Landau&Monson 2008

Government and Opposition, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 315336, 2008 doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00252.
Loren B. Landau and Tamlyn Monson Displacement, Estrangement and Sovereignty: Reconguring State Power in Urban South Africa
THE ABILITY TO DEFINE WHO HAS THE RIGHT AND ABILITY TO OCCUPY
territory and to access benets of residence is central to standard, modernist conceptions of state sovereignty. Formal controls over entry, exit and movement within a territory are inextricably tied to such understandings. Under this largely Manichaean rubric, states incapable of exercising these controls are something less than sovereign.1 But as with all principles, practice is never so absolute. Nowhere is this more evident than in the arenas of migration, asylum and humanitarian interventions.2 Through its worms-eye view, this article adds refugees and other migrants to a list including multinational corporations, banks and information technology as catalysts for shifting sovereignty. The article illustrates how mobile populations exercise and engender challenges to and recongurations of state practices; not only by claiming space to which they are not formally entitled, but also through their interactions and confrontations with citizens and ofcials. In doing so, the article opens space
See C. Dauvergne, Challenges to Sovereignty: Migration Laws for the 21st Century, paper presented at the 13th Commonwealth Law Conference in Melbourne, Australia, April 2003; H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn, New York, Meridian Books, 1958. 2 See S. Krasner, Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States, International Security, 29: 2 (2004), pp. 85120; R. Keohane, Political Authority after Intervention: Gradations in Sovereignty, in J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (eds), Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 27598; B. Chaln, Working the Border in Ghana: Technologies of Sovereignty and its Others, Occasional Paper 16, Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study, 2003; C. Joppke, Immigration Challenges the Nation-State, in C. Joppke (ed.), Challenge to the Nation State, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 548; G. P. Freeman, The Decline of Sovereignty? Politics and Immigration Restriction in Liberal States, in Joppke, Challenge to the Nation State, pp. 86109.
The Authors 2008. Journal compilation 2008 Government and Opposition Ltd Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION
for discussion of informal mechanisms of territorial control that may run parallel to or intersect with the formal controls of a state-centric vision of sovereignty.
JOHANNESBURG: A CRITICAL CASE
This article exploits an ecumenical array of data in offering examples of dissenting authorities and contentious claims to territorial access and closure in southern Africa. While our focus is on Johannesburg, we also draw on examples from across South Africa. Compared to Africas ungovernable cities where state authority and power are dispersed, irregular or absent3 Johannesburg may seem an unlikely site to witness migrants agency in transforming the exercise of state power. Not only is the city uniquely prosperous and infrastructurally endowed, but it is also the heart of the strongest state on the continent by most conventional measures. It is precisely for those reasons that it provides such a critical case in illustrating migrants potential power to introduce mutations and inconsistencies in state practice: if the broadcast of state sovereignty can be interrupted or interfered with here, this must be much more so in less robust states. Johannesburgs central role as a node of industry and mobility means it shapes and is shaped by socio-economic dynamics, including migration, throughout southern Africa and the world.4 Where mining and agricultural areas were once most affected by international migration, border crossers are now concentrated in the countrys urban centres, with Johannesburg the most important of these (see Figure 1). Gauteng Province, the heart of southern Africas economy and home to Johannesburg and Pretoria, has seen the fastest growth. Between the national censuses in 1996 and 2001, the government estimates that provinces foreign-born population increased from 4.8 per cent of the total population to 5.4 per cent: a jump of almost 40,000 people. Other estimates indicate a far steeper climb. In addition to relative numbers, there are important spatial dynamics with
3 A. Simone, For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2004. 4 A. Mbembe and S. Nuttall, Writing the World from an African Metropolis, Public Culture, 16: 3 (2004), pp. 34772; C. Kihato, NEPAD, the City, and the Immigrant, Development Update, 5: 1 (2003), pp. 26786.
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DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY
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Figure 1 Distribution of Non-Nationals in South Africa (2001)
0 150 300 Kilometres

