spatial regulation, this conceptualization aligns with modes of life that do not see like states (Howarth 2022, 246; 2019). Although Schmitt and Delueze’s approaches to land and its usage diverge considerably, their differences are encapsulated in what I have previously conceptualized as “detached imaginaries of dwelling” (Howarth 2019, 123). This concept refers to the different and often incommensurate practices pertaining to land use, labor practices, and mobility between those imagined as nomads and the sedentist nation states that seek to govern them: in short, the difference between perceptions and practices of land, labor, and mobility by those imagined as nomads, and the regulatory frameworks employed by sedentist states. During the wide-scale development of industrial capitalism, what the British State considered to be nonproductive forms of land use, mobility, and labor activities have repeatedly been legislated against on the grounds of their illegitimacy. While the categories of nomadism and vagrancy were shaped during these historical circumstances, the literature on Travellers, Gypsies, and Roma demonstrates that imaginaries forged during industrial capitalism’s development remain pervasive.

Therefore, although one may assume that the links between vagrancy and nomadism are historic artifacts, on closer scrutiny, nothing could be further from the truth. The 1824 Vagrancy Act was only repealed in 2022, and states continue to use tropes of vagrancy and disorderliness in their efforts to control what are imagined to be nonproductive forms of mobility. For Europe’s Travellers, Gypsies, and Roma, this often consists of the deployment of normative injunctions regarding land rights, social nonconformity, and instability. Therefore, similar to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vagrants, Travellers, Gypsies, and Roma are constructed by states, and in popular discourse, as diametrically opposed to the values of their broader host societies. In short, the ordering principle of nomos is untethered from its roots as an etymological precursor to nomadism, extending beyond its conceptual underpinnings into the lived experience of thousands of Europeans (including Travellers and Gypsies and others). In this sense, the figure of the vagrant, the ordering principle of nomos, and tropes of disordered mobility remain key features of contemporary constructions of Traveller, Gypsy, and Roma mobility and perceived nomadism. In response, these groups have repurposed the nomad category for their own ends, employing it as a marker of cultural traditions that, in their own right, are as ordered and legitimate as any other.

Such practices and imaginaries continue to shape the nomad category’s social and political life. Life, here, refers to how categories become far more than cognitive-linguistic devices, are often applied with instrumental intent, and can also exceed their users’ purposes, taking on a life of their own resulting in very real social, political, and material effects.

Nomadic Futures Past: “Civilized Nomads” and the Crisis of Western Civilization, 1870–1945 (Jaakko Heiskanen)

For some, new-fangled terms such as “digital nomads” and “global nomads” invoke the freedoms of the postmodern age, the liberty to work on the move and explore far-flung corners of the world. For others, they signal the anonymous power of global financial interests or the erosion of national traditions. Either way, these nomadic futures are seen as recent developments, driven by neoliberal globalization and technological changes that have reconfigured human life-worlds since the 1980s. Yet a closer scrutiny of the historical record reveals a much longer fascination with nomadic futures stretching back to the nineteenth century. To paraphrase Reinhart Koselleck (2004), we might call these nomadic futures past.

This intervention focuses on the period 1870–1945, when the spread of technological inventions from the bicycle to the wireless telegraph brought about a dramatic compression of space-time comparable to the digital revolution of today—if not quite on the same scale (see Kern 1983). Against this backdrop, hopes and anxieties often concretized in the ambivalent figure of the nomad: While some interpreted the new nomadism as a degeneration of civilization from within, others embraced it as a solution to the social issues of the time.

The ambivalence of “nomadism” can be seen in the very first appearance of the term in an 1841 essay by the American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. According to Emerson, agriculture and nomadism were “two antagonist facts” that “still fight out the old battle, in the nation and in the individual.” In Africa and Asia, nomadism was based on a pastoral economy where mobility was driven by environmental factors such as the need for pasturage and “attacks of the gad-fly.” Among the civilized nations of America and Europe, by contrast, “the nomadism is of trade and curiosity.” Such nomadic stimulations contributed to the vitality of Western civilization insofar as they helped to combat the “perils of monotony and deterioriation.” Yet nomadism could also prove detrimental if left unchecked: “The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects” (Emerson 1940, 133–4).

As Anthony Howarth explains in his contribution, above, industrialization and urbanization were key factors behind the propagation of the nomad category in European social and political discourse. In nineteenth-century Paris, members of the social underclass were frequently described as “nomads” in books, speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, and even official statistics (Chevalier 1973, 362–6). Similar tropes pervaded depictions of the laboring poor in Victorian Britain. The most detailed and enduring account was that of Henry Mayhew, an influential journalist, amateur sociologist, and founding editor of the satirical magazine Punch. In London Labour and the London Poor, published in piecemeal fashion between the 1840s and 1860s, Mayhew divided the world’s population into “two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers—the vagabond and the citizen—the nomadic and the civilized tribes.” Mayhew’s list of urban nomads included vagrants, tramps, pedlars, showmen, harvestmen, wanderers, pickpockets, beggars, prostitutes, street sellers, street performers, cabmen, coachmen, watermen, and sailors (Mayhew 1861, I:1–2; see also White 1885).

