The concept of nomad citizenship developed here derives from the concepts of nomadism and nomadology expounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). As I have explained elsewhere, this concept of nomadism should not be understood primarily in reference to nomadic peoples, despite the familiar connotations of the term. Rather, nomadism as Deleuze and Guattari understand it can refer to a wide range of activities, including ‘building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or making music or instituting a science, a technology’ (ibid.: 366). In the same vein, I will in what follows discuss nomad science, nomad music, nomad games – and eventually nomad management and nomad citizenship. We begin with nomad science, since it is a concept Deleuze and Guattari develop at some length by contrasting it with what they call royal or state science.

Nomad Science

Much could be said about these two ‘versions’ of science; for our purposes, two points are essential. One is the difference between the principles of ‘following’ and ‘reproducing’ that characterise the two kinds of science; the other involves the social consequences that follow from this difference.

Royal science proceeds by extracting invariant (‘universal’) laws from the variations of matter, in line with the binary opposition of form and matter: matter is essentially variable, but ‘obeys’ formal laws that are universal. Reproducing the results of a successful experiment is crucial to establishing the veracity and universality of the hypothesised law that the experiment was designed to test.