Mapping the Transnational World

A study of the structure, growth, and future of transnational human travel and communication.

Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it really a fully globalised world in which everything is linked, as popular catchphrases like 'global village' suggest? Through a sweeping comparative analysis of eight types of mobility and communication among countries worldwide—from migration and tourism to Facebook friendships and phone calls—Mapping the Transnational World demonstrates that our behaviour is actually regionalised, not globalised.

Emanuel Deutschmann shows that transnational activity within world regions is not so much the outcome of political, cultural, or economic factors, but is driven primarily by geographic distance. He explains that the spatial structure of transnational human activity follows a simple mathematical function, the power law, a pattern that also fits the movements of many other animal species on the planet. Moreover, this pattern remained extremely stable during the five decades studied—1960 to 2010. Unveiling proximity-induced regionalism as a major feature of planet-scale networks of transnational human activity, Deutschmann provides a crucial corrective to several fields of research.

Revealing why a truly global society is unlikely to emerge, Mapping the Transnational World highlights the essential role of interaction beyond borders on a planet that remains spatially fragmented.

Mapping the Transnational World offers a large-scale look at various human connections spanning national borders. I appreciate the breadth of coverage: the description of regionalisation and globalisation across eight types of human activity over five decades is a big contribution all on its own. The use of network-analytic techniques to model these cross-border connections is impressive. - Jason Beckfield, Harvard University

This spectacularly ambitious and potentially paradigm-shifting work builds what is indeed one of the first systematic attempts to document, analyse, and explain the totality of migrations on a planetary scale. Mapping the Transnational World is a big empirical step forward for the study of international migration and mobilities. - Adrian Favell, University of Leeds