Nineteenth-century accounts of urban nomadism were informed by colonial discourses that posited a civilizational hierarchy between sedentaries and nomads. Mayhew’s work, for example, drew on anthropological studies of “primitive” societies (Mayhew 1861, I:1; see also Marriott 2003). Yet the transposition of these colonial tropes onto European industrial centers also problematized binary oppositions such as metropole/colony and primitive/civilized. Firstly, the new urban nomads were not just outsiders located beyond the pale of civilization, but outsiders on the inside, strangers residing at the very core of civilized society—indeed, they were products of civilization itself. Whereas the usual evolutionary accounts of the time posited a stadial progression from primitive nomadism to civilized sedentarism, accounts of urban nomadism depict nomadism as a degeneration of civilization from within. Secondly, the “new” nomads of the industrial age were not only confined to the lower classes; the higher echelons of society, too, were becoming increasingly nomadic. Commenting on these trends in 1873, the British artist and author Philip Gilbert Hamerton noted the appearance of “savage nature at the very summit of modern civilization” (Hamerton 1873, 356–7). “The civilized English nomad,” Hamerton (1873, 530–1) explained, “is usually a person of independent means, rich enough to bear the expenses of frequent removals, but without the cares of property. His money is safely invested in the funds, or in railways, and so, wherever the postman can bring his dividends, he can live in freedom from material cares.” Especially in German-language sources, the figure of the civilized nomad was often conflated with the anti-Semitic image of the rootless Jew as a parasitic capitalist (Gelbin and Gilman 2017).

Turn-of-the-century accounts of urban nomadism were intermingled with anxieties about national collapse and racial degeneration. This sense of crisis was captured by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, a best-seller conceived in the midst of the First World War. “In place of a type true people, born of and grown on the soil,” Spengler (1934, I:32) lamented, “there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman, and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.” The advances of European civilization, Spengler argued, had severed the cultural roots that tied men to their homeland and nourished them: “only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually” (Spengler 1934, II:90). According to Spengler, “this new nomadism of the Cosmopolis” encompassed both the educated elite and the faceless urban crowd, “an undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future” (Spengler 1934, II:358).

Spengler’s diagnosis left a deep impression on numerous twentieth-century thinkers across the political spectrum. In Germany, these included Martin Heidegger, whose links to the Nazi party are well known (Potter 2017), and Theodore Adorno, a leading light of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Despite his rejection of Spengler’s organistic theory of the rise and fall of cultures, Adorno saw in his Zivilisationskritik a promise that could be harnessed for left-wing ends (Immanen 2021). In particular, he singled out Spengler’s discussion of “the latter day city-dweller as a second nomad” as an insight that “deserves special emphasis” (Adorno 1941, 307). For Adorno, Spengler’s analysis of this “second” nomadism opened the door for a left-wing critique of the technological and material conditions—including new forms of propaganda, pauperization, and mass culture—that had paved the way for totalitarianism. Another inspired reader of Spengler was the renowned American journalist and historian Herbert Agar, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1934. Embracing Spenglerian pessimism, Agar in 1931 interpreted “the emergence of the intellectual nomad” as a “sign of the unhealthy state of our culture” (Agar 1931, 485). For Agar, the new nomadism was a symptom of the “disillusionment with life” and “loss of inner vitality” brought about by the mechanization of society and the gradual destruction of close-knit community life (Agar 1931, 487).

Not all accounts of the “new” nomadism were so pessimistic. Inspired by Emerson’s abovementioned depiction of the liberated thinker as an intellectual nomad, Friedrich Nietzsche (1996, 263) styled himself as a “free spirit” who embraced “spiritual nomadism” (see also Ratner-Rosenhagen 2012, 1–20). Nomads were also cast in a positive light by H.G. Wells, one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the time. Best known today for pioneering modern science fiction, Wells was a prolific writer in numerous genres and authored more than one hundred books during his life. In A Modern Utopia, first published in 1905, he observed that people were on their way to becoming “a breed of nomads.” The “old fixity” of sedentary life, he wrote, was “a mere phase in the development of civilisation” (Wells 1909, 56). In Outline of History, published in 1921, Wells theorized the dynamism of civilization as a product of the “constantly recuring nomadic injections” that influenced its development: “what we now call democracy, the boldness of modern scientific inquiry and a universal restlessness, are due to this “nomadization” of civilization” (Wells 1921, 1097).

Nietzsche’s and Wells’s popular works paved the way for a fascination with nomadic futures that persists to the present day. Nietzsche’s writings, of course, served as the inspiration for Gilles Deleuze’s writings on “nomadology,” which in turn became the catalyst for much recent social science literature on nomadic theory (Tally 2010). Wells lacks a standout intellectual heir on par with Deleuze, yet his musings on nomadic futures were widely read and arguably even more influential than those of Nietzsche. One interesting example is the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, an English progressive movement established by John Hargrave in 1920. Although the movement accomplished relatively little, its advisory board included Wells himself alongside a litany of respected names such as Julian Huxley—a collaborator and protégé of Wells and renowned biologist who would become the first Director of UNESCO in 1946—and Norman Angell—a journalist, scholar, and politician who would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. Fusing primitivism with modernism, the Kindred’s stated aim was to revitalize the civilized urban man through an open-air lifestyle based on hiking and handicraft (Pollen 2015). Wells’s writings were a key influence behind the Kindred’s promotion of a “nomadic” way of life during the interwar years. In 1932, one member of the Kindred published an abridged version of Wells’s Outline of History, which concluded on the following prophetic note: “Throughout history, stagnant civilisations have been revived by nomad conquerors. The world community of the future, safe from outside raids, will have to become nomad itself to avoid the evils of stagnation. Already civilised folk are taking to the nomad life, wandering and exploring and seeing the world, and they will do so still more when finance has been put in order. The people of a more advanced world will be civilised nomads, getting all the advantages of both the wandering and settled lives” (Evans 1932, 260–1; see also Hargrave 1919, 21).

