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

The ability to control the movement of people both across territorial borders, and within state territory, is one of the main preoccupations of contemporary states around the world. Within this context, Hagar Kotef’s excellent monograph is an inquiry into the politics of motion. Kotef “seeks to map several modes of configuring movement into different forms of subject-positions, and thus, into the production and justification of different schemas of governance” (2). Her book is, in part, therefore a study of political subjectivity vis-à-vis governance. Her starting point is that despite freedom and movement often being viewed as co-constitutive within liberalism, that does not mean that completely free and chaotic movement is synonymous with freedom in liberal states. Rather, the control or ordering of movement—facilitating the movement of some, hindering that of others—characterises liberalism.

Kotef advances four main arguments in elaborating this assertion (summarised pp. 3–6). First, that “subject-positions (identity categories) and the political orders within which they gain meaning cannot be divorced from movement” (3). Second, that the liberal subject was, until the end of the eighteenth century, corporeal, and “throughout the history of liberal thought movement functioned as a pivot of materialization for the liberal body” (4). By focusing on the moving body Kotef suggests she is able to shed light on major modalities of the exercise of liberal power which are lost when the liberal subject is abstracted as non-corporeal. The purpose of this is “to point to a political rationale that still governs contemporary political orders, to point to a political rationale that still governs contemporary political trends” (4). Third, that the movement entailed within liberal freedom was (and is) “secured by many anchors that provided it with some stability” (4). These anchors were gendered, racialized, geographic and material. Therefore, some people have been constructed as free when moving and oppressed when hindered, while others have been constructed as unruly (out of control) when moving, and in control (managed) when hindered. The fourth is an endeavour to show how the split in the configuration of movement (as freedom or as problem) “as well as the modes of governance that are formed alongside this split, are mapped into contemporary spaces” (5). The case study here is the occupied Palestinian territories.

Following a comprehensive introduction which lays out the central argument as well as addressing the key literatures on which it draws, there are five chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter 1 launches straight in to the case study and is the only chapter to be co-authored (with Merav Amir). The occupied Palestinian territories offer an ideal case study, Kotef argues, because “this regime’s focal point of interest (and major political technology) is the movement of people and goods” (5). The chapter quickly immerses the reader in rich description of life with and within checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, which Kotef argues are part of a corrective system which is designed to fail. The chapter explains how Palestinians are produced as “unruly or undisciplinable subjects” by the checkpoint system, which disciplines by means of constantly changing rules and imaginary lines which structurally create failure. By failure, the author means the failure to demonstrate the self-regulation which characterises the liberal subject. The checkpoint is, Kotef argues, where movement is governed, the space in which political subjects and subjectivities are produced. Chapter 2, titled “An Interlude,” is a short discussion of the spatial separation of Israelis and Palestinians on two separate roads into Jerusalem. One road is a modern tarmacked motorway which includes tunnels under a series of hills—this is for Israelis and “tourists.” The other is unpaved, meanders around the hills, and is for Palestinians. Though there are no signs stating this rule, an “imaginary line,” and unspoken understanding, like that surrounding the checkpoint, guarantees conformity. Through the roads Kotef demonstrates how a further mode of governing movement serves to separate Israelis and Palestinians, and in doing so...