Tanya Zack and Yordanos Estifanos: Somewhere else – social connection and dislocation of Ethiopian migrants in Johannesburg 

The meaning of personal relationships for Ethiopian migrants to Johannesburg is shaped by individual connections, by imported social networks that are adapted in the host city, and by the particular conditions of livelihood creation in the emerging Ethiopian entrepreneurial enclave of ‘Jeppe’. In their migration individuals experience both rupture and reconnection ­ with relatives, as well as through relationships and networks that constitute social capital in Johannesburg. The social world of Ethiopian migrants in this entrepreneurial enclave is complex. Many social connections and dislocations are affected by the life choices in which income generation and economic relations are the primary aim and social relations are necessarily secondary. Others are influenced by the strength of informal social networks that serve the needs of Ethiopian migrants. And, far from ‘here’ and ‘there’ being connected through the use of technology and advanced connectivity, ‘home’ and Johannesburg are experienced as quite separate and different places.

Tanya Zack is an urban planner and writer who holds a PhD from University of Witwatersrand for her work on Critical Pragmatism in Planning. She is the author of a series of photobooks entitled, ‘Wake Up, This Is Joburg’ (with photographer Mark Lewis). She has operated as an independent consultant since 1991 and her work straddles academic research, policy development and practice. Tanya’s recent research, publication and creative writing centres on the inner city of Johannesburg. This includes work on migrant spaces and in particular on the spatial and economic shifts in an Ethiopian entrepreneurial location in the inner city.

Lukas Spiropoulos: Greek migration in Southern African History

There are several key moments in the history of Greek and Cypriot migration into Southern Africa, most of which correspond to periods of economic and political strife in areas of origin. These include, amongst others, the nationalisation of Greek businesses and related exchange controls in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s; the famine and conflict associated with world war two and its aftermath in Greece and the rise in conflict in Cyprus in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless Greek migration in the region is uniformly treated as a form of economic migration rather than the wide array of factors that almost always inform the routes taken by migrants of any kind throughout history. This is particularly interesting in the Southern African case when read in the context of the majority of the 20^th century historiography on international migration in Southern Africa. This tends to focus on three key elements: regional African labour migration, especially mine labour; intra-imperial Indian migration, including indenture; and white imperial settler migration.  All of these are treated as forms of “economic migration”, though often not responding to personal preference.

Each of these categories of mobile people have quite clearly defined, if not always comfortable, roles in the imperial system of government.

Under this system, African mobility was to be the by-product of colonial “development” and the responsibility of colonial “custodianship”.

Settlers were citizens of the metropole and also a key element in “development” and thus often represented the core constituency of colonial government.

Indian immigrants were more ambiguous, they were subjects of empire and thus conceptualise under the same notions of “custodianship” as Africans but were at the same time fundamentally out of place and thus treated as largely undesirable. This is especially true where they were not indentured and thus “under control” but rather engaged in free trade and labour.

Again, most of these migrations responded to conditions of war or economic pressure but are treated, nevertheless, as elements only of the local economic and governmental system.

Greek migrants, however, did not conform to any of these categories – they were not imperial, not metropolitan and not native, nor was it obvious to colonial officials if they were white. The result is that the story of the immigration and settlement of these “swarthy not-quite types”, as Mark Gevisser calls them, become an excellent tool for studying how ideas about governing global migration, race and the social status of transnational diaspora developed in the 20^th century.

I would argue, through this analysis, that the distinction between the local economic role of migrants and the conditions which caused their migration emerges, at least in part, out of this imperial ideas about the function and governance of migration.

Jihane Sfeir: Territories of migration in Lebanon: spaces, status and identity of the Armenian, the Palestinian and the Syrian refugees.

In this paper I will explore from a historical approach the genealogy of spaces of migration in Lebanon. I will begin by retracing the exodus of the Armenians to Lebanon, their settlement in camps in the South of Lebanon and their re-settlement in the Eastern suburbs of Beirut in Burj Hammoud. I will also tackle the birth of the Armenian agricultural community of Anjar in the Bekaa. I will explore then the status given by the French authorities in the 1920’s to the new comers and see in what way the Armenian community melt into the Lebanese society.

The second territory is Palestinian and is linked to the 1948 Nakba and the birth of the refugee problem. In this part I will study how and why the Palestinian refugee camps were settled; I will then analyze the status (or non-status) that was given to them by the Lebanese Directorate for Palestinian Affairs. And see in how the massive arrival of the Palestinians could threaten the fragile balance of a confessional state (the role of the Palestinian national movement during the war, the homogenization of the space and the disappearance of Tell el Zaatar and Jisr el Bacha camps…). I will then analyze briefly in what way the Palestinian camps represent the national identity in exile.

I will conclude by giving a short description of the Syrian informal settlements in Lebanon with a focus on the Bekaa Valley situation. My aim in this paper is to give a historical approach to the refugee problem, linking the space to the identity and the status of the migrants in Lebanon.

