Fighting a Fictional Invasion via the English Channel:Self-defeating Discursive Performances of Sovereignty in Response to Irregular Migration

The Conservative UK government’s ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign depicts mobility across the English Channel as an impingement of national sovereignty (Braverman, 2023), and supports exceptional measures to restore it. Yet scholars have observed that sovereignty is not an attribute but a practice, produced by states’ enactment of what it means to assert sovereign power (Edwards, 2020; Aalberts, 2004; Ashley and Walker, 1990). Therefore, although it is often imagined and depicted as an essential, pre-discursive quality possessed by states, state sovereignty has a performative, discursive and constructed character (Edwards, 2020; Spengler et al., 2021; Jones et al., 2017). When shortfalls in state power become evident, performances of sovereignty can be undertaken to obscure apparent state weakness or reassert strength. Performative measures of sovereignty in relation to migration include physical interventions such as border walls (Brown, 2010) or detention camps (Amit &amp; Lindberg, 2020), or politico-discursive ones such as legislation (Kahn, 2006) and government rhetoric (Akopov &amp; Krivokhizh, 2019). This paper focuses on performative government rhetoric by members of a political elite, which has “preferential access to the mass media”, and the ability to “set or change the agenda of public discourse and opinion making” (Van Dijk, 1995, p. 4). Specifically, it illustrates how cross-channel migration has been represented as a powerful external threat to sovereignty in rhetoric by UK Home Secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, prompting punitive and exceptional government policies as assertions of state power in response. Yet it argues that these performances of a ‘strong’ sovereign state, and the repressive policies they are mobilised to justify, may actually produce state ‘weakness’ in practice.<br/

Collective mobilization and the struggle for squatter citizenship: rereading “xenophobic” violence in a South African settlement

Given the association between informal residence and the occurrence of “xenophobic” violence in South Africa, this article examines “xenophobic violence” through a political account of two squatter settlements across the transition to democracy: Jeffsville and Brazzaville on the informal periphery of Atteridgeville, Gauteng. Using the concepts of political identity, living politics and insurgent citizenship, the paper mines past and present to explore identities, collective practices and expertise whose legacy can be traced in contemporary mobilization against foreigners, particularly at times of popular protest. I suggest that the category of the “surplus person”, which originated in the apartheid era, lives on in the unfinished transition of squatter citizens to formal urban inclusion in contemporary South Africa. The political salience of this legacy of superfluity is magnified at times of protest, not only through the claims made on the state, but also through the techniques for protest mobilization, which both activate and manufacture identities based on common suffering and civic labour. In the informal settlements of Jeffsville and Brazzaville, these identities polarised insurgent citizens from non-citizen newcomers, particularly those traders whose business-as-usual practices during times of protest appeared as evidence of their indifference and lack of reciprocity precisely at times when shared suffering and commitment were produced as defining qualities of the squatter community

It’s a two-way thing: symbolic boundaries and convivial practices in changing neighbourhoods in London and Tshwane

While there is a considerable body of literature on symbolic boundaries that engages with long-established/newcomer configurations, work on conviviality has only rarely taken this angle, despite its general focus on contexts of immigration-related diversity. This article connects these literatures by examining insider-outsider configurations between long-established residents and newcomers in two very different contexts of rapid demographic change, where the established population is already marginalised and feels further threatened by newcomers. Drawing on ethnographic research in Newham, United Kingdom, and Mshongo, South Africa, we advance debates on conviviality by revealing how perceptions of inequality, lack of civility, and lack of reciprocity shape symbolic boundaries against newcomers, which may in turn be softened by convivial practices. We also consider what the differences between the sites might reveal about the enabling conditions for conviviality in such neighbourhoods

Citizenship, 'xenophobia' and collective mobilization in a South African settlement: the politics of exclusion at the threshold of the state

