meaning of political mobility
Answers
Cluster “Political Mobility”
The aspirations of social thoughts and movements of the modern period often transcended national boundaries and were truly global. The universalist ideas – socialism, anarchism, communism, (Christianity and Buddhism) – as well as their texts and people had a transnational organization and built local organizations, often in port cities. Port cities acted as necessary gateways and connecting hubs for these universalist visions to move inward and outward, and to mobilize the “masses” into international kinship of various registers. It was also in port cities where the state worked on curbing those internationalist activities.
The increasingly globalized political (and religious) activism across Asia, broadly defined to include the Asian territories of the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, Northeast, South and Southeast Asia, have only recently attracted attention of scholars.
The cluster seeks to promote a cross-border and cross-disciplinary discussion on how various global ideologies of internationalism connected and worked in various local social settings and national discourses. How did local social experience and identity produce specific internationalist modalities in different parts of Asia? What were the transnational networks of Asian revolutionaries, their workings and logistics, its revolutionary geography? How these universalist thoughts and movements were filtered through multiple lenses: religious, ethnic, imperial, national, and colonial?