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The 'new mobilities paradigm' formulated in the early 2000s allowed scholars of labor to explore the possibilities of the concept of im/mobility as an interpretive framework for understanding processes of work and labor. This paper contributes to the continued cross-fertilization between mobility studies and labor studies by exploring the theoretical and methodological prospects of focusing on assemblages of temporal-spatial practices that simultaneously compel and confine movement. The article suggests that means, processes, and extent of labor coercion can be understood by analyzing how people are compelled to move or are confined to specific sites temporarily or permanently. It discusses how employing space and im/mobility as conceptual tools uncover the role of diffused, hierarchical layers through which labor coercion emerges. In this regard, environment emerges as a significant factor. The paper examines how mobility becomes a line of flight from sites/fields of coercion, or locks people into new forms of coercive relations; the legal/formal or informal frameworks that regulate or govern labor im/mobility within specific sites; and how the logics of deployment and coercion overlap and mutually reinforce one another. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to the calls for nonlinear, newly spatialized histories of labor processes and labor coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The declaration of war in August 1914 seemed to sanction the impotence of the organized labor movement and these international bodies. The First World War would prove 'the gigantic force of imperialism', accelerating and intensifying a new period of globalization. Thus, while at the beginning of the twentieth century John Atkinson Hobson described inter-imperialist entente as one of the consequences of what he called 'patriotic parasitism' and, like Karl Kautsky, excluded the risks of a global war, other commentators saw precisely in the imperialism of the great powers, and in particular in their unequal development, the reasons for future conflict. The First World War also promoted an 'offensive war of self-defense' by the state and the ruling classes against the organized labor movement. This paper proposes to discuss the conflicting and contradictory links between internationalism, globalization and war by taking a transnational approach, conceived as necessarily attentive to the 'unequal and combined geographical development' of the world. The combined nature of the transformations affecting the various societies at war thus becomes essential in attempting to grasp the apparently simple idea that the processes at work in certain advanced societies 'irrevocably transform the conditions and character of similar processes about to take place elsewhere'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]