Breaking the Nation-State’s Spell

Abstract

Once the bias of methodological nationalism is recognized, the next step is to describe the world in ways that do not unduly privilege the nation-state. This chapter offers resources from the social sciences that help us to break the spell of methodological nationalism. It surveys scholarship in transnational history, transnationalism, mobility, and border studies that provides categories other than the nation-state that play a decisive role in understanding migration. This literature provides a richer and more diverse account of borders that has normative implications which have not received sufficient attention among normative theorists.