In testimony to the negative connotations of the nomad category at the time, Well’s positive spin on nomadism generated substantial controversy. “Mr Wells’s sentimental and romantic attachment to the nomads and his emphasis upon their ‘restlessness’ seems to me extraordinary,” one reviewer commented. “I should sooner expect ‘the boldness of scientific inquiry’ from a bagman than from a nomad” (Thorndike 1922, 233). Other prominent critics of Wells included the aforementioned journalist and historian Herbert Agar (1931, 485), the Zionist author and playwright Israel Zangwill (1917, 101), and the writer and poet Hilaire Belloc. In A Companion To Mr Wells’s Outline Of History, first published in 1926, Belloc set out to identify “the principal old-fashioned popular errors” in Wells’s text (Belloc 1938, 9). One of these “errors” was Wells’s depiction of “nomadic” invasions as the driving force of civilisational development, which in Belloc’s view turned reality upside-down: “Subjugation of the barbarian by the civilized man is very much more the rule of recorded History than its opposite” (Belloc 1938, 109).

The discussion and debate generated by Wells’s writings on nomads exerted a powerful influence upon the imagination of nomadic futures in the twentieth century. Authors informed by Wells’s works ranged from the Canadian superstar media theorist Marshall McLuhan—who predicted in the 1960s that the information revolution would turn people into “nomadic gatherers of knowledge” (McLuhan 1994, 358)—to the English science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. McLuhan was steeped in the debates between Wells and Belloc during his studies at the University of Cambridge (Stahlman 2011), while Moorcock described himself as a “huge admirer” of Wells in the foreword to his compilation volume A Nomad of the Time Streams (1993).

In sum, the present fascination with nomadic futures is merely the most recent iteration of a long series of nomadic futures past: A direct line of descent can be traced from Emerson’s mid-nineteenth century text via Nietzsche and Deleuze to the present, while Wells’s prolific writings influenced a whole slew of academic fields and literary genres in the twentieth century. Excavating these historical lineages is important not only for its own sake but also for understanding the broader social, political, cultural, and economic context within which the concept of the nomad has acquired salience. Part of this story is the advent of industrial capitalism and the coupling of nomadism to notions of vagrancy and unproductive mobility, as detailed in Anthony Howarth’s contribution to this forum, but no less significant was the growing fascination with “civilized” or “intellectual” nomadism among the higher echelons of society. All of this took place against a backdrop of empire-building and nation-construction, where discourses of nomadism intertwined with discourses of race and nationality. When the nomad category emerged in modern European social and political discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it did so as a deeply ambivalent figure, oscillating between barbarism and civilization. Contemporary controversies surrounding the desirability of “digital nomadism” and the analytical value of “nomadic theory” are deeply indebted to these earlier debates.

Nomadism as Prism for Social Cohesion (Sina Steglich)

The Nomad—Discursive Trope and Physical Entity

Approaching the figure of the nomad from a historiographical perspective requires a differentiated understanding of nomadism. Are we thinking of “real” people living a nomadic lifestyle, conducting a subsistence economy with their livestock, and moving periodically with their herds? Or does a concept come to our minds, a mere theoretical stimulus or a far-reaching yet abstract social imaginary? If the answer is a clear-cut neither-nor, how can we engage with this category at all, navigating back and forth between the physical and the ideal nomad in a nuanced way? In what follows, I will present an argument that considers these questions not as preliminary or even banal, but as crucial to our current conceptualization of the nomad, to discussions in the fields of international relations and development economy, and to public debate. I will argue that the ambiguous figure of the nomad serves as an ideal prism through which to engage with the challenges of transforming perceptions of social cohesion in modern Europe.

