Dr Victoria Mason

Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This book sets out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.

The book covers the challenges faced by both forced migrants and receiving authorities. It applies these challenges to regions such as the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa. In particular, the chapter on Iraq to Jordan foced migration tests the sincerity of the concept of Pan-Arabism; the chapters on Bangladesh and Ethiopia deal with the more historically familiar variables of warfare and famine as drivers of forced migration.

This book will be of value to practitioners in the area of human rights and to scholars of racial and ethnic politics, human geography and globalization.

This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Loyalty: whether we are talking about concepts of loyalty at an individual, family, community, organisational or state level, this is a word that generally elicits passionate responses. But what do we actually mean by the term 'loyalty'? And, in today's globalised, transnational world, is loyalty a term that still has salience and relevance? Whilst loyalty might be seen by some as outdated, signifying the attachments of subjects to their monarchs, or outbursts of fist-thumping xenophobia, it is clear that ideas about 'loyalty' remain significant, as the chapters in this volume illustrate. In particular, notions of loyalty are pivotal in processes of identity formation, for both the individual and the larger social body. This volume critically addresses concepts of 'loyalties' and brings together an eclectic range of contributions and multidisciplinary approaches, drawing on sociology, politics, law and history.