This thesis develops a layered historical, ethnographic and theoretical analysis of ‘xenophobic' mobilisation and informal residence in South Africa. It explores the role of historically and spatially defined political identities in shaping exclusionary collective mobilization in the informal settlement, countering notions of ‘xenophobia’ as an effect of poverty, racism, elite manipulation, or psychological pathology. It argues that, in a context of stratified citizenship, ‘exclusionary’ mobilization by infra-citizens may be directed toward fuller citizenship andinclusion rather than toward the exclusion of a racial, cultural or ethnic other. Moving from the national to the local scale, and using a combination of archival data, documentary analysis, and ethnographic field research, I demonstrate how the South African squatter camp emerged as a site for the insurgent claiming of citizenship and became a place of anticipated transition to equal citizenship in the years leading up to 1994. A doubleembedded case study in the settlement of Mshongo in Atteridgeville, Tshwane, depicts how, post-democracy, this site of transition transformed into a static and apparently permanent ‘threshold space’ neither inside nor outside citizenship. Here, the distinct institutional structures and repertoires of collective mobilization and violence produced by spatial and political inequalities continued to produce a threshold form of (infra-)citizenship, leading to a resurgence of the settlements' traditions of collective action. I argue that individualistic economic and political practices by non-citizen newcomers became vivid transgressions of this tradition, particularly at times of protest where the salience of collective labour and priorities was magnified. Theoretically, the thesis provides an account of local belonging as built on anteriority and political involvement, challenging dominant readings of autochthony. In addition, it explores the relationship between ‘threshold space’ and exclusion so as to illuminate tensions between inclusion and exclusion; agency and ‘bare life’; citizens’ and human rights

Sub-national sovereignties? : territory, authority and regulation in three sites of "xenophobic" violence in South Africa

This study investigates the nature of territory, identity and political authority in three areas affected by the May 2008 violence against foreign nationals and other outsiders in South Africa: Itireleng (Laudium), ‘Beirut’ (Alexandra), and Madelakufa II (Tembisa). The study compares the three territorial orders from the perspective of nodal governance, using a typology of state‐government and informal nodes, each with dimensions of authority and provision, and asks whether they may constitute local sovereign forms (sub‐national sovereignties). The study finds a different micropolitical geography in each case study: in Itireleng, informal nodes of governance gained control over the means of movement and were locally viewed as legitimate, indicative of a localised sovereign form. In Beirut, Alexandra, an ‘accidental local sovereignty’ emerged when informal nodes attempted to supplement formal state controls but found themselves on the wrong side of the law. In Madelakufa II, violence was seen as illegitimate, criminal behaviour, and the state sovereignty was strengthened by the repressive response of formal state‐government nodes (in the form of the police). The three cases illustrate that, while the state remains empirically significant, and state citizenship retains a resonance that contributes to the production of local forms of exclusion, the functional dimension, as well as the authority of the state over certain jurisdictions, varies substantially across spaces within South Africa

Why history has repeated itself: The security risks of structural xenophobia

The South African government declared last year's xenophobic attacks over on 28 May 2008. As early as July 2008, it began to assure displaced foreigners that conditions were favourable for their return to affected communities, and that it would be safe to do so. Yet in the past year there have been repeated attacks in a number of the same communities that fell victim to immigration-control-by-mob in 2008. Why? In this article we argue that the state's reluctance to protect and assist foreigners in the past perpetuates violence, social instability and injustice – for nationals and non-nationals alike. We examine the source of this reluctance, and show how it creates the conditions for weak protection and judicial responses

Book review: the rule of law in Central America: citizens’ reactions to crime and punishment

Mary Fran T Malone‘s study of public opinion in six central American countries is a treasure house of empirical data on citizen responses to rule-of law dilemmas in the region, but disappointing to a reader keen to apply its insights to the similarly crime-afflicted region of Southern Africa, writes Tamlyn Monson

Las fronteras de los contrabandistas en Sudáfrica

La construcción de una frontera imaginaria es la clave del contrabando a lo largo de la frontera entre Sudáfrica y Zimbabue