Embedding the Nomad in Modern History

For an understanding of the nomad, one can start with a genre of sources that aims to provide “general” knowledge: the encyclopedia. Prominent encyclopedias published in fin de siècle Europe present the nomad as originating in the Asian and African steppes, as not to be found in Europe, and as not settled, stateless, and predatory in relation to rare possessions (see Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon 1885; Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911). It is interesting in this context that the nomad is presented ex negativo, in other words, without attributing specific characteristics. Rather, nomads are defined in terms of what it is assumed they lack (linguistically quite clear in the use of the suffix “-less”): their (i) mobile and stateless lifestyle, their (ii) nonprogressive form of subsistence economy, resulting (iii) in a supposedly meaningful contrast with the modern ideals of efficiency and rationality. This understanding of the nomad refers to specific nomadic cultures and their lifestyles, both seen as a challenge or even a threat to their settled neighbors. Considering the far-reaching nomos of the Westphalian state, it therefore seems worth discussing the category of the nomad as a typical contrast to the modern European seen as a settled citizen who is part of an imagined homogenous society formed from a language community and/or bound to shared cultural practices and norms (see Fahrmeir 2007; Maier 2000; MacKay et al. 2014; Levin 2020). From this perspective, nomadism appears as a cultural “other” of modern Western and European societies and their understanding of appropriate modes of power and forms of sociality. According to Charles S. Maier, this “age of territoriality” between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries is best characterized in terms of emerging nation-states that long for congruence between the “decision space” (government, power, border controls) and the “identity space” of a supposedly homogenous group of people, the settled and legitimate citizens of this state (Maier 2006, 35). Given this historical background, we can observe a twofold exclusion of nomadism during this period. In a temporal perspective, nomadism was interpreted as the opposite of modernity, as traditional and backward, while in a spatial perspective it was located outside Europe and the Western world—in the vastness of the Sahara or in the Asian steppes. In this vein, the Encyclopaedia Britannica described nomads as “wanderers” and “primitive pastoral people who have no settled territory” in 1929 (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1949 [1929], 481). This might explain why Tim Cresswell, for example, writes: “The State [. . .] is the metaphorical enemy of the nomad, attempting to take the tactile space and enclose and bound it. It is not that the State opposes mobility but that it wishes to control flows—to make them run through conduits. It wants to create fixed and well-directed paths for movement to flow through” (Cresswell 1997, 364). He presents the nation-state as an attempt to control, limit, and foresee mobility—or simply to tame it. Thinking of mobility leads automatically to nomadism, which is regarded as the prototype of a mobile lifestyle (see Engebrigtsen 2017). It is not by accident that James C. Scott introduced it as follows: “The classic example of physical mobility is, of course, pastoral nomadism. Moving with their flocks and herds for much of the year, such nomads are constrained by the need for pasture but are unmatched in their ability to move quickly and over large distances” (Scott 2009, 184). Yet this sharp rhetorical distinction between the state and the nomadic (or any other) “other” should not obscure the fact that the academic and public discourses on nomadism were always accompanied by a fascinated understanding of it, as Jaakko Heiskanen has illustrated in his contribution. As early as 1956, the universal historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his magnum opus, A Study of History (1934–1961), tellingly introduced nomadic cultures as “superior” to agricultural civilizations because of the “special moral and intellectual powers” they needed to live and survive in the hostile environment of vast Asian, African, or Nordic steppes (Toynbee 1956, 13).

(Re)Discovering the Nomad as Alternative Mode of Sociality

However, this clear, rather ideal than real, opposition between modernity as represented by settled and territorially coded nation-states on the one hand, and a nomadic a-modernity on the other, itself came under fire after two world wars and in the context of a binary world during the Cold War. Although, on reaching independence, former colonies widely adopted the notion of settled citizens within the framework of supposedly homogenous nation-states, they challenged it as a universal standard. As the concept of nation-states has been exported, especially into African contexts, Europe and the Western world are increasingly confronted with other ways of living and different forms of sociocultural institutionalization beyond the nation-state. Contemporaries and scholars have raised awareness that being settled is by no means an anthropological norm—or has ever been. But statelessness and continuous mobility have hardly been recognized as a legitimate equivalent of the modern, mobility-limiting nation-state. On the contrary, sedentarization has been regarded as a necessary stage for “developing” countries to go through on their way to achieving modernity and economic growth (see Rinschede 1982; Bhattacharya 2019). And even for UNESCO-affiliated protagonists, “nomads [remained] misfits in the modern state” (Bourgeot 1994, 8). As Cresswell argues, modernity was based on “the moral values of place, rootedness, and order,” and therefore “[t]he metaphysics of sedentarianism pervades modern thought” (Cresswell 2006, 32). Nomadism and the sedentarian project of modernity bound to the ideal of the nation-state in this sense presents a paradox: Notwithstanding the reality that millions of people labeled as “stateless” are on the move in modernity, the idea that the modern being is a settled one, at best migrating for specific purposes, remains normative and influential (see Siegelberg 2020; Mau 2022).

Nonetheless, emerging into postmodernity resulted in a renewed engagement with the trope of the nomad and its alternative logic of being. It was only in this historical context that the metaphorical dimension of nomadism was strongly emphasized and slightly detached from its physical basis, forming a social collective, resulting in a stronger positive, individualized framing of it. Whereas some protagonists were still focusing on real nomadic cultures (in plural), for example, Pierre and Hélène Clastres and Michel Maffesoli, and highlighting their advantages, others such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin strengthened the idea of the nomad (in singular) as a discursive figure promising an entirely different possibility of thinking and being in the world (see Clastres 1975; Chatwin 1977, 1987; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Clastres 1989; Maffesoli 1996; Braidotti 2011). Nomadism as such was no longer seen as the archaic lifestyle of a group of people, as an ahistorical and non-European pathology of human sociality. Instead, it was suggested, one could become a nomad, escape modern civilization, leave its societal and economic norms behind, and embark on the journey of an entirely individualistic and highly mobile lifestyle (for this euphemistic reading of nomadism, see also Nivi Manchanda’s contribution to this forum). One could regard these references to nomadism foregrounding a lifestyle one could choose freely and as an individual, loosening ties to any other group of social belonging either as an attempt to escape the perceived decadence of modern societies or as mere examples of a capitalist and neoliberalist agenda of personal fulfillment (see Deleuze and Parnet 1987, esp. 135 and D’Andrea 2007). But asking why these individualist projects as well as profound theoretical programs both refer to the nomad category and its lived experience opens up a more nuanced understanding of it. Considering well-functioning political and social orders as internalized and as such perceived as reificated, legitimate, and thus not questioned by their respective members, the bare fact that the trope of nomadism resonates so manifoldly in current discourses indicates that common forms of social cohesion based on the ideal of a sedentary lifestyle have lost their former self-evidence and plausibility. Given the long history of the nomad-state binary or even opposition, such a reference to the nomad as an alternative mode of being and social togetherness can—or has to—be read as an attempt to reformulate and adjust political and social orders (see Steglich 2021). As such, the discursive nomad cannot be clearly differentiated from the “real,” to the contrary: even speaking of the nomad category unfolds a critical potential aiming at transforming existing sociopolitical realities and lives (see Ingold 2022, 159).