Percentage 0.00 . 0.63 Municipality 0.64 . 1.79 Province 1.80 . 4.76 4.77 . 9.21 9.22 . 17.58
W S
Copyright @ Statistics South Africa.2003
Source : Statistics South Africa.
extraordinary transformations in those areas that have become primary destinations for asylum seekers, refugees and other foreign migrants. In Johannesburg, for example, Balbo and Marconi report that international migrants now represent 6.2 per cent of Johannesburgs total population.5 Leggetts 2003 survey (n = 1,100) of key immigrant neighbourhoods found that almost 25 per cent of residents were foreign born.6 An unpublished study by Kagiso Urban Management three years later found that many of the same neighbourhoods were 60 per cent foreign. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Department of Home Affairs ofcials widely assume that the city boasts the largest concentration of the
5 M. Balbo and G. Marconi, Governing International Migration in the City of the South, Global Migration Perspectives 38, Geneva, Global Commission for International Migration, 2005, p. 3. 6 T. Leggett, Rainbow Tenement: Crime and Policing in Inner Johannesburg, Monograph 78, Pretoria, Institute for Security Studies, 2003.
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countrys almost 200,000 refugees and asylum seekers.7 For these and other reasons, Johannesburg provides an apt laboratory for observing novel and dynamic social-political congurations engendered by human mobility. A substantial portion of the information reected here stems from migration-related research in southern and eastern Africa beginning with Johannesburg in particular undertaken between 2002 and 2007. This includes original survey research complemented by formal and informal interviews with migrants, service providers, advocates and local government representatives. The 2006 iteration of the migration survey, rst undertaken in 2003, is a collaborative project among Wits University (Johannesburg), Tufts University (Boston), the French Institute of South Africa and partners in Maputo, Lubumbashi and Nairobi. The 2006 Johannesburg sample, from which the statistics and general trends presented here are largely drawn, included 847 respondents in seven central Johannesburg neighbourhoods (Berea, Bertrams, Bezuidenhout Valley, Fordsburg, Mayfair, Rosettenville and Yeoville). Of these, 29.9 per cent (253) were from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), 24 per cent (203) from Mozambique, 22 per cent (186) from Somalia, and 22.4 per cent from South Africa (190). The remaining 1.8 per cent were from other countries mistakenly included in the sample (Zimbabweans and other groups were excluded to enable better comparison with other cities in the study). Overall, 59.7 per cent of the respondents were male, generally reecting ofcial estimates of the inner-citys demographic composition. Though these data are by no means representative of South Africas migrant stock or of Johannesburgs population as a whole, they nevertheless provide critical illustrations of trends and point to the possibility of new forms of sociopolitical organization and categories of belonging. While the information used here is some of the best available, the article should nevertheless be seen largely as a conceptual and speculative intervention that begins to reveal a set of ever-evolving dynamics that demand further empirical investigation.
Because South Africa grants all legally registered foreigners, including refugees, the right to move within the country, it is almost impossible to monitor their movements and distribution accurately.
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SOVEREIGNTY AS PRACTICE IN AFRICAN CITIES
Africas urban centres have become primary nodes of trade, transit and political power8 characterized by a widening range of diffuse experimentation with the reconguration of bodies, territories, and social arrangements.9 Here, inactivity and docility are not options:10 to survive and thrive, refugees, migrants and long-term residents not only move through space ostensibly regulated by the state, but they also transform it through strategies of accumulation, coupled with tactics to elude danger and regulation.11 This article examines how such behaviours manifested in the engagements of migrants, citizens and authorities consistently fragment and destabilize localized systems of authority and power. In particular, we draw attention to three facets of migrant life in the cities, which complicate dichotomous understandings of state sovereignty. The rst of these is socioeconomic and institutional discrimination against refugees and asylum seekers by citizens, often in collusion with state actors, which works as a form of territorial control but contravenes ofcial laws and policies. The second explores migrant discourses of self-exclusion and evocations of alternative systems of rights that transcend state laws and practices seeking to limit foreign nationals presence on South African soil. The third looks at the function of state enforcement mechanisms and how, through laws and extra-legal actions taken, the state itself is reshaping sovereignty as a reaction to the refugee peril.
Discrimination Beyond the Law Actual sovereignty, state-centred and otherwise, works through networks of institutions, ideas, identities and individuals. When these are integrated into unied systems, state sovereignty can function
Cf. M. Castells, The Power of Identity, London, Blackwell, 2004. Simone, For the City Yet to Come, p. 4; also A. Mbembe, Aesthetics of Superuity, Public Culture, 16: 3 (2004), pp. 373405. 10 Z. Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, New York, Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 78. 11 P. Arnade, M. C. Howell and W. Simons, Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of Urban Space in Northern Europe, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002), pp. 51548.
