The key concepts and reference points of International Relations (IR) areinformed by a sedentarist worldview anchored on the territorial state. IR’s conceptionof its subject-matter is thus ‘static’ in both senses of the word: state-centric andimmobile. One of the consequences of this sedentarist worldview has been a neglect ofthe world’s nomads. Defined by their spatial mobility, nomads have been either ignoredor, less frequently, brought in as an exceptional ‘Other’ against which concepts such asstatehood and territoriality can be defined. The interventions in this forum challengeIR’s sedentarism by recovering the world’s nomads as international political actors pastand present, thus enriching the range of empirical cases upon which IR scholars maybuild their theories and challenging teleological narratives that view the history of theinternational system as the inevitable triumph of the territorial state. At the same time,the forum cautions against the reification of the nomad as the ‘Other’ of the state bydisaggregating nomadism from mobility and problematising the sedentarism/nomadismbinary. The goal of the forum is not to provide a blueprint for how IR scholars shouldstudy nomads, but to promote a critical reflexivity about IR’s sedentarist assumptions.