MIASA Working Papers

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://197.255.125.131:4000/handle/123456789/41285

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End date: 2019Has files: Yes

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    Temporality, informality, & translocality in Africa’s urban archipelagos
    (Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), 2019-11) Landau, Loren B.
    Mobilities across time and space are reshaping African lives, communities, and imagination. As people make lives across multiple sites – connections forged through travel, media and the circulation of goals, memories and values – they generate novel forms of mobile urbanism and belonging. Cities’ rapidly expanding, diversifying, and mobile urban populations now interact with each other in ways largely unstructured by state regulations or hegemonic social norms. The results are urban socialities often deviating from the models of solidarity, integration, and membership described in classic urban sociology or more recent debates around transnationalism, multiculturalism, and urbanization. While often appearing deeply anomic, fragmented, and relatively unregulated by officials or constitutional orders, these are not genetically antisocial or disconnected sites. Nor are they singular in the histories, morphologies or trajectories. Yet despite the diversity and distance between them, they are linked. These connections draw together urban estuaries where highly fluid populations move into and through cities with archipelagos of people and sites interlinked across and within spatial and temporal horizons. These changing social and urban forms raise epistemological, ethical, and practical challenges around the governance of space, rights, and representation. This paper outlines these concerns as a way of charting research directions for the study of mobile urbanisms.
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    Migration Infrastructures in West Africa and Beyond
    (Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), 2019-11) Kleist, Nauja; Bjarnesen, Jesper
    Infrastructure is becoming an influential field of inquiry across the social sciences as it has been in policy related research for some time. In migration and mobility related research, the recent introduction of the concept of “migration infrastructure” represents an attempt to theorise the infrastructural approach in relation to the multifaceted mediation of migration. This MIASA working paper considers the usefulness and limitations of the concept of migration infrastructures in understanding labour mobilities in various West African contexts. This juxtaposition of West African cases with the Asian examples that informed the articulation of the concept of migration infrastructures suggests that the framework holds potential for moving beyond migrant-centred analysis, while leaving some open questions regarding the role of migrant agency, the discrepancies between intentions and uses of (migration) infrastructures, the significance of culturally embedded migrant imaginaries, and the impact of global migration governance on national or regional regulatory frameworks.
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    “Acting together”: How Non-State Actors shape migration policies in West Africa
    (Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), 2019-11) Bisong, Amanda
    This paper examines how non-state actors (NSAs) leverage their role in regional migration governance in West Africa. The paper focuses on the involvement of non-state actors in the migration policy process at the regional level. It unpacks the relationships between state and non-state actors, focusing on the media, non-governmental organisations, civil society organisations and academia in West Africa. It examines the engagement between state and NSAs at the regional and national levels, finding that formal and informal spaces for engagement exist and linkages between these levels of governance provide avenues for transposing national solutions to the regional level and vice versa. The paper finds that NSAs leverage formal and informal mechanisms for engagement at the regional and national levels to ensure that their interests are achieved. The paper concludes that involving NSAs in regional migration governance is essential to promote the integration of migration approaches and initiatives from the ‘bottom-up’, complementing the ‘topdown’ state-centric processes in ECOWAS.
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    Urban Sanctuary and Solidarity in a Global Context: How Does Africa Contribute to the Debate?
    (Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), 2019-11) Bauder, Harald
    As national governments and supranational institutions fail to cope with international migration and refugee movements, many cities in the Global North are asserting stronger roles in protecting and including vulnerable international migrants and refugees. Various labels, such as sanctuary city, solidarity city, and city of refuge describe corresponding municipal policies and practices. However, literature that connects such labels to urban policies and practices in the Global South is sparse. I review the English language literature to assess whether the concepts of urban sanctuary and solidarity are applicable in Africa, or whether they represent inherently Eurocentric or Western concepts of little relevance to cities in Africa. The review indicates that there may be some similarities between cities in Africa and the Global North, but that the differences are fundamental and challenge the universality of the concepts of urban sanctuary and solidarity.