Walking the International

Abstract

Walking is a nearly universal activity, even given the many contrivances invented to avoid it, yet it is widely absent from the sedentarist disciplines of politics and international relations. This absence is perhaps not surprising, given that so much political thought and practice are deeply tethered to the inventions of the boot and the chair that remove walking from our view, as Tim Ingold has observed. Yet, given the significance of events such as forced death marches as parts of war and genocide; formative collective walks such as Gandhi's march to the sea, the Long March in China, or the Selma to Montgomery marches; or the everyday politics of walking in global cities, such absence might be mistaken. This article suggests instead that walking be understood as integral to the operation of internationality. In particular, it argues that walking is part of a mobile field of power and agency that generates, stabilizes, and unsettles internationality in equal parts. The article diagrams some key conceptual nodes of walking and political power, and then traces their operation in the case of the Long Walk of the Navajo.