Book Review: In his book Mapping the Transnational World, Emanuel Deutschmann challenges this premise by undertaking an alternative empirical analysis and new ways of visualizing mobility data. Using network analysis, Deutschmann examines human transnational activity to identify where mobility is taking place. Using different lenses, Deutschmann shows that most transnational human activity takes place at close proximity to its origin and that as distance increases, it becomes scarcer. In other words, mobility is predominately intraregional, rather than interregional. The author found similar findings for communication across media. Most communication takes place at a regional level, challenging the assumption made by researchers under the “new mobilities paradigm” (John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century [Routledge, 2000]), which claims that most mobility and communication are global. As Deutschmann explains, transnational human activity is very similar to Granovetter’s theory of weak ties, whereby strongly linked groups (densely connected world regions) are linked through weak ties (relatively scarce interregional ties).

CACHIA Romina; 

2026-06-11

UNIV CHICAGO PRESS

JRC134318

0002-9602 (online),   

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/724452,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC134318,   

10.1086/724452 (online),