Migrant Mobilisation, Goals, Structure and Conception of Rights (2009-2011; Hivos; Zaheera Jinnah)

Migrants traverse and transform geographic, social, and political space. Within these spaces, successful quest for profit, passage, and protection depend on rights to work, move, and access necessary social support. Focusing on three South African cities and Nairobi, urban centres with significant non-national populations—this study will document and explain migrants’ individual and collective mobilisation for those rights and others’ groups attempts to do so on their behalf.

Three puzzles emerging from ten years of prior research in Southern Africa animate this project.

• First, despite widespread human mobility (urbanisation, domestic migration, and international migration) and an active civil society in South Africa and elsewhere, there have been few sustained campaigns for migrant rights. Where action has occurred, it has been oriented toward specific events or policy processes and has rarely developed long-standing networks or politically visible organisations. Their absence is particularly surprising given widespread violations of migrant rights and the established presence of non-nationals throughout the region.
• Second, in attempting to explain the absence of widespread migrant mobilisation, this project will build on FMSP research suggesting that social exclusion and political marginalization may not always be challenges migrants wish to overcome. Rather, non-nationals and other outsiders (e.g., ethnic minorities and domestic migrants) often capitalise on their ability to exist in a world partially beyond state and social regulation. Along with risks, many find freedom and opportunity in worlds without documentation, organizational membership, or familial obligation. In this context, this study will also explore migrants’ understand of rights, their content, and the purposes they imagine that they will serve. It works from the presumptions that any system of rights also brings with it duties and other forms of regulation from which migrants may choose to avoid or exit.
• Third, this study breaks from the state-centrism informing much of the research on civil society mobilization. Organisations like the sans papiers in France and similar movements are largely dedicated to changing state law and practice or using the state’s power to promote their interests. Amidst the rapid expansion of Africa’s cities and public officials’ relative incapacities and disinterest, this study does not presume the state’s normative or empirical centrality in denying, mediating, or allocating rights. In such environments, rights may be allocated or denied by religious or ethnic associations, employers, landlords, and gangsters with little reference to policy and law. As such, this study will identify the state and non-state actors and institutions that block or allocate rights and migrants various efforts to claim them.