12 1. Mobility, immobility, and migration Nicholas DeMaria Harney INTRODUCTION Since February of 2022, it is estimated that over 8 million Ukrainians have fled their country in the wake of the Russian invasion, with millions more internally displaced (UNHCR, 2023). This flight of people crossing international state borders, escaping war and terror, and the internal displacement of many more, are tragically familiar to those studying migration over the last century. The movement of people across space seeking safety, security, and opportunity elsewhere has been a classic focus in the sociology of migration. Yet, the current Ukrainian crisis is not simply a replay of previous mass migrations. Some of its characteristics encourage analysts to stress that it should not be examined only through a migration lens, which concentrates on the movement of people, but rather as an intensification of many kinds of motion, or mobilities, at play. In this view, taken together, these human (migration) and non-human mobilities provide a fuller and more nuanced reading of the crisis. The expansive frame of mobilities to examine this war highlights the collapse of time and space, the transfor- mation of social relations through technology, and the upending of our sense of co-presence and experience. People using social media and mobile phones act as open-source intelligence gatherers, tracking Russian advances and geolocating them instantaneously. Technology destroys through drones, advanced weapons systems, or hand-held anti-tank weapons, dis- placing and killing people. Economic sanctions and the blocking of the SWIFT banking tool interrupt capital mobility to the Russian economy, while at the same time, sharing sites such as Airbnb and the Ukrainian diaspora’s mobilization via Western Union or IBAN transfers reveal the intensity of interdependence aided by mobile infrastructures and networks. These mobility spaces and tools augment the physical convoy of trucks with donations earmarked for Ukraine. The war in Ukraine, then, combines movement both as migration and the mobilities of things, images, and information. The war displaces masses of people across Europe, obscuring the world-changing pandemic, another mobility event, as viruses and infections spread in new variants. The immediate health threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in early 2020 provoked public health fears and led to an abrupt halt to population movements across international borders and within local jurisdictions and states. Seasonal farmworkers were stuck in place, corporate travel grounded, tourism suspended, supply-chains disrupted, and states arranged emergency flights to bring their citizens home, reaffirming the primacy of national identities in the face of a global biosecurity threat. The fear of strangers as carriers of disease increased, summoning older views about foreigners. An intensified focus on biosecurity meant that asylum camps, for example, in Greece, or along the US–Mexican border, were quarantined or neglected, and migrant boats crossing the Mediterranean heading for Europe were turned back. The limits on local movements through lockdowns and stay-at-home orders within cities, regions, and coun- tries all exemplified the potential advantages of pairing the different scales of migration, the movement of people across space, with the more expansive, if amorphous term, ‘mobility’, as Nicholas DeMaria Harney - 9781839105463 Downloaded from https://www.elgaronline.com/ at 02/13/2024 10:42:41AM via free access