Mobility and mobilization; structure and strategy of claiming migrant rights in Southern Africa

A research project by the Forced Migration Study Programme at the University of Witwatersrand in partnership with HIVOS and ISS

Tags: Africa , Kenya , South Africa , Civil Society Building
Additional tags: Civil society building southern Africa responsive governance migrant rights

Urban centres in Kenya and South Africa are among the main hubs in Subsharan Africa hosting large groups migrants from neighbouring countries. Migrants traverse and transform geographic, social, and political space. Within these spaces, successful quest for profit, passage, and protection depend on rights to work, move, and access necessary social support. Focusing on three South African cities and Nairobi, urban centres with significant non-national populations—this study will document and explain migrants’ individual and collective mobilisation for those rights and others’ groups attempts to do so on their behalf.

This study will be conducted in collaboration with the Forced Migration Studies Programme (FMSP), University of Witwatersrand. The study has three main links to the themes of the knowledge programme in the Southern Africa region. First, the study addresses the major problem of migration in the region, indeed in all of Africa. Migration is seen as having a high risk of (potentially) destabilising society. A second motivation to the support the study will look at factors such as the absence of proper regulatory rights frameworks, combined with a lack of understanding how migrants view their own rights. The third link is the study’s proposal to identify how non-state actors (religious, ethnic, employers, landlords, etc.) allocate or deny rights to migrants (in addition to state actors).
Three puzzles emerging from ten years of prior research in Southern Africa animate this project.
First, despite widespread human mobility (urbanisation, domestic migration, and international migration) and an active civil society in South Africa and elsewhere, there have been few sustained campaigns for migrant rights. Where action has occurred, it has been oriented toward specific events or policy processes and has rarely developed long-standing networks or politically visible organisations. Their absence is particularly surprising given widespread violations of migrant rights and the established presence of non-nationals throughout the region.
Second, in attempting to explain the absence of widespread migrant mobilisation, this project will build on FMSP research suggesting that social exclusion and political marginalization may not always be challenges migrants wish to overcome. Rather, non-nationals and other outsiders (e.g., ethnic minorities and domestic migrants) often capitalise on their ability to exist in a world partially beyond state and social regulation. Along with risks, many find freedom and opportunity in worlds without documentation, organizational membership, or familial obligation. In this context, this study will also explore migrants’ understand of rights, their content, and the purposes they imagine that they will serve. It works from the presumptions that any system of rights also brings with it duties and other forms of regulation from which migrants may choose to avoid or exit.
Third, this study breaks from the state-centrism informing much of the research on civil society mobilization. Organisations like the sans papiers in France and similar movements in are largely dedicated to changing state law and practice or using the state’s power to promote their interests. Amidst the rapid expansion of Africa’s cities and public officials’ relative incapacities and disinterest, this study does not presume the state’s normative or empirical centrality in denying, mediating, or allocating rights. In such environments, rights may be allocated or denied by religious or ethnic associations, employers, landlords, and gangsters with little reference to policy and law. As such, this study will identify the state and non-state actors and institutions that block or allocate rights and migrants various efforts to claim them.
With these factors in mind, this study will begin to answer the following questions:
• What, if anything, is the target of mobilisation and what are the means migrants and their ‘allies’ have developed to achieve their objectives. The study will specifically attempt to identify the target of mobilisation – state, or non-state – and informal forms of mobilisation including efforts to claim rights through subterfuge, subversion, and corruption.
• What has shaped the nature of mobilisation? In attempting to answer this fundamental question, this study will explore, inter alia:

- The nature of rights and points of debate with a particular focus on conceptions of rights to space, land, and work among citizens and non-citizens.
- The specific actors involved in migrant mobilisation: who in the non-national and host communities is involved and, critically, who is not?
- The degree of collaboration and conflict between migrant and non-migrant associations and mobilisation.
- Migrant aspirations and itineraries including the desire to stay, return, or transit.
- The political economy of mobilisation including legal frameworks for organising among hosts and migrants (including some general measure of political openness), the funding available for such mobilisation, and the nature of extant/evolving civil society.
- The ‘everyday’, and organic forms of mobilisation in which migrants avoid state controls, invent self-preservation and protection strategies and create the bases for ongoing mobilisation.
In all instances, the study will identify and explain commonalities and differences among cities and the different migrant groups within them.
This study will have two primary outcomes. The first will be comparative scholarly work on the emerging structure of civil society mobilisation in Southern Africa. While there have been active debates over the nature of South African civil society, little has been done on the migrant rights sector. The extant literature documents and explains human rights abuses but does not identify migrant rights mobilisation as a subject of analysis. Outside South Africa, civil society and human rights mobilisation has been a subject for interventionist research but have yet to appear among the scholarly literature. Contributing to an academic literature on the nature of African migration, law, and society is this study’s first priority. The second outcome is more practical in nature: providing support to the FMSP’s Migrant Rights Monitoring Project and project partners. By identifying the challenges of organising for migrant rights, this project may help to inform future advocacy efforts and funding priorities in South and Southern Africa.