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without the regular or visible application of coercive force.12 But where daily practices overtly contradict elite, state-centred principles, they threaten the establishment or maintenance of unitary (if not always centralized) sovereignty. It is this latter conguration that we see in Johannesburg and elsewhere in South Africa. Despite the countrys ambitions to overcome past patterns of exclusion based on arbitrary social categories, xenophobic articulations in Johannesburg and elsewhere contrast starkly with the countrys commitments to tolerance and inclusion.13 For instance, in October 2000, a shebeen (informal bar) brawl in which a Xhosa-speaking South African was killed by a Zimbabwean led to extreme violence against Zimbabwean residents of Zandspruit informal settlement near Johannesburg. At least 76 Zimbabweans shacks were burnt to the ground, while South African spouses of Zimbabwean residents were attacked and South Africans of Zimbabwean descent were assaulted on the basis that foreigners had brought crime into the area.14 South Africans refused to participate in the conict-resolution meeting subsequently arranged by community leaders, and the police were accused of negligence in investigating the perpetrators of the violence.15 These are hardly exceptional incidents. In late 2005 and 2006 the events were re-enacted in the Choba informal settlement north of Johannesburg, this time after a Christmas Eve bar ght in which a Zimbabwean fatally injured a SePedi-speaking South African. In seeking vengeance on the attacker, the family of the deceased man attacked several Zimbabweans16 and then reportedly tried to mobilize the community against foreigners in general, portraying them as
M. Foucault, Governmentality, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 87104; M. Dean, Foucault, Government, and the Enfolding of Authority, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 20929. 13 B. Harris, A Foreign Experience: Violence, Crime and Xenophobia During South Africas Transition, Violence and Transition Series 5, South Africa, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 2001. 14 T Mohlala, Xenophobic Thugs Roam Zandspruit, Mail and Guardian, 4 October 2000. 15 T Mokopanele, Tensions Running High in Zandspruit, Business Day, 25 October 2000. 16 Robert Matshete, interview for CDE, 22 February 2007.
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a threat to South African lives. Sources dispute the exact numbers killed, wounded and dispossessed, but concur that groups of South Africans wielding improvised weapons17 sought out foreign African residents, chasing them from their shacks and beating them before looting and razing their homes. There were also reports that some women were raped. Shops owned by foreign Africans were also looted and burned,18 as was a childrens crche.19 The violence was reportedly accompanied by police activities to arrest foreigners not in possession of legal documentation.20 Perhaps the most extraordinary example of extra-legal territorial control by citizens occurred in Motherwell township, outside Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape province.21 On the afternoon of Monday 12 February 2007, a young South African man was accidentally shot while outside the Bafana Bafana grocery shop. The exact details are unclear, but when the police arrived, they arrested the stores owner and staff, allowing the gathering crowd to plunder the shop. When they had taken what they wanted, the crowd lit a drum of parafn and burned the store to the ground. Over the next few hours, Motherwell residents systematically looted more than 100 Somali-owned businesses across the sprawling township. Although not all the shops were burnt, they were all stripped of their contents, including food, fridges and fuse boxes. It was only when the mob reached the Motherwell Centre, a small shopping mall containing larger South African-owned chain stores as well as some Somaliowned businesses, that the police gave the order to disperse. Arguably, more alarming than the violence were the reported announcements from police vehicles demanding that the Somalis
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South African Riots Sparked by Inux of Migrants, Daily Telegraph, 12 January
2006. Two Zambian former residents of Choba, interview for CDE, 23 February 2007. Conrmed in accounts by South African residents of Choba and Robert Matshete, 22 February 2007. 19 B, a young man running spaza shop at Choba taxi rank, interview for CDE, 27 February 2007. 20 SABC News, Police Presence Intensied in Olievenhoutbosch, 5 January 2006, available at http://www.sabcnews.com/south_africa/crime1justice/0,2172,118944,00. html. 21 The account of violence in the Eastern Cape draws heavily from L. B. Landau and H. Haithar, Somalis are Easy Prey, Mail and Guardian, 2 March 2007.
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vacate the township by 8 a.m. the next day to ensure their security. Whatever the motivations and specic actions taken, the result was effectively a cleansing of the Somali populace from the township and by the next day more than 400 Somalis had left the township in fear, most without any of their belongings. What is more important here is not the specics of any one case, but the way in which nationality and particularly rights to territory are refracted through the language and actions of South African citizens. In an interview we conducted in Motherwell 10 days after the attack, a young man told us that, . . . The approach for the Somalis to come and just settle in our midst is a wrong one. Somalis should remain in their country. They shouldnt come here to multiply and increase our population and in future, we shall suffer. The more they come to South Africa to do business, the more the locals will continue killing them. While there are those who are more cosmopolitan in their thinking and actions, it is clear that citizens are often prepared to exclude foreigners through vigilantism and systematic harassment when popular sentiment deems state territorial controls inadequate. Many justify such actions by blaming non-citizens for the countrys most visible social pathologies crime, HIV/AIDS and unemployment22 and presenting foreigners as obstacles to national selfrealization and the promises of freedom: prosperity, equality, security and global eminence. Importantly, the violence described above does not make any discrimination based on individuals legal status. In the case of the Somalis in Motherwell, almost all were legally recognized refugees or asylum seekers with rights to own and operate businesses. The effects of these practices are not limited to the street. If not helping to generate a set of illegal state practices that effectively prevent city-dwelling non-nationals from becoming full members of the urban community, these attitudes have helped to legitimize discrimination by ofcials that erodes refugees and migrants ofcially mandated rights. Research consistently nds that refugee children are excluded from schooling despite their legislated right to
J. Crush and V. Williams, Criminal Tendencies: Immigrants and Illegality in South Africa, Migration Policy Brief 10, Cape Town, Southern Africa Migration Project, 2003; Leggett, Rainbow Tenement.
