Mobility Governance Research Articles

Mobile Borders and Turbulent Mobilities: Mapping the Geopolitics of the Channel Tunnel

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the making and contestation of mobile borders around the Channel Tunnel, the fixed link connecting Britain and the European continent. It suggests that the bordering of the infrastructural and vehicular spaces is both an object of inquiry in its own right and a productive lens for reflecting on questions related to European Union (EU) territory, the heterogeneous nature of borders as well as the interplay between regimes of control and resistance. The article starts by reviewing the legal and institutional frameworks in which the Channel Tunnel area is governed and envisioned as an interstate and European/Schengen borderzone. It then examines the uncoordinated efforts of national, private and European authorities in managing the episodic migration controversies around this area, which bring together the interconnected rationales of security, economy and humanitarianism and expose the dissonance between and within them. Finally, the article considers how the acts of turbulent mobilities interact with this contingent assemblage of mobility governance and realise the radical potential of territorial borders.

Transit mobility governance in Turkey

Transit mobility governance in Turkey

The governance of smart mobility

There is an active contemporary debate about how emerging technologies such as automated vehicles, peer-to-peer sharing applications and the ‘internet of things’ will revolutionise individual and collective mobility. Indeed, it is argued that the so-called ‘Smart Mobility’ transition, in which these technologies combine to transform how the mobility system is organised and operates, has already begun. As with any socio-technical transition there are critical questions to be posed in terms of how the transition is managed, and how both the benefits and any negative externalities of change will be governed.This paper deploys the notion of ensuring and enhancing public value as a key governance aim for the transition. It sets out modes and methods of governance that could be deployed to steer the transition and, through four thematic cases explores how current mobility governance challenges will change. In particular, changing networks of actors, resources and power, new logics of consumption, and shifts in how mobility is regulated, priced and taxed – will require to be successfully negotiated if public value is to be captured from the transition. This is a critical time for such questions to be raised because technological change is clearly outpacing the capacity of systems and structures of governance to respond to the challenges already apparent. A failure to address both the short and longer-term governance issues risks locking the mobility system into transition paths which exacerbate rather than ameliorate the wider social and environmental problems that have challenged planners throughout the automobility transition.

Improvement of Electronic Governance and Mobile Governance in Multilingual Countries with Digital Etymology using Sanskrit Grammar

With huge improvement of digital connectivity (Wifi,3G,4G) and digital devices access to internet has reached in the remotest corners now a days. Rural people can easily access web or apps from PDAs, laptops, smartphones etc. This is an opportunity of the Government to reach to the citizen in large number, get their feedback, associate them in policy decision with e governance without deploying huge man, material or resourses.But the Government of multilingual countries face a lot of problem in successful implementation of Government to Citizen (G2C) and Citizen to Government (C2G) governance as the rural people tend and prefer to interact in their native languages. Presenting equal experience over web or app to different language group of speakers is a real challenge. In this research we have sorted out the problems faced by Indo Aryan speaking netizens which is in general also applicable to any language family groups or subgroups.Then we have tried to give probable solutions using Etymology.Etymology is used to correlate the words using their ROOT forms.In 5th century BC Panini wrote Astadhyayi where he depicted sutras or rules- how a word is changed according to person,tense,gender,number etc.Later this book was followed in Western countries also to derive their grammar of comparatively new languages.We have trained our system for automatic root extraction from the surface level or morphed form of words using Panian Gramatical rules.We have tested our system over 10000 bengali Verbs and extracted the root form with 98% accuracy.We are now working to extend the program to successfully lemmatize any words of any language and correlate them by applying those rule sets in Artificial Neural Network.

Privilege and precarity: public scripts and self-censorship in shaping South African social science

South African social science’s close relationship with politics and policy have long provided a source of vitality and intellectual direction. Although one of the field’s greatest strengths, intimacy with socio-political and economic transformations engenders solipsism and stagnation. Ironically, it also compromises scholars’ political autonomy and intellectual ethics by blinding analysts to the emerging socio-political formations which will shape the country’s future. As demands for decolonisation and academic transformation continue, the pressures for political alignment will only grow. Drawing on over a decade of inquiry into the formal and informal governance of human mobility into and within South Africa, this article reveals the contours of such isolation and conceptual complacency. From this we can find direction for satisfying the “dual imperative:” contributing to progressive policy while maintaining scholarly autonomy. While not disengaging from politics, we must work to destabilise the language of it even where it means potential isolation from officials, peers, and personal profits. Doing so can protect social science’s autonomy while opening new opportunities for understanding the world in which we live and new tools for challenging those who seek to describe, theorise and change it. Doing otherwise risks converting the South African academic project into a policy think tank or self-referential echo chamber.