Jihane Sfeir is an associate professor in Modern History of the Arab world in the Faculty of Sociology and Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She obtained her PhD from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisaitons Orientales in Paris, her research interests and teaching focus on Middle East history and politics generally and Palestine and Lebanon in particular. Her work deals with refugee issues, the manufacture, uses and practices of archives. She authored several articles in academic journals and edited books on Arab historiography and archiving in the Middle East. She is also the director of the Observatory of the Arab and Muslim Worlds at the Maison des Sciences Humaines at the ULB.

Matthieu Rey: The genealogy of a political concept: ‘refugee’ or the Europeanisation of the World-system.

Summer 2015: a new wave of displaced people arrived on the shores of Greece and the Austrian borders. This massive population movement triggered intense debates in the media, in which journalists agonized over whether these newcomers were migrants or refugees. Besides this polemic, a series of decisions in recent years has highlighted the subtext of such debates. In 2008, when terrorists attacked churches in Baghdad, the French ambassador offered visas to all the Christian survivors, but members of the Shia population were targeted without anyone coming forward to offer support. ‘Refugee’ is certainly an international legal term used by the United Nations. However, the concept and its implementation carry an historical legacy that sheds light on its contemporary usage. This presentation will identify the different meanings attributed to the term ‘refugee’ in the Western tradition from the 17th century onwards, to show how the concept classified sectarian white groups in different contexts that propagated the traditional view of the Westphalia order. ‘Refugee’ had more political connotations when it designated political groups. The significance of the term shifted during the first decade of the 20th century when it became connected with the Eastern question and the Western conception of the Eastern groups. At the end of the war, the status of ‘refugee’ became an international tool through the issue of the Nansen Passport, which has blurred the historical path of the term.

Ivan Panovic: Linguistic landscapes of migration – a case study of a quarter in Istanbul

Being a sociolinguist interested in writing and literacy practices, I approach the main theme of this workshop – territories of migration – by reflecting on some sociolinguistic ramifications of migration in these territories. Here, I specifically focus on publicly visible language (linguistic landscape) in a city that has been witnessing a growing language contact involving Arabic and Turkish – Istanbul. I discuss the dynamics of this on-going sociolinguistic and sociodemographic transformation by focusing on linguistic landscaping of a particular area in the vicinity of Taksim Square, where publicly visible written Arabic has become prominent on various establishments and walls due to the increased presence of:

(1) Arab tourists of different dialectal backgrounds whose presence in the city is voluntary and transient, and

(2) Syrian refugees whose presence is mostly involuntary but long-term. 

Adopting an ethnographic approach advocated by Blommaert (2013) and understanding language as “a local practice” (Pennycook 2010), I situate my work within the growing field of linguistic landscape studies (Gorter 2013) and analyse a photographic collection of the linguistic landscape of the studied quarter against a number of interviews conducted with Syrian refugees working in the area and ordinary Turks whose reactions and attitudes to this change have been elicited. A broader context is provided by clippings from the Turkish media on “Arabs in Turkey”. I highlight several literacy-as-social-practice issues and discuss ways in which Arabs inscribe their presence and identities in Istanbul, the discursive elaboration of this presence, and socio-cultural tensions this increasing “Arabisation” of Istanbul entails.

I joined the LMS team at NTU in December 2013. I have a BA in Oriental Philology from the University of Belgrade, MA in Sociology & Anthropology from the American University in Cairo, and DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. After completing my doctorate and before coming to NTU, I had a two-year postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford (Andrew W. Mellon Early Career Development Fellowship in Arabic Sociolinguistics). It was jointly held at the Oriental Institute and Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics. I translated four novels of the Turkish Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk from Turkish into Serbian. In 2014, I co authored a book with Professor Deborah Cameron from the University of Oxford (Working with Written Discourse, SAGE). Currently, I am completing the manuscript of my monograph (Literacies in Contemporary Egypt: everyday writing and political change – under contract with Routledge).

Jean-Pierre Misago: Mobility and Social Cohesion in Cities of Strangers: Fault Lines and Opportunities in South African Diverse Communities

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Due to migration and other different forms of mobility, South African urban communities are becoming increasingly diverse, highly fluid and characterised by forms of sociality that challenge the common understanding of socio-spatial belonging and membership.  Using qualitative empirical data from sixteen urban communities across South Africa, this paper explores the status and meaning of social cohesion in these ‘cities of strangers’. It illustrates that, while diversity is not inherently conflictual, it can and indeed often breeds serious social cohesion challenges particularly under the conditions of severe socio-economic hardships and shaky governance regimes. The paper consequently argues that governance deficit is the biggest threat to social cohesion in highly diverse South African communities. In these communities, numerous obstacles to -and symptoms of frail- social cohesion (including real or perceived socio-economic and political deprivation, endemic crime and social maladies, pervasive negative attitudes towards outsiders, outsiders’ limited access to services and protection, group tensions and violent conflicts, etc.) are a result of lack of a competent local and community governance, capable of effective service delivery and conflict resolution. This governance deficit also means that opportunities for building cohesive communities are often missed. For example, community-level practices of collective efficacy are not strategically used towards a form of community citizenship that would ensure that rights and obligations, struggles and opportunities are equally shared among all residents who would then become full and equal members of the local ‘tout social’ (social whole).