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education.23 Similar patterns are reected in migrants efforts to access health services, particularly emergency care. While the Constitution guarantees everyone the right to health care services, and states that no one regardless of nationality, documentation, or residency status may be refused emergency medical treatment,24 a recent national study of refugees and asylum seekers found that 17 per cent of all respondents were denied emergency medical care.25 It is in these practices and accompanying forms of social exclusion that we see the citizenry enforcing a kind of closure that at times reects the states strong anti-immigration legislation but often contradicts state commitments to providing asylum, the rule of law and universal human rights. As in the case of Somali refugees, who face violent discrimination despite their state-guaranteed rights to live and work on South African territory, popular strategies of territorial exclusion may reinforce the geographic and psychological boundaries around the country, but nevertheless challenge ofcial efforts to establish unitary regulatory systems.
Migrant Discourses of Self-Exclusion and Alternative Rights to Territory State power and sovereignty are not only manifested in coercion, but also exercised through national and sub-national forms of belonging that dene membership in a population and structure peoples relationships with the territory they occupy, with other subjectively and objectively dened groups, and with the institutions, agencies and individuals charged with social welfare and security.26 In an idealtypical, Weberian nation-state, subjectively dened categories of
23 S. Peberdy and Z. Majodina, Just a Roof Over My Head? Housing and the Somali Refugee Community in Johannesburg, Urban Forum, 11: 2 (2007), pp. 27388; Consortium of Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA), Protecting Refugees and Asylum Seekers in South Africa 2007, Pretoria, Consortium of Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, 2007. 24 Section 27 (1) and Section 27 (3) of the South African Constitution. 25 F. Belvedere, National Refugee Baseline Survey: Final Report, Johannesburg, Community Agency for Social Enquiry; Japan International Cooperation and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2003. 26 See C. Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980; C. Gordon, Governmental Rationality: An Introduction, in Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect, pp. 152; also W. Powell, Expanding the
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membership map uniformly across a countrys national territory while corresponding with formal denitions of citizenship. This regime creates a unied population (the citizenry/nation) enmeshed in a codied set of values, measures of appropriateness and logics of cause and administrative responsibility.27 Models of immigrant/refugee integration often suggest a gradual inclusion of foreigners where their differences and external loyalties are gradually supplemented or supplanted by forms of membership linking them to a new national territory and institutions. But in response to the violence, abuse and discrimination many foreigners experience in Johannesburg and elsewhere in the country (see above), migrants have developed a discourse of self-exclusion that asserts and maintains a position outside the embrace of statesanctioned values and relationships. So, rather than striving to integrate or assimilate, non-nationals extended interactions with South Africans are leading to a reication of differences and a counteridiom of transience and superiority. One migrant we interviewed, who hails from Lesotho and has lived in Johannesburg for four years, revealed many dimensions of a discourse of non-belonging: I dont think any right-thinking person would want to be South African. Its a very unhealthy environment. South Africans are very aggressive, even the way they talk. Both black and white. I dont know whats the word, its a degenerated faade they are putting up . . . They are just so contaminated. Ironically, foreigners often brand South Africans with the same characteristics often ascribed to them: dishonesty, violence and contagion. Few trust South Africans (see Table 1) and only a minority maintains close relationships with them. All this is further complemented (and justied) by a sense that South Africans are uneducated or do not appreciate the opportunities they have for education (or other social services), that they are promiscuous, overly tolerant (especially of homosexuality) and unreligious.
Scope of Institutional Analysis, in W. W. Powell and P. J. DiMaggio (eds), The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 183203. 27 See P. G. Mandaville, Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 28: 3 (1999), pp. 65373; J. Agnew, Mapping Political Power Beyond State Boundaries: Territory, Identity, and Movement in World Politics, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 28: 3 (1999), pp. 499522; Foucault, Governmentality.
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Table 1 Johannesburg Respondents Indicating that they Can Generally Trust South Africans (per cent) DRC Agree Disagree No opinion No opinion/Dont know/ Refused answer n 38.3 46.2 12.3 3.2 253 Somalia 11.3 85.5 2.2 1.0 186 Mozambique 3.9 75.4 14.3 6.4 203 South Africa 71.6 20.0 6.8 1.6 190
Table 2 Johannesburg Respondents on Whether or Not it is Better to Maintain Customs in South Africa (per cent) National It is better for society if immigrants maintain their customs It is better for society if immigrants do not maintain their customs Dont know/Refused answer/Other n 67.7 27.1 5.2 192 Non-National 77.3 16.7 5.9 640
Clinging to the status afforded those belonging to the mobile classes,28 migrants resist implantation into the soil on which they live and work, instead hovering above it by retaining loyalties to their countries of origin and orienting themselves towards a future outside South Africa. Whatever the reasons for their self-imposed distance, many migrants deny ever having held aspirations of assimilation or permanent settlement (i.e. total inclusion). Others claim they would refuse such opportunities were they available. Indeed, from the data represented in Table 2, there is little sign of an assimilating agenda. While many more foreigners would like their children to learn English or another South African language, they remain wary of their families ever considering themselves South African. Although many refugees and migrants do not wish to be part of South African society or of other systems of social regulation, they have nevertheless developed a set of rhetorical devices to justify their position in South Africa, a physical presence that often belies South
28
See Bauman, Globalization.

