Welcome to Global Segregation. The goal of this website is to present cutting-edge research on the world history and the global politics of human efforts to control human migration, resettlement, and residence within cities, countries, continents, and across the world.

Control of human movement across space is essential to other forms of political and economic control. As such it represents a crucial tool of historical and present-day inequity and injustice. Increased efforts to prevent people from moving to and living in places where they can gain access to opportunities also exposes the inequities of historic and contemporary globalization. While we celebrate the mobility of money and consumer goods and extol the expanded global reach of corporate power and its justifying ideologies, we have cracked down on the right and the ability of most of humankind to move and live to places where opportunities are available. Yet the right to geographic mobility, resettlement, and conveniently located housing is especially crucial within a world where opportunity is located very unevenly within cities, within countries, and across the planet.

The starting point for this website is my new book, Segregation: A World History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). The website will offer periodic elaborations and updates on the themes in this book, which focuses on segregation in cities, but which also shows how urban segregation is connected to larger-scale efforts to divide the world and control human movement and residence. In addition the site will provide links to other cutting-edge scholarship and popular work on the subject of segregation and boundary-making.

Carl H. Nightingale, May 22, 2012