Citizenship and Displacement

Landscapes of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, guest workers and other moving groups and persons constitute the essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree. This is not to say that there are not anywhere relatively stable communities and networks, of kinship, friendship, of work and of leisure, as well as of birth, residence and other filiative forms. But this is to say that the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion, as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move.