A New Book: “Movement and the Ordering of Freedom”, by Hagar Kotef

We are excited to announce the publication of a new book by Hagar Kotef, a research fellow at the Minerva Humanities Center in Tel Aviv University, and the former managing director of the Political Lexicon group at the center:

Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: on Liberal Governances of Mobility, Duke University Press, 2015

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

Table of Contents:
 

Chapter 1:
Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justificationsat the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine
Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir

Chapter 2:
An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads — On Freedomand Movement

Chapter 3:
The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”:Locomotion and the Liberal Body

Chapter 4:
The Problem of “Excessive” Movement

Chapter 5:
The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”:On Other Bodies

Read the book’s introduction here

See more details on Duke University Press Website