Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the role of borderlands in Southern Africa as spaces of class formation and labour mobilization. It draws from cases across Mozambican borders to propose the borderland as a 'field' in which ranges of spatial and temporal effects contribute to the commodification of labour.

Paper long abstract:

Trans-frontier labour migration has been at the centre of studies of labour and class formation in Southern Africa. However, this literature has focused on long-distance return migration and on the well-documented pull of mines and other historically prominent labour migration destinations. Borderland regions, where a large share of agricultural production and processing in Southern African countries takes place presently, have attracted academic interest instead as spaces of political and economic informality and hotbeds for illicit economies. This paper draws from a review of cases of borderland economies straddling Mozambique and neighbouring countries to propose a reinterpretation of the role of borders as 'fields' in which a range of spatial effects such as distance from alternative livelihoods and 'otherness', contribute to the mobilization and commodification of wage labour. Borderland migration creates as geographic and time-bound window in which inhabitants of the borderland become workers. While many other instances of capital and labour encounters enabled by borders have been documented in spaces of steep socio-economic disparities, in the Southern African case the effect is accentuated by historical processes. Recruiting workers from among groups that have historically retained access to the means of production and some ability to refrain from selling their labour power is considerably difficult. The paper shows how borderland economies use the border to source, to regulate and to discipline labour in an attempt to adapt to the character of capitalism in the region and the particular class formations that have arisen.