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African political, legal and social prohibitions. These take a number of often-contradictory forms, with a single person sometimes making claims to space on a variety of seemingly incompatible grounds. Alternative discourses can emerge from principles of belonging that evade both assimilation into South African culture and a reactionary retreat into ethnic or national enclaves. Kihatos work on migrant associations in the inner city described Awelah, an Ivorian group that, unlike most of Johannesburgs previous migrant organizations, has founded itself upon a new kind of pan-Africanism in place of specic ethnic or national ties: We want to shift our patriotism to the continent, not to a country. We Africans share a history together . . . In our day-to-day living we are all confronted with problems of nationality, ethnicity and so on. But when you have this [broader African] perspective you do not see these problems anymore.29 There is more to this than a desire to build a community as an end itself. Rather, the pan-Africanist evocations drawn, inter alia, from 1960s liberation philosophy, President Mbekis African Renaissance and the rhetoric surrounding the FIFA World Cup to be played in South Africa in 2010 serve to erode the barriers that separate foreigners from South Africans. By encouraging South Africans to realize connections to their continental kin they undermine the legitimacy of any barriers to inclusion that South Africans may erect in front of them. Through variants of such discourse, migrants are fashioning a form of cosmopolitanism that, by engaging a plurality of cultures and openness to hybridity, undercuts the dominance of South African nationalism within South African territory.30 Moreover, by drawing on multiple identities simultaneously, they evade subjection to the overarching authority of one. This opens a discursive space that resists both the reactionary xenophobia of the citizenry and the conventional state-centred notion of belonging as determined by the bureaucratic sanction of a legislative regime. Elsewhere, migrant groups exploit South Africas relatively liberal if inconsistently applied asylum laws to access rights of residence and work even where they are well aware of their ineligibility. Given
C. Kihato, Reconguring Citizenship in African Cities unpublished paper presented to the Inclusive Cities Workshop, Wits University, Johannesburg, 12 March 2007. 30 Cf. U. Hannerz, Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism Globalization and Modernity, London: Sage, 1990, pp. 23751, 239.
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the long delays in processing claims, the submission of unfounded claims is one quasi-legal way to penetrate South African territory. More commonly, however, even those who do not or cannot apply for asylum will nevertheless label themselves as refugees. This discourse of refugeeness erodes the language and practices of exclusion through its intrinsic claim to territorial access. The discourse reects and refracts the principle of asylum, where people forced from their homes have the right to claim protection elsewhere. Stories of dispossession, poverty or other forms of hardship justify escaping the responsibilities of home while also validating their presence in South Africa. Although not universally accepted by South Africans, narratives of victimization are far more powerful than stories of journeys motivated by economic circumstances. Another set of discursive claims relies on norms of reciprocity claiming territorial rights to South Africa based on what countries of origin did to assist South Africans during the struggle against apartheid. Nigerians, for example, often remember the full university scholarships their government gave African National Congress (ANC) activists in the 1970s and 1980s, opportunities not always available to Nigerians. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and even Namibians recall their personal suffering from wars tied to South Africansponsored violence aimed at rooting out communists and ANC strongholds. Others plausibly argue that because South African business derives so many prots from investments in their countries both now and in the past they have a reciprocal right to South Africas territory and wealth. In this way, South Africas own transnationalism, however morally suspect, justies transcending national residential restrictions. Critically, migrants strategies for claiming space outside legal discourse and bureaucratic regulation does not represent the creation of a single, counter-hegemonic form of sovereignty. Mangana and Misago both report, for example, that even people from the same country are careful to avoid the mutual obligations and politics that come from close association with other exiles.31 The literature on
J. M. Mangana, The Effects of Migration on Human Rights Consciousness among Congolese Refugees in Johannesburg, unpublished MA thesis, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2004; J-P. Misago, The Impact of RefugeeHost Community Interactions on Refugees National and Ethnic Identities: The Case of Burundian Refugees in Johannesburg, unpublished MA thesis, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2005.
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migrant associations does not reveal the emergence of any lasting and cohesive alternative sovereignty.32 Rather than integrating or assimilating, migrants enlist discourses that exploit their position as the permanent outsiders in a manner that distances [them] from all connections and commitments.33 As Simmel notes, these strangers are not fully committed to the peculiar tendencies of the people amongst whom they live.34 Indeed, avoiding such commitment enables scepticism and the self-imposed distancing that allows them to elude state control.
Illegality, Extra-Legality, and Alternative Sovereignties Having discussed citizens attempts to appropriate usufruct rights to territory and migrants attempts to resist exclusion, we now turn to practices by state institutions and actors that serve through intention and/or effect to enact territorial closure against cross-border migrants. Though they are regularly victimized by the (often fragmented) body of the state, migrants engendering of these control strategies aptly illustrates their ability to transform sovereign practices. In many instances, the interactions between state actors and migrants are generating or reshaping networks of corruption within the states coercive apparatus that echo those seen during the apartheid period and elsewhere on the continent.35 While there may be continuities with the past, efforts to combat illegal immigration have
