Nomads’ Land: Exploring the Social and Political Life of the Nomad Category

Abstract The category of the nomad has gained a newfound salience in recent decades, ranging from public interest in “digital nomadism” to academic debates about “nomadic theory.” Faced with this upsurge of interest in nomadism, this collective discussion brings together five scholars of diverse theoretical and academic backgrounds to investigate the pasts, presents, and possible futures of the nomad category. The contributions excavate the conditions under which the category first arose in European social and political discourse, explore the historical baggage that this category has carried with it into the twenty-first century, and inquire under what conditions nomadism has come to be regarded as a promising or emancipatory trope. Keeping with the open-ended ethos of international political sociology, the aim of the collective discussion is not to seek conceptual mastery over the category of the nomad, but to foreground the multiple, ambivalent, and often contradictory ways in which this category has been deployed through space and time. More broadly, the collective discussion is an invitation for scholars to explore the international social and political lives of our concepts in a way that destabilizes disciplinary and institutional boundaries.