Mobility Justice: A framework and vision for human (im)mobility
Overview
This paper examines how inequalities rooted in historical and modern-day colonial systems shape patterns of human (im)mobility. It proposes mobility justice as both a framework and a vision for transforming the systems that sustain those inequalities. As a framework, mobility justice unpacks how neo-colonial regimes of the global economic system — including the financial and trade regime, large-scale land-based investments, and the arms trade — act as forms of structural violence that constrain people’s choices to move or stay. It further examines how the very systems meant to offer solutions – cross-border mobility regimes and the foreign aid regime – too often reinforce the status quo by disregarding, distracting attention from, or deepening these same structural inequalities. As a vision, mobility justice imagines a world in which moving and staying are genuine choices equally available to all, rather than strategies to survive an unjust system. Inspired by systems change thinking, it connects struggles for justice across sectors and disciplines, and calls for evidence-based understandings of inequality, the leadership of people with lived experience, and collaboration and solidarity across movements.
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10.21201/2026.000138How to cite this resource
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