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B. Amisi and R. Ballard, In the Absence of Citizenship: Congolese Refugee Struggle and Organisation in South Africa, Forced Migration Working Paper 16, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, April 2005, available at http:// migration.wits.ac.za/AmisiBallardwp.pdf; G. Gtz and A. Simone, On Belonging and Becoming in African Cities, in R. Tomlinson, Robert Beauregard, Lindsay Bremmer and Xolela Mangcu (eds), Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 12347. 33 E. Said, Reections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 183; see also A. Simone, On the Worlding of African Cities, African Studies Review, 44: 2 (2001), pp. 1541. 34 G. Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff, New York, Free Press, 1964. 35 J-F. Bayart, S. Ellis and B. Hibou, From Kleptocracy to the Felonious State?, in J-F. Bayart, S. Ellis and B. Hibou (eds), The Criminalization of the State in Africa: African Issues, Oxford, James Currey, 1999, pp. 131.
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created exceptional, extra-legal practices that, while authorized by ofcials within the state bureaucracy, nevertheless violate constitutional principles and the rights of refugees, migrants and South African citizens. A few examples illustrate these patterns. In Johannesburg and elsewhere, police capitalize on foreigners unpopularity to bolster their reputation and their bank accounts. A study conducted in late 2000, for example, found asylum seekers arbitrarily arrested and detained based only on their physical appearance; their inability to speak one of South Africas ofcial African languages (of which there are nine) or simply for tting an undocumented-migrant prole.36 Non-South Africans living or working in Johannesburg consequently report having been stopped by the police far more frequently than South Africans (see Table 3), even if they have generally lived in the city for longer periods. Yet while such measures appear on the surface merely to carry out the states ofcial migration controls and policy, closer inspection reveals that extra-legal harassment of migrants often counters control strategies by facilitating the emergence of quasi-state actors and practices. Although instructed to respect non-nationals rights, police often destroy or refuse to recognize work permits or refugee identity
Table 3 Percentage of Johannesburg Respondents Stopped by Police or Military after Entering South Africa 37 DRC Yes No Dont know/Refused answer/ Not asked n 70.0 29.2 0.8 253 Mozambican 57.1 41.9 1.0 203 Somali 71.0 29.0 0.0 186 South African 33.7 65.3 1.1 190
36 E. Algotsson, Lindela: At the Crossroads for Detention and Repatriation, Johannesburg, South African Human Rights Commission, 2000; S. Lubkemann, The Transformation of Transnationality among Mozambican Migrants in South Africa, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34: 1 (2000), pp. 4163, 589; M. L. Madsen, Living for Home: Policing Immorality Among Undocumented Migrants in Johannesburg, African Studies, 63: 2 (2004), pp. 17392. 37 South African respondents were asked about being stopped by the police since coming to or while living in Johannesburg.
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documents in order to justify arrests.38 This kind of harassment is more easily understood in the light of numerous accounts of police eliciting bribes from apprehended persons (documented and undocumented) in exchange for freedom.39 Rather than protecting South African territory, ofcials who ostensibly represent the state in fact provide undocumented migrants with the chance effectively to purchase territorial access. Police opportunism may of course coexist with strong xenophobic sentiments, as evident in cases where harassment is prolonged even once a nancial transaction has been completed. A Sierra Leonean man recounts his experience:
The police asked me for my refugee paper, which had not yet expired. They say, fk you and they just tear the paper and seize my money and cellphone . . . So then, what they do is take me to the police station. I was shouting . . . [and] one of them just removed something like a little shocker. He was shocking me . . . say that I was to shut up and if I wasnt shut up, he was going to shock me until I die.40
Extortion of bribes from foreigners is a relatively easy and, as a result of anti-foreigner attitudes, a socially acceptable way to supplement ofcers income. Denied access to almost all formal banking services, poor immigrants must either stash money in their residences or carry it on their bodies.41 With their tenuous legal status, (often) poor documentation and tendency to trade on the street (hawking or informal business), foreigners have come to be seen by some police ofcers as mobile-ATMs.42 In the words of one Eritrean living in
South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), Open Hearings on Xenophobia and Problems Related to it, 2000, available at http://www.sahrc.org.za/ sahrc_cms/downloads/Xenophobia%20Report.pdf. 39 Ibid.; L. B. Landau, Transplants and Transients: Nativism, Nationalism, and Migration in Inner-City Johannesburg, Forced Migration Working Paper 19, unpublished, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand; P. Zvomunya, From Terror to Misery, Mail and Guardian, 25 August 2005. 40 In I. Palmary, J. Rauch and G. Simpson, Violent Crime in Johannesburg, in Tomlinson et al., Emerging Johannesburg, p. 113. 41 See K. Jacobsen and S. K. Bailey, Micro-Credit and Banking for Refugees in Johannesburg, in L. B. Landau (ed.), Forced Migrants in the New Johannesburg: Towards a Local Government Response, Johannesburg, Forced Migration Studies Programme, 2004, pp. 99102. 42 A. Templeton and S. Maphumulo, Immigrants Get Raw Deal, Star, 20 June 2005.
