In her new book, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Duke University Press), Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

For more information on the book, visit Duke University Press.

Kotef is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Bar Ilan University and a research scholar at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.