Hyenas of the Limpopo: The Social Politics of Undocumented Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe

Tshabalala, Xolani

doi:10.3384/diss.diva-142790

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 96 publications

(235 reference statements)

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“…Migration infrastructure, for instance, inspired by science and technology studies (Pelizza 2016), explores technology and digitalisation that structure transnational economies. Literature on brokers is relevant to economic mediation because it discusses legitimacy and resources (Faist 2014;Tshabalala 2017) as well as the representation of brokers as moral or immoral in relation to profit (James 2011;Lindquist 2015). Research on migration industries, an emerging field of research through which scholars explain migration systems in terms of a meso-structure (Castles, De Haas, and Miller 2013), represents the most ambitious contribution to exploring the economic processes of migration in new ways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Krifors

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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New approaches to understanding the mediation of migration have emerged from literature on migration industries, migration infrastructures and migration brokerage. These studies point out the importance of economic processes in migration by studying how recruiters and brokers negotiate im/mobilities, within and outside the state. This article argues that there is a need to develop a complementing theorisation of the economies of migration, since the centrality of migrant labour, the role of employers, and the extraction of value from the transnational situation of migrants' lives remain vague. Emerging scholarship around a logistics of migration that accounts for supply chain organisations and the quest for transnational interoperability is suggested for this purpose. The article utilises ethnographic data from Sweden on labour recruiters and employers in two sectors: the wild berry industry and the ICT industry. Logistics, the art and science of coordinating supply chains [Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press.], produces a commodification of im/mobility in specific contexts of labour and social reproduction. Migration, therefore, represents one, more or less integrated, aspect of extracting value. Critical perspectives on logistics have the potential to link the emerging frameworks on mediation with observations of how globalising markets affect migrant workers and their lives.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Krifors

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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“…Owing in part to the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy over the past two decades, illegal migration has again become a salient feature of the contemporary Zimbabwe-South Africa border culture (see for example Bolt 2015; Tshabalala 2017). As such, illegal migration has also become one of the commonly discussed topics in everyday interactions in the two countries.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ban on “Tropical Natives” and the Promotion of Illegal Migration in Pre-Apartheid South Africa

Musoni¹

2018

Afr. stud. rev.

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Abstract:This article examines the historical as well as contemporary significance of South Africa’s 1913 ban on the recruitment of migrant workers from areas north of latitude 22 degrees south. This ill-conceived policy not only criminalized the employment of so-called “tropical natives” in South Africa but also triggered contestations, fueling illegal migration from the restricted areas. By 1933, when the ban was lifted, illegal migration from Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) had become a major site of contestations among policymakers, labor agents, business owners, and migrant workers in South Africa. While the dominant narrative in Southern Africa holds that illegal migration only became an issue of concern after the end of apartheid rule, this phenomenon has a much longer history in the subregion. Identifying factors that push people to move from one country to another and those that force or encourage travelers to cross international boundaries without following official channels facilitates the understanding of the complexities involved in cases of illegal migration wherever this practice exists. While low wages and other sources of insecurity in colonial Zimbabwe may indeed have compelled many people to consider moving to South Africa, such factors did not cause migrants to use unofficial channels in crossing the border. Rather, South Africa’s ban imposed numerous barriers, rendering it difficult for those seeking work to cross between the two countries through legal and/or formal channels.

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“…Correspondingly, bordering also be reframed as a temporal process, in which 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' are rarely disjunctive positions but matters of degree and positionality on a transversal scale that is ultimately governed by prevailing relationships of power between several collective agents, and not just by the inevitably asymmetric relation, which we experience at the passport control, of a dominant state sovereignty and a subaltern migrant agency. Such a reframing is under way in some of the most interesting departures in interdisciplinary migration studies, appearing under rubrics such as transnational migration systems (Basch, Glick-Schiller and Szanton Blanc 2005), border practises (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013;Tshabalala 2017), transformations of class, race and gender in globalized systems of labour migration (Schierup et al 2015) and the ensuing mobilization of migration movements (Soysal 1994;Isin 2012;de Genova, ed. 2017).…”

Section: A Society Which Is Not: Concluding Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

A society which is not: Political emergence and migrant agency

Jönsson

2020

Current Sociology

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This essay represents an effort to rethink the relationship between political emergence and migrant agency. This undertaking has a theoretical motivation. Mainstream human and social sciences seem to be at an impasse because of their structural inability to interpret and explain systemic crises and contradictions. While this is a topic far too complex to be dealt with in a brief essay, the following pages will explore three expressions of this impasse. First, the social sciences often analyse migration without acknowledging its profound political implications. Second, European history and sociology rarely recognize histories of imperial dominance and anticolonial resistance as intrinsic to European history and society. Third, mainstream social and political theories often ignore the structural significance of collective protests and resistance movements for the realization of democracy. The article frames the analysis of these problems via two different theoretical contexts in which we can observe ongoing conceptual or methodological shifts or ‘turns’ that respond to the said impasse. In studies of democracy and citizenship there has thus been a clear turn toward ‘borders’. In migration studies, there is a corresponding turn toward ‘agency’. By analysing the interconnections between these theoretical contexts the article suggests ways of resolving the three problems at hand. It starts by examining the first one, or the inability to acknowledge the profound political implications of migration. This discussion will then offer an approach to the other two, concerning the legacies of colonialism and the significance of political agency and protest.

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Hyenas of the Limpopo: The Social Politics of Undocumented Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe

Cited by 3 publications

References 96 publications

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

Logistics of migrant labour: rethinking how workers ‘fit’ transnational economies

The Ban on “Tropical Natives” and the Promotion of Illegal Migration in Pre-Apartheid South Africa

A society which is not: Political emergence and migrant agency

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