The Nomad—the Untraceable Other?

This snapshot of intellectual engagement with nomadic cultures may illustrate the argumentative appeal of the figure of the nomad and its redefinitions at a time when modes of social cohesion were transformed, and common ways of being with others were challenged, criticized, and adjusted. The nomad, as abstract, as far distant or even untraceable he—far less often she—may seem, continues to figure as a tempting argumentative tool that still is activated at times of societal transformation within Europe, largely because Europe was discursively formed as a place alien to nomadic cultures. At moments of crisis or simply when core European modes of human sociality are less self-evident, the nomad as a pivotal reference figure has a heyday, mirroring changing societal realities and perceptions of them. To this day, nomadism figures as an elementary prism of public and scholarly debates of social cohesion and informs policy practices outside the European and Western world. As such, the category of the nomad not only continues to unfold its sociopolitical life, but also stimulates our inner-European reflections on ideal forms of human (or even more-than-human) sociality.

Nomads: Ahistoricism, Appropriation, and Racial Capitalism (Nivi Manchanda)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “nomad” can be traced to the French word nomade, via Latin from Greek nomas, which literally means “roaming in search of pasture,” from the base of nemein, which stands for “to pasture.” It seems to have entered the English language in its present iteration “nomad” in the late sixteenth century. This question of definition and provenance is important not only because it enables historically sensitive research but also because origin stories can serve as a touchstone when words take a life of their own or when concepts become untethered from their roots, perhaps somewhat ironically given the concept we are dealing with presently. Indeed, my own interest stems from the more recent co-optation or “reorientation” of nomads and nomadism as a modality of mobility and movement and the multiple political impetuses behind this.

Much critical theory has dealt with the question of nomadism through the lens of territory, mobility, and fluidity. Deleuze and Guattari have most famously written about “nomads” (and including a treatise on “nomadology”), which for them signifies a tendency toward deterritorialization. They foreground and problematize the dichotomy between exteriority and interiority, and capture the essence of nomadism as “a continuous flux and the disruption of flux.” Michel Foucault, in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, synthesizes some of their main points as a manual or guide for action. One of them is “prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (2009, xiii). Although Deleuze and Guattari (1987) are themselves attentive to the complexity of “nomad” as subject-position, on the one hand property-less and unencumbered and on the other parasitic on the earth (“nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it”), this complexity has been sacrificed for a fetishization of mobility.

One of the main culprits of this lionization of “nomadism” has been queer theory. Queer theory, especially in its guise as queer of color critique, has given us a piercing critique of the heteronormative structures (the state, the family, the workplace) that profoundly shape both everyday life and sociopolitical choices. While seeking to unsettle dominant discourses of sex, gender, pleasure, and deviance, queer theory instead valorizes fluidity and mobility. Gender remains the core concern, but the fixation on an ability to “cross,” “trespass,” “transgress,” and transcend extends to physical and material borders and to look forward to a world predicated on mobility (Alexander cited in Puar 2002, 108). “Queer nomadism” has become a rallying cry against the nation-state, one that has resonances with other incitements to nomadism: “digital nomadism,” “neo-nomadism,” etc.

These injunctions to be nomadic in the twenty-first century are neither purely metaphoric nor entirely literal. They seek to internalize one of the logics of nomadism in its original formulation—mobility or movement. At the same time, they elide the other precept of nomadism, that of a relationality and connection to the physical land. Nomadism, in its original formulation, is intimately connected to pastoralism, to horticulture, to the herding of animals, to seasonal changes in rivers and other water bodies, and to environmental changes. Nomadic pastoralists follow seasonal migration routes and have often inhabited borderlands in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. These border crossings became dangerous, even impossible, with the fortification of what were largely arbitrary colonial borders, borders that bisected lands and destroyed livelihoods. The border crossings were necessary for their way of life.

The present-day co-optation or reappropriation of nomadism is problematic not because it is not true to the spirit of nomadic life in its pure form—indeed, the romanticization of this life as a pristine or untouched way of being leads to its own problems—but rather because it forgets who has access to this politics of mobility. In a world that is bordered not just by nation-states but by the barriers of class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality, we cannot all “choose” to be nomads. This choice is always already unavailable to billions.

The category of the nomad, in as much as it challenges the nation-statist imaginary of IR, is politically useful. However, its (partial) metaphorization and adaptation have also led to elliptical understanding of how the politics of mobility and containment works in conditions of racial capitalism. Indeed, the “nomad,” with its connotations of wanderlust and peripatetic energy, stands in contradistinction to the category of the “migrant.” While the (economic) migrant is vilified in mainstream discourses, the itinerant nomad is imbued with a desirability, an evocative ephemerality that is cleaved both from the originary meaning of the word and its associated functionality, as well as from the socioeconomic constraints and structures of a differentially bordered world.

