This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received notions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the relationship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; instead, we seek a more finely grained framework of interpretion. The chapters that follow contain new ideas, based on close empirical observation in various societies across the vast continent of Asia.

Thinking Mobile

Two critical points of departure shape our approach. First, we consider mobility to be an integral part of social life rather than its exception (Urry 2007). Second, we acknowledge that the existence of mobile communities preceded the formation of states (Ludden 2003). Thus, we think of the state as a political organisation keen to regulate existing or emergent patterns of mobility. States are of interest to us because they exert themselves in controlling and moulding mobilities within and across their national borders. Our contributions empirically explore the effects of such exertions. How do they affect, contain, increase, deflect or bypass mobile practices?

From this perspective, the state often appears as reactive rather than proactive: it has to run after the facts. In doing so, it is never a neatly coordinated machine with all its agents acting in unison. The real-life states that we have studied bear little resemblance to the ‘model state’ used in much social theory. Looked at from the vantage point of people participating in (illegal) transnational flows, these states turn out to be far less tightly structured and much less governed by uniform, impersonal rules. Our studies demonstrate that these states suffer from a persistent ‘implementation deficiency’ – an inability to put their policies into practice. There are two dimensions to this. On the one hand, policies are often overambitious and the state lacks the manpower and legitimacy to push them through. On the other hand, officials may actively obstruct policies handed down from higher levels within the state.