Ebook: Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality

This book sets out to answer a question of global importance: how does inequality persist in our increasingly mobile world? It is a contentious problem. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, inequality is often referred to as the greatest threat to our democracy, society and economy. Yet in an era some call the ‘age of migration’, opportunity has apparently never been more accessible. Long and short distance transport—from motorbikes to aeroplanes—are available to more people than ever before. What’s more, physical mobility tells only part of the story. Telecommunications have transformed our lives, ushering in an era of translocality, in which the behaviour of people and communities are influenced from hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. Nevertheless, amidst ever more complex flows of people, ideas, and capital, persistent inequality cuts a jarringly static figure. The worst off all too often remain impervious to the winds of economic dynamism, whilst those who were better off in one place remain so in another. This is an age-old story enmeshed in modern complexities. The vast economic successes of India and China have redrawn the map of global poverty in recent decades, contributing to falling inequality between countries even as inequality within countries is on the rise. Scale, in other words, matters and this book sets out to show why. Eschewing the international cross-sectional analysis employed in others on the topic of inequality, in favour of a deep dive approach to its subject, its eight chapters bring together a decade of research across multiple contexts to cast a forensic eye over the many of faces of inequality in a rapidly changing environment. Tracing a “miraculous” decade of development in Cambodia, one of the world’s fastest growing economies since the turn of the millennium, it brings together a broad toolbox of data to make a case for inequality not as an economic phenomenon, but as a ‘total social fact’ in which stories, stigma, obligation, and assets combine to lock social structures in place.

Keywords: inequality, migration, rural–urban linkages, mobility, mobile livelihoods, migrant livelihoods, translocality, translocal, development, Cambodia