These categories of nomad and migrant, at least in common parlance, are inextricable from their class and race positionalities, and their interpellation into those positionalities. The nomad that is invoked through the hipster hotel chain, the luxury goods shop, or the travel website is interpreted as having resources: time, energy, youth, and (access and proximity to whiteness), whereas the migrant is construed as being a drain on resources: healthcare, community, social order, and liberal freedom. The paradox at the heart of this Janus-faced imaginary is that those who make perilous journeys in search of work, fleeing the ravages of climate catastrophe and the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, and for the promise of a future are punished, whereas those who are contributing to the carbon emissions, practices of extraction, and expropriation are lauded for being worthwhile citizens (of the world).

It is worth remembering that this, admittedly schematic, image of the world nonetheless belies a seemingly ageless impulse toward Othering in Europe. In this case, the economic migrant looms large as the alien Other, arriving on small boats to “invade” our countries, our ways of life, and our harmonious social orders. The nomad in turn becomes synecdoche for our freedoms, our fancies of flight, and our longing for discovery and exploration. However, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nomadic way of life was considered a scourge in Europe, an alien existence inferior to settled civilizations. The ways in which Romani peoples who continue to practice “authentically” (intended to signify “traditional”) nomadic lifestyles are treated in much of Europe suggest that it is not so much that a latent appreciation of nomads has surfaced, but rather that the coordinates of race and class shape who is considered “deserving” and who is othered, in a tradition that seems to have stood the test of time. In England, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 prefigured some of the most invasive legislation and set in motion policies and practices of policing and surveillance of people of color and poor people (Lawrence 2017). In North America, anti-Blackness often manifested in legislation that sought to curtail movement and disrupt fugitivity (Maynard 2017). Therefore, any attempt at narrativizing “the nomad” that unsutures the history of (attempted) movement from racism and carcerality is not merely incomplete; it becomes an exercise in depoliticization and deliberate obfuscation at the altar of capitalism.

Indeed, given that the reorientation and eager metaphorization of the term “nomad” cannot be understood outside of the histories and presents of racial capitalism, one might ask what purchase the concept still has. A tentative answer might begin with an engagement with our current investment in categories that seem to defy stasis and stagnation. Perhaps the very “value” of the word lies in its ability to offer a glimpse into a different world, one without the constraints that the one we jointly inhabit imposes (see Sina Steglich’s contribution). Nonetheless, not only is this world chimerical, it also remains impregnated with those very same logics of racial capitalism that represent the biggest constraints and challenges that most people are attempting to overcome. In the face of this putative tautology, grappling with “nomads” and “nomadism” is a fruitful exercise, if only in its ability to underscore the limits of our (raced, classed, and gendered) political imaginary.

Representations and Policies toward Nomadic Communities in the Sahara and Sahel: The Intersection of Securitization and Orientalism (Adib Bencherif)

Poststructuralism developed itself in the context of the anti-colonial struggle, notably in Africa. As demonstrated by Sajed (2012), the Algerian War participated in the interconnection between poststructuralism and postcolonialism. The notion of the nomad is a meeting point between these two intellectual currents. It has been used to propose a theoretical deconstruction of territorialization to reinvent an emancipated citizen interconnected with his environment. As noticed by Ghambou (2020), North African postcolonial authors, such as Mouloud Mammeri, and poststructuralist authors, such as Deleuze and Guattari, associated the nomadic way of life with subversion and emancipation. This romantic understanding of the nomad is staged by early postcolonial authors and poststructuralist scholars who select some excerpts of writings, studies, and pictures as artifacts, but, unfortunately, in disconnection with the sociopolitical experiences of nomads in Africa (Miller 1993). It led poststructuralist and early North African and western postcolonial authors to essentialize nomads through orientalist and romantic clichés. These clichés are still present in the representations of current international and local actors operating in the Sahara and Sahel. At the same time, it led some intellectuals and elites in Sub-Saharan Africa to describe nomads through negative portraits, such as “assaillants” or “supporters of slavery” (Lecocq 2010; Hall 2011). Since the beginning of the Malian conflict in 2012, nomadic communities have been depicted as being at the heart of the political and security crisis in the Sahel. International, regional actors, and local elites are sharing representations, mainly fear, suspicion, and admiration, toward nomads, mainly Tuareg groups. These representations are framing their policies. At some point, their inability to understand nomadic communities is leading them to two biases: securitization and orientalism. I propose to explore the genealogy of the intersection of these two biases, through the narratives of international and local actors (Thakur 2015), and their cumulative effects on nomads in the Sahara and Sahel regions, particularly on Tuareg groups, but also on the regional political and security context.

The Structuration of a Versatile Myth (Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Century)

A versatile myth has progressively emerged around the figure of the nomadic people, especially Tuareg in the desert of the Sahara. The first part is based on a positive cliché, representing Tuareg as “mysterious,” “brave,” and “noble” figures (Deycard 2012). Westerners, mainly French, established contacts with nomads in the Sahara,only in the nineteenth century. The early explorers, such as Duveyrier, admired them (Duveyrier 1864). Some western sources are even affirming that the Tuareg are an archaic group descendant from Christians, because notably of the subsistence of a cross in their pieces of jewelry and the freedom of their women comparatively to Arab communities considered as conservative Muslims (Pandolfi 2004, 5). Tuaregs were even compared with nobles and crusaders from the Middle Age in Europe (Hureiki 2003). Tuareg nomads in the Sahara are a relatively close “other” for French comparatively to other ethnic groups, like Arab communities. It is especially the case when the western narrative is focusing on the norms of this nomadic “milieu.”