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Johannesburg, As foreign students we are not required to pay taxes to the government. But when we walk down these streets, we pay. This choice of words is particularly apt: for the foreigner in Johannesburg, there is a quasi-state taxation system that challenges the ability of political leaders to monopolize coercive force. Other extraordinary practices, while state sanctioned and coordinated, illustrate contradictory purposes and principles within the body of the state. A joint operation launched by the City of Johannesburg and the Department of Home Affairs in September 2003 deployed helicopters and almost 1,000 private security ofcers in a thinly disguised effort to rid the city of unwanted foreigners in the name of crime prevention and urban renewal. After sealing an apartment block, ofcials conscated four illegal rearms modest by Johannesburg standards and arrested 198 illegal immigrants. As unpalatable as these operations may seem in a country committed to curbing the arbitrary use of force, a senior city ofcial proudly reported on their success to a public meeting called to help combat social exclusion. Lindela Repatriation Centre is perhaps the most extraordinary manifestation of the semi-parallel authority systems emerging in response to international migration. Those arrested for immigration offences at least those unable to buy their way out of police custody through the systems of alternative authority already discussed are remanded to this privately managed detention centre outside Johannesburg. But the privatization of this mechanism of state authority has often hindered state imperatives, effectively setting the facility beyond legal regulations in ways that encourage abuse and rentseeking. Lindelas operators have been denounced by the courts for turning the Constitutions lofty ideals into hypocritical nonsense through their treatment of minors,43 and reports of sexual abuse, violence, and bribery within Lindela are common. There is evidence that deportations are delayed in order to maximize the nightly fee the operators receive from the government for every person they house.44 Demonstrating the absurdity of this Kafkaesque world, there are reports that detainees even have to pay bribes to be deported.
43 L. B. Landau, K. Ramjathan-Keogh, G. Singh, Xenophobia in South Africa and Problems Related to It, Forced Migration Working Paper Series 13, unpublished, Johannesburg, University of the Witwatersrand, 2005. 44 Ibid.
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The evident ineffectiveness of South Africas deportation regime illustrated by widespread corruption and the ease with which people circumvent migration control procedures only highlights the power of the territorial fetish that the state uses to justify it. Despite its expense and the fact that many deportations take place without the mandatory hearings, deportations show no sign of abating: indications are that South Africa deported more than 150,000 Zimbabweans alone in 2007.45 Most deportees are undocumented, but human rights groups insist that signicant numbers are registered refugees, asylum seekers or people who have sought to access the asylum system but have been unable to do so due to corruption or delays.46 Current practice is well reected in Arendts suggestion that innocent foreigners or stateless people are typically denied even the procedural protections offered to violent criminals.47 Through these efforts to regulate territory, we see the state using market mechanisms (through privatization of the detention and deportation processes) and extra-legal mechanisms in an effort to promote its sovereignty. In a 2002 statement to the Home Affairs Portfolio Committee, the former director-general of home affairs, Billy Masetlha, justied taking exceptional measures to protect the country against the dangers associated with migrants and refugees: Approximately 90 per cent of foreign persons who are in RSA with fraudulent documents, i.e., either citizenship or migration documents, are involved in other crimes as well . . . it is quicker to charge these criminals for their false documentation and then to deport them than to pursue the long route in respect of the other crimes that are committed.48 This statement and the associated actions do
45 An Institute of Migration (IOM) ofcial describes the situation as follows: Since we opened [the Beitbridge reception centre] on 31 May last year [2006], we have been operating seven days a week not one single day of closing and only on one day was no-one deported [from South Africa]. Christmas Day people were deported; New Years Eve they were deported; New Years Day they were deported; any public holiday you like to mention, they were deported, IRIN News, IOM to Open Centre for Undocumented Zim Migrants, IRIN News, 4 September 2007. 46 CoRMSA, Protecting Refugees and Asylum Seekers in South Africa 2007. 47 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 2834. 48 B. L. Masetlha, Remarks at the Presentation of the Department of Home Affairs on the Migration System in South Africa to the Home Affairs Portfolio Committee, 15 April 2002, available at http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2002/02042002146p1002. htm.
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not signify the kind of formal institution of a state exception seen with declarations of war or martial law, but nevertheless helps situate migrants in a space beyond the normal protections of the law where abuse and extortion can take place with impunity. This kind of ofcial endorsement tacitly both accepts and justies systems in which government ofcials (albeit at different levels of the ofcial hierarchy) legitimize or help create parallel, extra-legal, systems for policing foreigners. Indeed, given the presumed links between foreigners and crime, coupled with a passive acceptance of vigilantism, such pronouncements effectively license the targeting and restraining of non-nationals by whatever means state ofcials and citizens deem appropriate.
CONCLUSIONS: RECONSIDERING SOVEREIGNTY AND DISPLACEMENT
Much current work on sovereign statehood is informed by four assumptions. The rst is that states operate as unitary systems capable of exercising sovereignty through their laws and authorized agents. Second, that sovereignty is dichotomous: it either exists or does not. Third, that the most signicant practices of sovereignty are necessarily state centred, state authored or informed by clearly articulated and unied strategies of control. Last, that state actors practices are bound by ofcial policy, law and principles. This article presents a variety of anomalies in the South African context that question these assumptions. At least in the area of territorial control, they are not necessarily fullled and this is not only in failed or ungovernable states, but also in relatively robust democracies. Let us examine the rst assumption outlined above. Whereas the state is often understood as a unied and coherent set of institutions and practices, this article illustrates how police, public health and education workers and ofcials employed at the coalface of territorial control deportation often confound the states intentions in their everyday practices. Indeed, it is not merely that they fail in exercising the powers delegated to them, but that in some cases they set up parallel, informal authority systems in which state territorial control imperatives are sabotaged in favour of rent-seeking for personal gain. Evidence such as this supports the notion that people, and their