From worker to self‐entrepreneur: The transformation of homo economicus and the freedom of movement in the European Union

AbstractThis paper seeks to make a contribution to the study of personhood in EU free movement law by linking a historical and doctrinal analysis with the internal transformation of the homo economicus in economic liberalism. It is argued that a shift can be observed in the government of mobility from “freeing up” the ability of the worker as a relatively passive subject tied to external economic mechanisms to the targeting of the individual him/herself as a responsible, active bearer of economic capability or “human capital”, whereby past socio‐economic conduct and prospective economic activity serve as the thresholds for the entitlement to rights. The essence of the “new” homo economicus of EU free movement law is situated at the intersection of the social and economic, serving as a rational frame for the government of the European mover on the basis of a mutual responsibility between the Union citizen and his/her host Member State towards social and economic activity, self‐sufficiency and integration.

The biometric imaginary: (Dis)trust in a policy vacuum.

The decision in Europe to implement biometric passports, visas and residence permits was made at the highest levels without much consultation, checks and balances. Council regulation came into force relatively unnoticed in January 2005, as part of wider securitization policies urging systems interoperability and data sharing across borders. This article examines the biometric imaginary that characterizes this European Union decision, dictated by executive powers in the policy vacuum after 9/11 - a depiction of mobility governance, technological necessity and whom/what to trust or distrust, calling upon phantom publics to justify decisions rather than test their grounding. We consult an online blog we operated in 2010 to unravel this imaginary years on. Drawing on Dewey's problem of the public, we discuss this temporary opening of a public space in which the imaginary could be reframed and contested, and how such activities may shape, if at all, relations between politics, publics, policy intervention and societal development.

Cost of Tax Avoidance: Examining the Role of Product Market Structure

Examining product market structure, we show that market leaders engage in greater levels of all forms of tax planning and generate more sustainable tax positions. Importantly, examining cost of equity capital we document asymmetrical benefits to tax avoidance for market leaders in that while they participate in benefits to tax optimization, unlike the case for non-leader firms, they are shielded from additional risk premiums required for more aggressive levels and forms of tax avoidance. Realized tax risk, however, has economically meaningful effect on investors’ perception of overall firm risk regardless of market power. Moreover, we confirm the findings in Cook et al. (2015) that at low/(high) levels of tax avoidance investors outweigh benefits/(incremental risks) of tax optimization/(avoidance). Overall, our analysis validate arguments that there exists negligible ex-ante costs to tax avoidance particularly for firms with significant market power. These results are robust to linear vs non-linear modelling assumptions, returns-based models, post-FAS109 period estimates and to measures of income mobility, financial constraints and corporate governance.

Freedom, Movement, Subjectivity

Book Review| April 01 2017 Freedom, Movement, Subjectivity Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Kotef, Hagar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. ix + 215 pp. Gil Hochberg Gil Hochberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2017) 23 (2): 279–282. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3750500 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gil Hochberg; Freedom, Movement, Subjectivity. GLQ 1 April 2017; 23 (2): 279–282. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3750500 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

M-Governance is a Participative Model-SWOT Analysis

The recent developments in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field have created sufficient opportunity for delivering online services through m-Governance. The e-Governance eco system changes the basic structure of the governance mechanism and the mobile platform acts as User Interface (UI) for online service delivery. The m-Governance eco system has multiple channels and various tools. This paper analyses various channels and tools available under mobile platform and discusses the need and strategic importance of mobile Governance. The m-Governance eco system has been explained with two different stage maturity models in the context of developing and developed economy. This paper also derives two different approaches of m-Governance evaluation and it has been explained with case studies. Finally, the paper analyses the eco system with SWOT analysis which provides further opportunity for Research and Development.

Book review: Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility, Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

Book review: Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility, Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders

Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. By Hagar Kotef. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 248p. $84.95 cloth. $23.95 paper - The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands. By Roger Waldinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 240p. $29.95.

Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. By Hagar Kotef. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 248p. $84.95 cloth. $23.95 paper - The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants and Their Homelands. By Roger Waldinger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 240p. $29.95.

The Neoliberal Governance of Global Labor Mobility

One feature of the “age of migration” in which we live has been an increasing movement of labor from the Global South to the North, mainly in “low-skill” and low-wage jobs. This article examines how far and in what ways contemporary capital-driven migration-related policies in labor-receiving and labor-sending states have shaped the subjectivity of transnational migrant workers and their positioning in host societies. It does so through the notion of new constitutional moments of primitive accumulation that designates the production of social spaces for the commodification of labor through the implementation of specific migration policies by labor-receiving states in the Global North, which is reinforced by the interests of labor-sending states in the Global South. By using this concept, especially with reference to changes in Japan’s immigration policy since the early 1990s, I argue that the governance of global labor mobility has not only separated migrant workers from their means of subsistence in the home societies but also constructed them as precarious subjects in the labor markets of the host societies.