However, negative representations became more salient when colonizers tried to manage the populations in the conquered territories of the Sahara (Mariko and Boilley 2001; Lefebvre 2022). In the same period, they were also considered “pillagers,” “without morality,” and even predating sedentary farmers (Bernus 1990). Some leaders were considered “untrustworthy,” “uncontrollable,” and “rebel” (Salifou 1973; Lecocq 2010). To control nomads, colonial administration fragmented the “confederations” of nomads, particularly those who were reluctant to their authorities (Bencherif 2019). After the revolts occurring during the first World War in the Sahara against the French authorities, especially in 1916 (Fuglestad 1973), colonizers punished the rebel Tuareg groups by dismantling or controlling the traditional chieftaincy and forbidding them from practicing slavery, changing the political economy for these communities (Klute 1998). This representation of a “rebel” nomad endangering the management of territory was progressively crystallized during this period.

The practice of slavery was tolerated by Tuareg groups that sided with the French colonial administration during the nomadic revolts (Klute 1998). This tolerance toward the practice of slavery until the 1940s for some Tuareg groups created a form of resentment among Black communities, mainly in Mali (Lecocq 2010). Thinking of Tuaregs as ex-lords who can’t adapt to a modern society structured on economic productivity and farming (as opposed to the practice of pastoralism associated with nomads), colonizers were hesitant to ban completely the practice of slavery for these communities (Hall 2011; Mauxion 2012). For colonial administrators, Tuareg’s social order was incompatible with capitalism. By thinking that, they were ignoring the internal debates occurring within nomadic groups and focusing only on aristocratic nomads. Thus, Western narratives are representing nomads in the Sahara, from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as glorious figures trapped in a past hierarchical order (compared often with the European Middle Age) and resisting, for some of them, the central authority. Orientalism was predominant, but securitization was already starting to frame nomads in the Sahara. These narratives are still present nowadays. Even ethnographic studies of Tuareg societies in the twentieth century have been trapped in these narratives (Grémont 2010). Only recent works have explored nomadic complex systems of statutory classes through a focus on marginalized voices (Rossi 2015) or on the fluid dynamics of power (Grémont 2010).

Postcolonial Order: Nomads as an Object of Insecurity (1960–1990s)

After decolonization, the new postcolonial states acted against nomads, believing that their mode of life was incompatible with modernity. Socialist regimes in North and West Africa were opposed to the Tuareg “tradition” of maintaining statutory classes. They considered them a threat to their political economy. To control these communities, the states were forcing nomads into sedentary lifestyles. Even in peaceful contexts between nomads and sedentary groups, nomads were still perceived as an object of insecurity (Djabi 2019).

In Sahelian countries, nomads were depicted as ex-slavers. This narrative is currently very popular in the south of the Sahara, particularly in Mali. It is regularly causing ethnic tensions in the country. This narrative on the practice of slavery was also preexisting before the colonization in the Sahara and Sahel regions but was reinforced during colonization because of administrative practices, typologies, and writings, framing, rigidifying, and dividing communities (Hall 2011). Idealizing nomads as lords of the desert through orientalist representation, the colonial administration reinforced some inequalities in certain localities, which certainly led to negative representations of nomads by some sedentary communities in the postcolonial era.

When a Tuareg revolt started in the north of Mali in 1963, the security forces committed such abuses against the nomads that they created trauma and a strong resentment among these communities. It partly caused the generalized Tuareg armed rebellion in the 1990s in Mali and Niger. Nomads who were marginalized in these two countries triggered an insurgency to ask for political and economic inclusion. At that time, racialized arguments were used by some Tuareg opinion leaders but also foreign journalists to advance their cause (Casajus 1995). They were insisting in their narratives on the proximity of Saharan nomads with Europeans, their historical legacy as an ex-dominant society in the region, and on being repressed by revengeful “Black” communities. These representations had deep echoes in the imaginaries of French societies. The sympathy for the Saharan nomads could be explained again by what Pandolfi (2001) named the “triangular relation.” Even if Tuareg are considered as an “other,” French intellectuals and society tend to consider themselves close to them, through culturalist or racialized arguments, comparatively to “others,” like “Arab” or “Black” Sahelian communities. This initial (and maintained) orientalism reinforced to a certain extent how Sahelian states perceived nomads as an issue of security.

The Sahel-Sahara: An Uncontrollable Space with Nomads, Jihadists, and Smugglers (2000–2011)

With the development of Al-Qaeda networks with sub-branches in different regions, the desert of Sahara became progressively a potential jihadist safe haven. International initiatives proliferated to increase the security dispositive. Counterterrorism western programs started to conceptualize the Sahel and Sahara as a common space of insecurity, creating confusion between these two regions, as underlined by Retaillé and Walther (2011). Security experts reinforced this confusion through a focus on the issue of drug smuggling in the 2000s. Drug smuggling from Latin America has a new itinerary from the West African coasts to Europe and the Middle East. The desert of the Sahara became a transit space for drug convoys. Nomads were again considered as a potential threat as narco-smugglers and potential allies with terrorist groups. The focus on security issues and the inability to understand local dynamics progressively led to complete confusion in understanding these two spaces.

