We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar 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.

Preface  vii

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction  1

1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir  27

2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement  52

3. The Fence That "Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement": Locomotion and the Liberal Body  61

4. The Problem of "Excessive" Movement  87

5. The "Substance and Meaning of All Things Political": On Other Bodies  112

Conclusion  136

Notes  141

Bibliography  203

Index  217