To understand the policy environment within which refugees establish and operate their enterprises in South Africas informal sector, this report brings together two streams of policy analysis. The first concerns the changing refugee policies and the erosion of the progressive approach that characterized the immediate post-apartheid period. The second concerns the informal sector policy, which oscillates between tolerance and attempted destruction at national and municipal levels. While there have been longstanding tensions between foreign and South African informal sector operators, an overtly anti-foreign migrant sentiment has increasingly been expressed in official policy and practice. This report describes the strategies being used to turn South Africa into an undesirable destination for refugees, including the setting up of additional procedural, administrative and logistical hurdles; the undercutting of court judgments affirming the right of asylum-seekers and refugees to employment and self-employment; ensuring that protection is always temporary by making it extremely difficult for refugees to progress to permanent residence and eventual citizenship; and restricting opportunities to pursue a livelihood in the informal sector. The authors conclude that the protection of refugee rights is likely to continue to depend on a cohort of non-governmental organizations prioritizing migrant livelihood rights and being willing and able to pursue time-consuming and costly litigation on their behalf.

To understand the policy environment within which refugees establish and operate their enterprises in South Africa’s informal sector, this report brings together two streams of policy analysis. The first concerns the changing refugee policies and the erosion of the progressive approach that characterized the immediate post-apartheid period. The second concerns the informal sector policy, which oscillates between tolerance and attempted destruction at national and municipal levels. While there have been longstanding tensions between foreign and South African informal sector operators, an overtly anti-foreign migrant sentiment has increasingly been expressed in official policy and practice. This report describes the strategies being used to turn South Africa into an undesirable destination for refugees, including the setting up of additional procedural, administrative and logistical hurdles; the undercutting of court judgments affirming the right of asylum-seekers and refugees to employment and self-employment; ensuring that protection is always temporary by making it extremely difficult for refugees to progress to permanent residence and eventual citizenship; and restricting opportunities to pursue a livelihood in the informal sector. The authors conclude that the protection of refugee rights is likely to continue to depend on a cohort of non-governmental organizations prioritizing migrant livelihood rights and being willing and able to pursue time-consuming and costly litigation on their behalf.

This open access Regional Reader proposes new ways of theorizing migration in Southern Africa by arguing that traditional western forms of theorizing do not adequately fit the South-South migration context. It explores the existing definitions of a ‘migrant’ with a view to conceptualise a definition which will speak to the complexities, envisioning a more inclusive Southern African region. The book investigates the various levels of migration moving from the local (rural to urban and urban to rural) to cross border migration; middle-class versus working-class migrant household livelihoods; livelihoods procurement versus wage earning; social capital (networks) and how they make meaning of their circumstances in a ‘foreign’ space. It also acknowledges the intertwined issues of gender and class as important in analyzing migration processes and the chapters feature both in varying dimensions. As such, the book provides a great resource for students, academics and policy makers.

Contingent Citizens examines the ambiguous state of South Africa’s public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of ‘transparency’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘rights’, though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that nurses draw on a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements, to assert new forms of citizenship. Focusing an anthropological lens on ‘professionalism’, Hull explores the major fault lines of South Africa’s fragmented social landscape – class, gender, race, and religion – to make an important contribution to the study of class formation and citizenship. This prize-winning monograph will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, development studies, sociology and global public health.

This edited volume interrogates the intersection between viral pandemics, transnational migration and the politics of belonging in South Africa during COVID-19. The chapters draw on theoretical conceptions such as biopolitics, necropolitics, xenophobio/afrophobia and autochthonous citizenship to understand how South Africa has responded to the devastating effects of COVID-19 and the implications for the lives and livelihoods of African migrants. The book is written against the backdrop of deepening socioeconomic and political problems in South Africa, which have been exacerbated by the pandemic, exclusionary response strategies employed by the government and populist discourses about the dangers of hosting an increasing population of African migrants. Drawing on the experiences of migrants from Cameroon, DRC, Nigeria, Somalia and Zimbabwe, this book explores the challenges of these diaspora communities during lockdowns, their survival strategies and the effects on their social existence during and post the pandemic. From these case studies, we are reminded about the paradoxes of belonging and how COVID-19 continues to reveal different forms of global inequalities. They also remind us about the burdens of displacement and emplacement and how they are repeatedly politicised in South Africa, as the government grapples with endemic socioeconomic and political problems. The conclusion of the book examines the implications of COVID-19 for migration across the African continent and particularly for South Africa, as we witness new waves of xenophobic/afrophobic vigilantism driven by Operation Dudula.

Small businesses owned by international migrants and refugees are often the target of xenophobic hostility and attack in South Africa. This report examines the problematization of migrant-owned businesses in South Africa, and the regulatory efforts aimed at curtailing their economic activities. In so doing, it sheds light on the complex ways in which xenophobic fears are generated and manifested in the countrys social, legal and political orders. Efforts to curb migrant spaza shops in South Africa have included informal trade agreements at local levels, fining migrant shops, and legislation that prohibits asylum seekers from operating businesses in the country. Several of these interventions have overlooked the content of local by-laws and outed legal frameworks. The report concludes that when South African township residents attack migrant spaza shops, they are expressing their dissatisfaction with their socio-economic conditions to an apprehensive state and political leadership. In response, governance actors turn on migrant shops to demonstrate their allegiance to these residents, to appease South African spaza shopkeepers, and to tacitly blame socio-economic malaise on perceived foreign forces. Overall, these actors do not have spaza shops primarily in mind when calling for the stricter regulation of these businesses. Instead, they are concerned about the volatile support of their key political constituencies and how this backing can be undermined or generated by the symbolic gesture of regulating the foreign shop.

This book explores the connection between family structure and circumstances, parental engagement, and adolescent sexual behavior. Given that South Africa contains the highest portion of the global HIV epidemic within a single country, a comprehensive, book-length investigation into—sometimes risky—adolescent sexual behaviour is necessary. Drawing from the longitudinal Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS) of more than 4,000 adolescents between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, as well as qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with parents and adolescents, this study pioneers empirical investigation of adolescent sexual behavior within the intricate framework of family dynamics in South Africa.