This roundtable examines the persistent marginalisation of ‘mobile peoples’, including pastoralists, nomadic forest peoples, and Traveller and Romani communities. While the mobile practices of these groups vary widely, what they have in common is that mobility is a unifying value for group identity, and often serves as an organising principle in cultural, economic and political life. Throughout most of modern history, governments have regarded mobile peoples as irrational, anachronistic, or even a threat to progress and stability. Even as more violent attempts to subdue, isolate or eliminate them have been challenged by human rights mechanisms, mobile peoples today are often confronted by ‘sedentist’ systems that are incompatible with their livelihoods and lifeways. This includes legal systems imposed by states to regulate land, property and access to social services; humanitarian systems governed by distant donors and aid providers; and the complex policy-scapes generated by international organisations in the pursuit of “goods” such as development, security and conservation.
This roundtable brings together academics involved in a special issue of the journal Nomadic Peoples, set for publication in September 2023, which examines sedentism as a form of bias, constituted by tacit assumptions or technical doxa that structure the ways planners and policy-makers understand and respond to problems. As a bias, sedentism can manifest even in policies that claim to support mobile peoples and their livelihoods, as documented in critical studies of the ways that development interventions have resulted in immobilization, social fission, livelihood disruption, and political marginalization. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a diversity of mobile peoples, discussants will reflect on the applicability of the concept of sedentism in critical anthropological research and policy analysis, and the impact of sedentist policies and programmes on mobile peoples’ ability to contend with the uncertainties of increasing climate variability and market volatility.
