Projects
Project description:
Within the next fifteen years, the majority of Africans will live in cities. The result of failing rural economies, global economic integration and international migration, the growth of the continent’s urban centres are generating new social configuration and patterns of power, authority and belonging.
This initiative builds upon the FMSP’s longstanding record of research and advocacy on migrant rights, with sustained, rigorous research into the nature of human-rights abuses against foreigners, the implementation of immigration control policies, and the access of refugees and immigrants to basic human rights.
This collaborative initiative – involving partners in Mozambique, Kenya, Congo, France, and the United States – explores how human mobility is transforming African cities. Drawing on insights from urban sociology, human geography, and political science, it seeks to document:
This project initiative examines health as a specific developmental impact of migration, and is investigating health – particularly healthcare seeking - as a determinant of migration. Considered from a broad public health perspective, health includes psychosocial, cultural and biomedical dimensions.
This research works from the assumption that displacement and its underlying causes are gendered and affect gender relationships. Gender roles, expectations, and inequalities affect who migrates during conflict, why, and with what consequences. Responding meaningfully to the needs of migrants requires that we understand these effects.
Zimbabwean migration to South Africa since 2000 has been the largest single flow of people in South African history. In spite of this, there has been relatively little comprehensive study of Zimbabwean migration in South Africa, nor have there been coherent or commensurate government responses to this movement.
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.
This project explores the representations of migration and traveling of West African migrants in South Africa and focuses on the concrete and imaginary aspects of transit, the migrants’ relations to the city and their plans to move to other places, mainly Western destinations like Europe and the U.S.
This initiative responds to the contemporary context of Yeoville, a neglected suburb on the eastern edge of Johannesburg’s inner city. This two-year project, conducted in collaboration with Johannesburg-based artist Terry Kurgan, is about migration and the reconfiguration of an enormous African city.
Control remains the central objective of global migration governance. However our the literature has been mostly focused on movements from developing to developed countries. We know comparatively little about the nature and transformation of migration controls in the Global South.
Discussing the management of cross-border migration at the local government level is rare. Migration management is generally considered a national government competency, regulated with national level laws (such as immigration and refugee legislation), and managed and enforced by national level institutions (the Department of Home Affairs or equivalent departments, police, army, customs, etc.).
The Acornhoek Advice Centre was established in 2000 as part of the Refugee Research Project’s involvement in the South African Government’s 1999/2000 Exemption for Former Mozambican Refugees, through which Mozambicans who had arrived in South Africa during the civil war (e.g. before December 1992) could apply for permanent residence in South Africa.