"Keep Your Head Down": Unprotected Migrants in South Africa

Looks at the experiences of undocumented migrant farm workers in South Africa, many of whom lack adequate legal protections and are particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses when they are arrested, detained, or deported

Veterans' Pensions in Zimbabwe: Dispute Resolution and Nation-Building

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Law, Politics, and Justice in Zimbabwe: Recognizing War Contributions

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Norma Kriger (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a visiting scholar this year at the Mershon Center. Her research on Zimbabwe reflects her interests in revolutionary war mobilization and post-war reconstruction. She is the author of Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices and Guerrilla Veterans: Symbolic and Violent Politics in Zimbabwe, 1980-1987, as well as numerous articles that have appeared in such publications as African Studies Quarterly and Review of African Political Economy. Prior to coming to Ohio State, Kriger was a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for International Studies, a Peace Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including one from the Lilly Foundation and from Yale University, as well as an individual research grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, phot

Making migrants 'il-legible': The policies and practices of documentation in post-apartheid South Africa

In South Africa, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) - the department charged with managing migration - has struggled to control growing migration flows, particularly the increased demand on the asylum system. The DHA has both relied on and sought to undermine documentation attempts as part of its migration management efforts. These shifting practices reveal an official ambivalence toward granting foreign migrants documents and the rights that accompany them. Ensuring that foreign migrants remain undocumented fulfils the DHA's objective of facilitating their removal, but it undercuts the administration's ability to know who is in the country, another expressed DHA goal. Examining two documentation schemes - the asylum system, and the three-month documentation programme targeting undocumented Zimbabweans - this article highlights these conflicting purposes. It explores the DHA's administrative strategies and practices to withhold or deny documentation, and hence legal rights, to foreign migrants even when its stated goal is documentation. Looking at the role that documentation plays in state administration, the article argues that the street-level organisational approach and its focus on implementation best captures the actions of the DHA, underscoring the ways in which street-level bureaucrats can influence documentation policy and practice by determining who gets access to documents