The Malian and Sahelian Crisis

The Sahel became the new focus of security experts after the beginning of the Malian crisis in 2012. Tuareg nomads were used to triggering insurgencies against the central authority in Mali and Niger to ask for more economic and political inclusion. However, jihadist groups established a fragile and temporary alliance with the Tuareg rebels in 2012. The media coverage and Malian officials established soon a confusion between the different insurgent actors, ignoring the internal fights occurring between these groups. A popular narrative in Bamako was to consider the Tuareg ethnonationalist movement as composed of narco-jihadists (Bencherif 2018). Through the strategy of extraversion described by Bayart (1999), this narrative helped political elites to delegitimize nomads and frame them as the common enemy of the Sahelian populations. Cumulative negative representations of nomads, like layers of securitization, keep adding fuel to the conflict. Since 2015, in a very similar way, negative representations of nomads are now more and more targeting Fulani communities in the Sahel (Sangaré 2019).

Despite the growing securitization, romanticized form of orientalism is also still very present in the representation and action of international and local actors. When French security forces started their military operation in northern Mali in 2013, they were allies in the field with the Tuareg rebels, who were now in open conflict with jihadists. A form of fascination was still present and regularly told in the field by foreign and Sahelian actors to explain this collaboration. French security forces, before leaving Mali completely in 2021, tried to maintain a balance between the Tuareg rebels and the central authority. Regardless of their efforts, Malian and Sahelian political elites consider French forces siding more with nomads. Local Sahelian elites can also share orientalist visions. Some Nigerian leaders think that nomads are better warriors and more courageous than sedentary communities. For some of them, this disparity between their fighting abilities is causing a disbalance of power, reinforcing tensions between these two groups. This narrative led them to forget about the structurally unequal share of lands between herders and farmers, which is marginalizing nomads in the Sahel.

Conclusion

Representations embedded in orientalism and processes of securitization guided policies toward nomadic communities in the Sahara and Sahel. By focusing on Tuareg, it is possible to notice that these representations are also cumulative, made by interactions between international and regional actors (often elites), involving emic and etic clichés, and are overall aggravating the context for nomads in these two regions. The intersection of securitization and orientalism also took different forms, depending on the period. These biases are not caused by an absence of knowledge of nomads. Africanist literature on nomads in the Sahara and Sahel is well-developed and must be considered also in IR. For instance, Rossi (2015) has written on the polycentric power dynamics between sedentary and nomadic communities, and Grémont (2005; 2010) has demonstrated the interdependency existing in multiple ecosystems between nomads and sedentaries. Nomads are not disconnected from their environment. They are evolving in parallel but also in interaction with sedentary communities. They even participated in or constituted sedentary central authorities in the Sahara and the Sahel during the last centuries (Khazanov and Wink 2012). These historical forgotten realities mean that nomadic cultural background is also a legacy shared by current sedentary communities (Myadar 2020). Unfortunately, local and international security experts focus on their frame of intervention (rigid conceptualization of the political economy and security dispositive) and the technicality of their programs without acquiring a deep understanding of what lies behind the notion of nomads in the Sahel and Sahara (Olivier de Sardan 2021; Carayol 2023).

Openings

The concept of the nomad seems to live up to its discursive representation—it is a mobile category indeed, presenting the scholar with an elusive target. Futuristic figurations of the nomad as hypercivilized or postmodern, of the nomad as the quintessential cosmopolitan or archetypal capitalist, are irrevocably entangled with romantic and colonial imaginaries of the nomad as primitive, backward, or premodern, of the nomad as rooted in place, in time, or in nature. The category of the nomad has thus been associated with premodernity as well as postmodernity; primitivism as well as civilization; pastoralism as well as capitalism; rootedness as well as rootlessness; freedom as well as subjugation. Nomads have been represented not only as anti-state or counter-state societies par excellence, but also as existing in a parasitic or even symbiotic relationship to the state. The concept of the nomad and the concept of the state are not simply opposed but deeply entangled, and it is from these connections that we can learn the most.

Faced with the malleability and contestability of the nomad category, we do not wish to conclude with a gesture of closure. Practices of representation often lead to mystification and overdetermination, which is made worse by the fetishization of nomadism in modern social and political discourse (see also Stoffel and Birkvad 2023). Historically, attempts to categorize and typologize nomads have been closely intertwined with attempts to “capture” specific groups of people and bring them under the symbolic and material control of the state. The tempting idealization of the nomad as the quintessential figure of mobility also threatens to obscure the plurality of human mobilities and the workings of power, which determine who is actually able to move where, when, and how.

Instead of seeking conceptual mastery over the nomad, our aim has been to explore the social and political life of this elusive category. By proceeding in this deliberately open-ended fashion, we have sought to move beyond the prevalent understanding of the nomad either as a theoretical category developed by scholars or as an empirical object existing “out there” in the world, and to instead shift the focus onto the varied uses of this concept through space and time. This strategy is especially appropriate for contested or controversial concepts, such as that of the nomad, which exceed attempts to pin them down through clear-cut definitions. The result of our collective discussion, we hope, is the outline of an international political sociology of the nomad category that foregrounds its ambivalences, tensions, and contradictions. We leave these as openings for others to further explore.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the editors of International Political Sociology and the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this collective discussion.

Funder Information

Jaakko Heiskanen received financial support for this research from the Leverhulme Trust through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (ECF-2020-243).

Notes

All authors contributed equally to this collective discussion; the names of the authors are listed in the order of their individual contributions.

References