Short Abstract

War anxiety produces hybrid forms of mobility that blur the boundaries between free choice and coercion, privilege and vulnerability. The panel explores how these war-driven mobilities produce new moral economies and polarisations within mobile subjects, host societies, and those left behind.

Long Abstract

The panel examines how the threat of war and political instability permeates forms of mobility often seen as privileged – lifestyle migration, workations, academic mobility, and the trajectories of digital nomads, among others. The shadow of war, arising from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as well as from other conflicts worldwide, reshapes these practices, generating hybrid forms in which the logics of free choice and forced movement intersect. As a result, boundaries between vulnerable and privileged mobilities become less distinct, though such comparisons produce new moral economies of mobility and raise ethical dilemmas around privilege and refuge. How can one compare the refugee fleeing violence with the individual who moves in search of self-realisation but whose movement is also shaped by real or imagined threats of war?

These dynamics are not only political but also affective, governing decisions to move, stay, or return. They produce new tensions, moral judgements, and politicised labels, fueling polarisations within mobile subjects, host societies, and those left behind. Moreover, conflicts that polarise people in their countries of origin also travel with them, unfolding and being rearticulated within mobile communities. Such dynamics are further entangled with historical perceptions of mobility, safety, and privilege.

We invite contributions that reflect on how emotions such as fear, guilt, and responsibility shape (im)mobility and how privileges and vulnerabilities intertwine under the shadow of war; how projects of self-realisation and the search for a better place intersect with the search for safety; and how polarising conflicts and imaginaries travel with mobile subjects affecting both host and origin societies.

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