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everyday practices, play an important role in the enactment of the state. Ofcials and institutions are not empty vessels through which the states agency is smoothly manifested,49 and in the arena of territorial control the interaction of migration with the embodied state has stimulated interesting mutations in what are ostensibly state practices. Second, our evidence casts further doubt on the notion of state sovereignty as dichotomous. Even in South Africa, the strongest of the African states, it is clear that there is considerable variation in the broadcast and recognition of state authority. Interactions of the migrant community with citizens and the state bureaucracy are unpredictable daily exercises that generate multiple, coexisting forms of regulation and authority, be they migrant organizations, asylum applications, rent-seeking arrangements or violence and intimidation. However, the fact of citizens and ofcials taking territorial control into their own hands does not suggest an absence of state sovereignty. Rather, it points to the existence of locally derived gradations, modes and congurations in the states monopoly over territorial control. Other scholars account for the emergence of such localized variations due to international actors, other states, occupying armies or even the history of state formation.50 In the South African case, it seems that the everyday practices and interactions of individual actors both migrants and locals also contribute to variations in state sovereignty. Given the concentration of migrantrelated practices in the continents cities, these transformations potentially have the power to shift the one place where states have been able to exercise something like normal sovereignty. Regarding state-centrality in sovereignty, the South African states formal mechanisms of territorial control theoretically manage refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants access to rights. Yet access and closure are also governed by emergent informal and illicit mechanisms such as xenophobia and corruption, which may result in
A. Mountz, Human Smuggling, the Transnational Imaginary, and Everyday Geographies of the Nation-State, Antipode, 35: 3 (2003), pp. 62244. 50 See Krasner, Sharing Sovereignty; C. Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; L. B. Landau, Beyond the Losers: Transforming Governmental Practice in Refugee-Affected Tanzania, Journal of Refugee Studies, 16: 1 (2003), pp. 1943.
49
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migrant communities being driven out from residential areas, becoming the targets of hate and violence, being denied health and education entitlements due to ignorance or discrimination51 or falling victim to extortion by ofcials keen to exploit their already vulnerable position. As such, mechanisms of territorial control are not always state authored, and, though they may at times coincide with and strengthen state strategies to curb illegal migration, they are not necessarily state sanctioned. Indeed, they may y in the face of ofcial policy. In turn, migrants may exploit their marginal position to create counter-narratives of self-exclusion, permanent transience and rights that run counter to the regulatory aspirations of the state. In so doing, migrants reject the social pressures that bind people to territory and regulate their behaviour in line with established norms. Alternatively, they may seize upon the discourse of formal inclusion and modify it to claim rights to space from which the state would formally exclude them for instance by falsely claiming refugee status or doing so on a basis not recognized by the state. If they do this, migrants attempt to appropriate a state prerogative for territorial control in a manner that demonstrates unevenness in the recognition of formal authority. These practices, which should shift how we understand sovereignty as practice, remain invisible if we solely focus on state actors, laws and border control. Lastly, our examples illustrate how state actors actions associated with territorial control can in fact fall foul of both policy and law. In cases such as the expedient policing approach articulated by ex-home affairs director, Billy Masetlha, a paradox emerges in which leaders feel compelled to protect their states universalistic legal principles and commitment to human rights through extra-legal efforts that violate them both. This raises questions about the nature and coherence of sovereignty by creating anomalies or fractures in the apparently coherent will of the state. In turn, the alternative authority structures effectively produced by corruption in the policing and deportation regimes which can only thrive in an atmosphere of exceptionalism threaten to establish an alternative order that undermines state leaders power of law and their power
Landau, Xenophobia in South Africa; P. Sukhraj, Foreigners Find No Soft Place to Fall, Star, 16 September 2005.
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to decide.52 If the existence of these alternatives is as central to sovereignty as Agamben argues,53 leaders seeking to protect sovereignty through exceptionalism may eventually nd they have created forces that rob them of it.
52 Cf. P. Chabal and J-P. Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, Oxford, International African Institute in Association with James Currey, 1999; Bayart et al., The Criminalization of the State in Africa. 53 G. Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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Government and Opposition, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 315336, 2008 doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00252.

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

JOHANNESBURG: A CRITICAL CASE

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

Figure 1 Distribution of Non-Nationals in South Africa (2001)

0 150 300 Kilometres

Copyright @ Statistics South Africa.2003

Source : Statistics South Africa.

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

SOVEREIGNTY AS PRACTICE IN AFRICAN CITIES

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

South African Riots Sparked by Inux of Migrants, Daily Telegraph, 12 January

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

See Bauman, Globalization.

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DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

CONCLUSIONS: RECONSIDERING SOVEREIGNTY AND DISPLACEMENT

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

DISPLACEMENT, ESTRANGEMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

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