A Foot in the Door: Access to Asylum in South Africa

Asylum seekers in South Africa experience extreme difficulties lodging their claims at the Department of Home Affairs. This paper utilizes new survey data to measure the extent of the Department’s failures to provide access to the status determination process. The principal finding is that South African officials often go out of their way to prevent asylum seekers from entering the system. This provides support for the argument the Department is beholden to an institutional culture of immigration protectionism. This assessment differs from conventional analyses of poor African performance of status determination which emphasize issues of corruption and institutional capacity.Les demandeurs d’asile en Afrique du Sud rencontrent des difficultés extrêmes pour présenter leurs demandes au Département des aff aires intérieures. Cet article utilise des données d’un nouveau sondage pour mesurer l’étendue des manquements du Département vis-à-vis de son devoir de rendre accessible le processus de détermination du statut. La conclusion principale est que les autorités Sud africaines s’évertuent souvent pour empêcher les demandeurs d’asile d’accéder au système. Cela semble soutenir l’allégation que le Département est prisonnier d’une culture institutionnelle de protectionnisme en matière d’immigration. Cette évaluation se démarque des analyses conventionnelles de la mauvaise performance africaine en matière de détermination du statut qui, elles, soulignent des problèmes de corruption et de manque de capacité institutionnelle

International relations’ first great debate: context and tradition

According to International Relations (IR) orthodoxy, the story of three Great Debates accounts for the most important theoretical developments in the discipline. Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading caricature of early academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by tracing the manner in which the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1980s. Our analysis reveals that a myth of a First Debate was produced when more recent scholars detached the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from both the unique historical milieu in which this dichotomy was conceived, and the rhetorical purposes for which it was employed. We use these findings to make the case for a contextual approach to disciplinary historiography, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in IR

‘Keeping on the move without letting pass’: Rethinking biopolitics through mobility"

“This is the sixth time that I am coming back to the border, in Ventimiglia, after being taken by force to the city of Taranto. I am now trying again to cross to France, I really hope that this time I make it, as I have no money and no energies left”. M., a Sudanese national who arrived in Italy in 2018 from Libya, is one of the many migrants who try to cross to France, along the coast, passing through the Italian city of Ventimiglia. Yet, most of those who try are pushed back to Italy by the French police, sometimes being held for hours in the police station at the border, without being allowed to claim asylum. On the Italian side of the border, some migrants are randomly caught by the police and put on one of the coaches and, on a weekly basis, transferred to Taranto, a city located 1200 kilometres southern of Ventimiglia. Migrants are taken to the Hotspot of Taranto and, after being identified, they are usually released few days later; the majority of them goes back to the Italian-French border, by train or by bus, despite they might be exhausted and running out money. Such a routinised police practice of internal forced transfers does not discourage migrants from going back to Ventimiglia and from trying again and again; nor are migrants taken to Taranto with the goal of detaining them for long time. And yet, they are kept on the move, forced to divert their routes and to repeat the same journey multiple times. The forced hyper-mobility of the migrants who try to cross to France from Ventimiglia is not an exceptional case study; rather, the focus on Ventimiglia sheds light on the dramatic migrants’ goose game , that is, on the convoluted geographies that they are forced to undertake due to legal restrictions, police measures, spatial blockages and ad-ministrative violence

Incident reporting: experimental data collection methods and migration governance

This paper reviews the techniques and procedures that constitute, and the empirical and ethical strengths and limitations of, an experimental data collection method in a study of street-level immigration policing in Johannesburg, South Africa

Incident reporting: experimental data collection methods and migration governance

This paper reviews the techniques and procedures that constitute, and the empirical and ethical strengths and limitations of, an experimental data collection method in a study of street-level immigration policing in Johannesburg, South Africa

The construction of an edifice: the story of a First Great Debate

Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism/utopianism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading characterisation of the history of academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by exploring how the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that scholars produced the myth of a First Debate by detaching the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from the unique historical milieu in which it was conceived, and employing this dichotomy for a new set of rhetorical purposes. We use these findings to suggest refinements for the historiographical methods employed to understand past international thought, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in international relations

Shifting the Focus of Migration Back Home: Perspectives from Southern Africa

ABSTRACT Loren B. Landau and Darshan Vigneswaran raise three fundamental critiques about how contemporary migration and development debates are likely to affect sub-Saharan Africa. They suggest that the focus should shift from movements out of Africa to migration, displacement and urbanization within the continent in order to take into account the negative effects of migration on families, conflict and political accountability. They argue that given that the balance of negotiating power rests with Europe and North America, it is unlikely that any future agenda on migration will give priority to African interests

A ‘distributive regime’: rethinking global migration control

International regimes govern how officials address specific issue areas in global politics. There is a deep and unresolved debate as to whether we can speak of an international migration regime. This article seeks to develop the theoretical language to resolve this debate. We introduce the concept of a ‘distributive regime’: a structure that coordinates movement and settlement control practices in ways that engender ideal distributions of populations across space. The paper demonstrates the discriminatory power of this concept by using it to shed light on analogous forms of movement and settlement control in the study of slavery and incarceration. We then suggest that we could resolve the extant debate about the status of the international migration regime by further exploring the hypothesis that contemporary migration control practices are coordinated in ways that achieve a distributive effect

Protecting Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in South Africa

Provides an annual assessment of the status of South Africa's refugees and migrants, trends in xenophobia, government policies, and other developments affecting them. Makes recommendations to the authorities for protecting refugees' and migrants' rights