My article "Visualizing the Regionalized Structure of Mobility between Countries Worldwide" is now published open access in Socius's innovative Visualizations series. Here, geographic mapping, algorithm-based community detection, network visualization, and conventional line plots are combined to display the network structure of more than two billion estimated trips between countries worldwide in 2016, together with information about the (non)evolution of this structure over time. The graph reveals that transnational mobility is highly regionalized: 80 percent of all human movements between countries occur within world regions. Despite strong increases in the absolute amount of transnational mobility, this share remains extremely stable between 2011 and 2016. The community detection algorithm reveals six mobility clusters that clearly correspond to world regions: Africa, Asia and Oceania, the Americas, Eurasia, Europe, and the Middle East. This stable, regionalized structure suggests that a fully globalized “world society” is unlikely to emerge, as social ties remain parochial, even in the transnational sphere.

A new article, titled "Transnational Social Practices: A Quantitative Perspective", co-authored with Céline Teney, was just published in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Transnational social practices (TSP) can be defined as sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges between individuals across national borders. Over the last decades, TSP have not only become more common, but they have also developed into an increasingly salient subject of quantitative sociological research. After highlighting seminal foundational research, we introduce a set of salient topics in this emerging strand of research, including the social stratification of TSP, the link between TSP and cosmopolitan attitudes, and the issue of classifying TSP into meaningful subdimensions. We conclude with a discussion of several avenues for future research, including the relation between TSP and the increasing societal polarization between “locals” and “globals,” the need to go beyond the field's current Eurocentrism to study TSP comparatively in all parts of the world, and the prospects of methodological and technical advances in research on TSP, including network‐analytic approaches and geo‐tagged digital‐trace data. A free pre-print version can downloaded here.