Enhancing the reach of public services through mobile governance: sustainability of the Mobile Seva initiative in India

In this paper, I examine the sustainability of the hugely successful and award winning Mobile Seva initiative in India, which aims to bring all e-government services on a common mobile platform. I analyse the critical success and the potential critical failure factors (CFF) behind the performance of the project. The analysis shows that the critical success factors (CSFs) include formulation of a national policy framework on mobile governance and support from the highest decision-making body on e-governance in the country, responsiveness of the implementing team, ease of on boarding and implementation for the departments, portal effectiveness, performance reliability, transparency and participatory design. However, the major potential CFF include lack of technical knowhow within departments, lack of adequate power and connectivity, lack of face to face interaction and lack of an appropriate business model. These issues need to be addressed properly to ensure that the project does not suffer a sustainability failure in the long term.

Emergency Mobilities

This paper explores the relationship between mobilities and emergencies, two concepts that have shared little of the same space in research and critical debate. Emergency is a relatively taken-for-granted part of the political administration of events, life and the production and governance of mobility. Equally, mobilities and immobilities occur in, because of, or through emergency. Some mobilities could certainly be understood as emergency because whether in flight or response, emergencies demand highly intensive forms of movement that radically transform one’s life chances and quality of life. The paper suggests that particular sets of mobilities occur and are compelled under certain kinds of conditions and forms of governance wielded under emergency politics, its legislation and practices. The paper works to identify several related characteristics of emergency mobility that have begun to be explored within existing literatures, burgeoning areas of enquiry and more conceptual writings, before concluding with a discussion of the implications of these themes for a more modest and provisional understanding of mobilities, emergencies and their governance.

Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On liberal governances of mobility by Hagar Kotef

Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On liberal governances of mobility by Hagar Kotef

Hagar Kotef: Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. (Durham: Duke University Press2015. Pp vii, 234.)

Hagar Kotef: Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. (Durham: Duke University Press2015. Pp vii, 234.)

Los hundidos y los salvados. Reflexiones sobre movilidad y frontera en tiempo de crisis

The «European Agenda on Migration», whose objective is the unification of the different measures that the European Union will adopt to develop a coherent and integrated approach to migrations and border policy, is paradigmatic of how the European Commission imagines de Mediterranean as a space of migratory flows. This agenda has three main characteristics: usefulness, planning and stratification, and points to a new European mobility governance. This paper explores the implications and consequences of this agenda, including the critical analysis of the so-called «Hotspot approach» and other measures such as the «refugee relocation system». Confirming the trends in the last few years, the main tools in the European border management and control strategy are cooperation, policing, new control and identification technologies for the newcomers, and the «border extended bureaucracies». As a consequence, the most advanced border posts are pushed towards the South and militarized. This paper discusses the underlying racist utilitarianism contained in these European policies. Thus, Mediterranean’s governmentality crystallizes in a series of mechanisms generating new forms of violence, symbolic and direct. In this context, the paper explores the parallel logics of the «will to mobility» of young migrants from the Global South who, in spite of the security web established in European policies wish and try to be part of a transnational cosmopolitan imaginary.

Understanding the variability of daily travel-time expenditures using GPS trajectory data

Transportation planning is strongly influenced by the assumption that every individual has a constant daily budget of ≈1 hour for his daily mobility. However, recent experimental results are proving this assumption as wrong. Here, we study the differences in daily travel-time expenditures among 24 Italian cities, extracted from a large set of GPS data on vehicles mobility. To understand these variations at the level of individual behaviour, we introduce a trip duration model that allows for a description of the distribution of travel-time expenditures in a given city using two parameters. The first parameter reflects the accessibility of desired destinations, whereas the second one can be associated to a travel-time budget and represents physiological limits due to stress and fatigue. Within the same city, we observe variations in the distributions according to home position, number of mobility days and a driver’s average number of daily trips. These results can be interpreted by a stochastic time-consumption model, where the generalised cost of travel times is given by a logarithmic-like function, in agreement with the Weber-Fechner law. Our experimental results show a significant variability in the travel-time budgets in different cities, and for different categories of drivers within the same city. This explicitly clashes with the idea of the existence of a constant travel-time budget and opens new perspectives for the modelling and governance of urban mobility.

Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. By Hagar Kotef.

Hagar Kotef has written an insightful, thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging book that brings a fresh theoretical perspective on the intersections between borders, mobility and liberalism. Her proposition is that freedom and violence are two sides of the same liberal coin that manifest in the long-standing governmental effort to control human movement. In a compelling and wide-ranging analysis that moves from Hobbes and Locke to Israeli checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, Kotef maps the development of liberal accounts of freedom. These, she holds, have always encompassed an embodied will and capacity to move, but have also assumed that certain kinds of unruly movements ought to be controlled via systems of enclosure and restraint. Ultimately, Kotef argues, that the liberal freedom to move—so often championed as reality for some and aspiration for others—demands our engagement with the forms of violence enacted in its name. Freedom for some implies dispossession, displacement and exclusion for others in ways that are constitutive of the liberal tradition itself. The point, she argues, is not to abandon aspirations for freedom of movement, but rather to more fully account for what is entailed in genuinely alternative ‘principles of mobilities’ (p. 135).