IMES Podium: Mobility, Territory, State

Theorizing from the South

Debate

International migration between developing and developed worlds has peaked and will gradually taper off over the coming decades. By way of contrast, short-distance migration in regions like sub-Saharan Africa - to nearby countries and cities - is booming, and is keeping policy-makers up at night.

Most research on migration politics assumes that governments primarily want to stop people moving from developing countries to the developed world. This assumption has produced a research agenda in which theory closely reflects developments in Western Europe and North America but where conflicting ideas emerging from Asia, Africa and Latin America and the Middle East are treated as anomalies or exceptions.

If UN projections are correct this status quo is about to change. 

Aim of the workshop 

This workshop will seek to determine how states, international institutions and the range of other power brokers (chieftains, security companies, vigilantes, private armies) are responding to this demographic sea change.

The workshop brings together three researchers who have worked collaboratively on a single case study - Johannesburg South Africa - and used this site as a shared laboratory to ground their explorations of concepts like sovereignty, territory and belonging. The seminar invites these researchers to ask how their ideas about Joburg might travel across time and space. In so doing, they will seek to elaborate what a politics of mobility might look like if viewed from the Global South.

 Speakers

• Loren Landau, University of the Witwatersrand

• Tamlyn Monson, London School of Economics

• Darshan Vigneswaran, University of Amsterdam 

 Chair

•  Walter Nicholls, University of Amsterdam

Published by  AISSR