"We must now go back to our history": continuity and change in Mamone, Northern Province

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Forging the links between historical research and the policy process, 18-19 September 1999.This paper considers how current law and administration can deal with local and traditional authorities. It describes how the traditional authority of Mamone, in Limpopo, has seen considerable change over the years and. how external forces and internal dynamics affect the traditional authority. The problem of trying to impose one system on very diverse traditional authorities is also raised

Decoupling and teaming up: the rise and proliferation of transnational municipal networks in the field of migration

Cities claim an ever-larger role in migration governance, often by means of progressive policies that “decouple” the local from the national. The literature on this “local turn” has generally failed to recognize how this decoupling increasingly takes place within the context of Transnational Municipal Networks (TMNs). On the basis of a database of the 20 most important TMNs in refugee and migrant welcome and integration in Europe and additional empirical research, this article identifies and analyzes their main characteristics, composition, and activities in a multiscalar context, thus contributing to a better understanding of migration governance. It argues that these networks, by means of a wide variety of activities, serve a practical but also a symbolic and jurisgenerative purpose. These implicit and explicit objectives of city networking also account for the proliferation of TMNs witnessed across Europe since 2015. In “teaming up,” European cities not only share practical experiences but also develop narratives about migration that counter national, more restrictive discourses and contribute to the global legal framework, as was the case with the Global Compact on Refugees and Migrants. It is this practical, symbolic, and jurisgenerative role of TMNs, in times of increasingly restrictive national policies, that makes these networks key actors in contesting but also improving global migration governance

Transnational city networks and their contributions to norm-generation in international law: the case of migration

Local governments and transnational city networks (‘TCNs’) have been increasingly engaging with norm-generation in the traditionally state-centric international law and migration governance. We identified two modes of this engagement: participation in mainstream state-centric processes, and norm-generation within their own networks. Through four examples, his article identifies four functions of this jurisgenerative activity. The external function is bringing local interests and expertise to influence international normative developments. The internal function is regulating local governments' behaviour towards their own citizens, creating and upholding standards. Through a horizontal function, local governments recruit peers and rally around normative documents that offer a compact, crystallised expression of their interests. The integrating function enables local governments to combine fragmented issues of international law in unified, practical toolkits for their own use. All throughout, TCNs challenge state-centric international law and their traditional exclusion from it by demonstrating competence and fluency in international norm-generation relating to migration

Justice in Europe Institutionalized: Legal Complexity and the Rights of Vulnerable Persons

https://ethos-europe.eu/sites/default/files//docs/d3.3_website_report_complete.pd

Of Bastions and Bulwarks: A Multi-Scalar Understanding of Local Bordering Practices in Europe

In recent years, local authorities in Europe have increasingly developed bordering practices that hinder or further migrant rights, such as the freedom of movement. They bypass national borders by facilitating refugee resettlement, they claim local space to welcome or shun certain migrants, and they develop or break down local impediments to migrant mobility. These local practices, we argue, can best be understood from a multiscalar perspective, which considers processes of placemaking as reproductive of power dynamics. Applying such a perspective to local bordering practices in Greece, Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, we point out the importance of the multitude of the actors involved; legal pluralism; and the contextual role of social, economic, and spatial factors. This offers a theoretical foothold for understanding the power dynamics at play when local authorities become bastions or bulwarks, in which some migrants are welcomed, and others are not

General introduction: Urban politics of human rights

Human rights and the urban – two concepts that both seem to quiver with hope, promise and potential. Songs, selfies and cinematography praising city life conjure images of growth, freedom and emancipation. The slums behind the shiny facades, the people begging next to high rise banks, the divergent life-worlds and opportunities of children in a single city. The different contributions highlight the involvement of a myriad of actors who use human rights, for instance, to respond to urbanisation processes. At the same time, this volume is mindful of critics who argue, for instance, that human rights city initiatives may preserve the state-centric human rights framework, by emphasising local ‘state actors’ and by only indirectly recognising the role of other local actors, such as community-based groups and social movements. The urban condition is often argued to define future life on the planet

Urban Politics of Human Rights

Increasingly, urban actors invoke human rights to address inequalities, combat privatisation, and underline common aspirations, or to protect vested (private) interests. The potential and the pitfalls of these processes are conditioned by the urban, and deeply political. These urban politics of human rights are at the heart of this book. An international line-up of contributors with long-term engagement in this field shed light on these politics in cities on four continents and eight cities, presenting a wealth of empirical detail and disciplinary theoreticalisation perspectives. They analyse the ‘city society’, the urban actors involved, and the mechanisms of human rights mobilisation. In doing so, they show the commonalities in rights engagement in today’s globalised and often deeply unequal cities characterised by urban law, private capital but also communities that rally around concepts as the ‘right to the city’. Most importantly, the chapters highlight the conditions under which this mobilisation truly contributes to social justice, be it concerning the simple right to presence, cultural rights, accessible housing or – in times of COVID – health care. Urban Politics of Human Rights provides indispensable reading for anyone with a practical or theoretical interest in the complex, deeply political, and at times also truly promising interrelationship between human rights and the urban