Media, Mobility and Conflicted Sovereignty

Media, Mobility, Conflicted Sovereignty

Convenor: Dr. Roxane Farmanfarmaian

This research investigates  the mediation of people movements on both community and national perceptions of sovereignty as populations traversing borders trigger re-imaginings of state identity and concepts of stability. It explores media’s impacts on society’s structured and settled spaces through promotion of disinformation and inter-group conflict, and the associated contestation over concepts of belonging and sovereign stability. A key area of focus is on the cohesion of community as mediation of division and fear affect growing numbers of people involved in perpetual transit and transition. 

This research examines media’s critical role in representing population movements in processes furthering social conflict, with implications on the way states construct the inside/outside aspects of their sovereignty. How states legitimise mobility and accommodate or control movement across their borders is central to how they are politically constituted. Moving peoples fleeing conflict are operating on an alternative governmental logic to that of the centralised state, as mobility, understood within the theoretical framework of kinetocracy, is fundamental to their ability to gain resources, safety and well-being. Case studies will explore the implications of this tension on perceptions of  state legitimacy by domestic populations increasingly restive as a result of the manner in which media warfare translates, labels and contributes to social disarray. It will investigate how this tension is exacerbated by disinformation and fake news in constructing both the danger of the ‘other’, and the sovereignty of states in responding to mobility.

Planned events and outcomes:
Workshop on Media, Mobility and Conflicted Sovereignty, Centre for Global Human Movement, June/July 2025

Special section in the new Cambridge Forum on Technology and Global Affairs