Dr. Jean Pierre Misago is a researcher with the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research interests include migration and belonging, xenophobia and violent outsider exclusion, and governance of migration and human mobility.

Loren B Landau: A Chronotope of Containment Development: Europe’s Migrant Crisis and Africa’s Reterritorialisation

Europe has taken unprecedented levels of peacetime defensive actions against the perceived demands by African migrants for “absolute hospitality”. In collaboration with politicians across the Mediterranean, European political leaders are authoring a chronotope that removes Africa and Africans from global time. This discursive vision rests on an epistemological reorientation coding all Africans as potential migrants capable of threatening European and African sovereignty and security. This conceptual realignment has seeded a defensive assemblage of coercive controls, sociologies of knowledge, and a campaign to generate sedentary African subjects. Ultimately it is engendering “containment development” aimed at geographically localising Africans’ desires and imaginations. In an era of planetary entanglement and exchange, this discursively and materially excludes Africans from what it means to be fully human.

Loren Landau holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley). Widely published in the academic and popular press, he is author of ‘The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania’ (Wits Press), co-editor of ‘Contemporary Migration to South Africa’ (World Bank), and editor of ‘Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa’ (UN University Press). He has served as the chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA), is a member of the South African Immigration Advisory Board and of the editorial boards of International Migration Review, Migration Studies, and the Journal of Refugee Studies.

He is currently exploring comparative perspectives on how mobility is reshaping the politics of rapidly diversifying and expanding communities. Through examinations starting in South Africa and extending across Africa and elsewhere, it will identify and explain emerging forms of political subjectivity, political authority, and governance regimes in spaces characterised by continued mobility. In its initial phase the concentration will be on the continent’s emerging urban estuaries: gateway zones characterised by transience, translocalism and social heterogeneity. As sites often loosely structured by state policy or dominant cultural norms, these estuaries are giving rise to novel modes of political community, institutional configurations, and practical ethics.

Dostin Lakika: Survivalist strategies of former Congolese soldiers in Johannesburg

The thrust of this paper is to explore various opportunities that a city like Johannesburg can offer to the people who were previously involved in the army in their country before moving to South Africa. Methodologically, the paper uses unstructured interviews whilst theoretically it draws from Bourdieu’s analytical tools (habitus – capital – field – practices). I argue that while military identity was spatially constructed, former Congolese soldiers’ military capital was an asset which could be used in different contexts particularly where there are security concerns. I conceptualised military capital as a specific professional value that provides former soldiers with the requisite capacity to navigate the South African context. The findings of this study reveal that the skills acquired in the army became an asset for former Congolese soldiers’ survival in South Africa, a country with scarce employment opportunities for migrants. Johannesburg being reputed for violence and crime offers to those migrants who were in the army the possibility of getting employed in security industry. However, former soldiers are mainly employed in unregistered companies which provide them with low pay because of their status of migrants. Despite the tough conditions in which former soldiers work in South Africa, military skills are a valuable asset in a country marked by security problems and that any intervention targeting former soldiers should take heed of the importance of their knowledge and how they can be oriented to become beneficial for them and for the environment where they live.

Dostin Lakika is a Doctoral Candidate at the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Jalal al-Husseini: The politics of Syrian refugee integration in the Middle East

This presentation examines the political and socioeconomic dynamics that have shaped Jordan and Lebanon’s integration policies towards the Syrian refugees since the start of the Syrian crisis in 2011/2012. I will focus more particularly on residence and access to the labour market, which are key when considering the medium, long-term integration. The analysis highlights the weight of previous waves of refugees on the host countries’ current Syrian refugee policy; stresses the role of external actors (donor countries more particularly the donor countries) in shaping national/local agendas and underline the limits of such policies, notably due to the Syrian refugees specific coping strategies and aspirations for the future.

Jalal Al Husseini is an associate research fellow at the Ifpo. Based in Amman since 1997, he has been involved both as a coordinator and as a participant in academic and applied research projects on refugee issues and more generally on the political and socioeconomic development of the Middle East. His fieldwork has mainly covered Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria around issues related to the political modalities of refugee integration and the role of local governments and international assistance agencies (UNRWA, UNHCR). He has also regularly supervised Masters and PhD students working on similar issues. Holder of a PhD obtained at the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva), with a doctoral dissertation on the political dimensions of UNRWA’s mandate, he has more recently specialized in the political significance of Diaspora. In this vein, he has recently conducted a 5-years programme on the Palestinian Diaspora involving a dozen researchers from Europe and from the Middle East that has resulted into a book: Les Palestiniens entre Etat et Diaspora, published by IISMM/Karthala in December 2011. More recently he has studied and published on the political and socioeconomic impacts of the refugees from Syria on Jordan.

Abstracts

Abstracts coming soon!