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Paper short abstract

Digital nomadism reveals how digital disruption reconfigures power, mobility, and inequality in North-South relations. This paper uses a critical migration studies lens to decentre nomadism and explore its impacts on host communities, development futures, and mobility justice.

Paper long abstract

Amid profound global uncertainty and accelerating digital disruption, digital nomadism has emerged as a celebrated symbol of borderless work and innovation. Yet this mobility also exposes deep tensions in how development, inequality, and agency are imagined. This paper reframes digital nomadism as a privileged form of North-South migration, arguing that its rise demands a rethinking of development itself in relation to shifting power relations and contested futures. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, Italy, and the UAE, the paper employs a critical migration studies lens to decentre dominant narratives of freedom and digital entrepreneurship. The analysis traces digital nomadism across macro, meso, and micro scales: (1) macro-colonial legacies and neoliberal development agendas that render the Global South a site for consumption, experimentation, and flexible work; (2) meso-mobility regimes, digital infrastructures, and racialized border practices that selectively enable elite mobility while deepening exclusion for others; (3) micro-the lived experiences of host communities confronting rent inflation, labour precarity, cultural displacement, and emergent forms of protest, such as Mexico City’s recent anti-nomad mobilisations. By foregrounding these interconnected dynamics, the paper argues that digital nomadism illuminates the limits of dominant development paradigms that valorise digital innovation while obscuring structural inequality. It shows how communities challenge these dynamics through acts of resistance, solidarity economies, and demands for more just urban and mobility futures. In doing so, the paper contributes to reimagining development beyond conventional binaries and toward more equitable, accountable, and decolonial visions of collective wellbeing.