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Paper short abstract:

Using Nyamnjoh's provocations about 'Frontier Africans' we argue that labelling and categorisation of African migrants on the African continent demonstrate western political and research ideologies that corrall individuals according to race, class, ethnicity, nationality and movement.

Paper long abstract:

Working from Nyamnjoh's understanding of and elaboration on 'Frontier Africans' we interrogate the normative categorisation and labelling of African migrants on the African continent. We argue that the imposition of geographical and political boundaries (for eg state borders) were historically driven through European colonisation and imperialism; and in the last century into the twenty-first century by a further globalised political economy that created a tension between the global south and the global north. By implication the categorisation of movement, an offshoot of colonial ordering and western theorisation of the other, has organised the way we think about movement on the continent.

Situated in particular westernised and hybrid political and economic contexts researchers and migration scholars themselves impose categorical conventions that are not specific to African contexts. Our provocations in this paper, catalysed in part by Nyamnjoh's work and our research experiences, open discussions on intra-African migration to context specific research that spotlights alternative realities that are not founded on separatist (or othering) principles. Our work, underpinned by ethnographic fieldwork across different time-space slices and a further reading of and engagement with texts on humaning, cosmopolitanism and decoloniality, interrogates the continuation of a scholarly ecosystem that centers categorisation and/or labelling as a means to understand African movement.

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Paper short abstract:

Only two decades ago, the term 'African descent' emerged as a designation and political category for people in the African Diaspora around the world. This paper delves into its societal impact and wider political implications of the term in international politics.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last two decades, a growing number of people around the world have identified as being of 'African descent' The term “people of African descent” has gained prominence in international politics and human rights discourse in particular since the Third United Nations World Conference against Racism in 2001. The United Nations primarily associates this term with the descendants of the victims of the African slave trade but recognizes that the term is broader and also includes recent migratory movements. People of African descent are highlighted by the UN as victims of racism and discrimination worldwide. Historically, categorizations for these people were often fragmented along local lines, such as African American or Afro-Colombian, or based on citizenship status (such as migrant, refugee, migration background). Above all, 'African descent' is a global category that transcends national boundaries. I interpret a 'global category' as a process of differentiation uniting people worldwide based on shared characteristics.

This paper explores the emergence of 'African descent' as an international political issue, examining the formation of this category from a sociological-historical perspective. Questions related to the influence of factors such as human rights discourse, political movements, and the meaning of 'African descent' in comparison to other categories for people of African descent. This presentation is based on the results of my PhD project 'The Institutionalization of People of African Descent in International Politics. Using a qualitative content analysis of textual documents from international Organizations and ethnographic observations of UN meetings in Geneva and New York.

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This paper delves into the complex dynamics of categorizing migrants and mobility within the context of regional integration and free movement, focusing on ECOWAS in comparison to the EU. It shows that the “inside” “outside” differentiation in the ECOWAS case is much more ambiguous than in the EU.

Paper long abstract:

This paper delves into the complex dynamics of categorizing migrants and mobility within the context of regional integration and free movement, focusing on ECOWAS in comparison to the EU. While existing research emphasizes a distinct "We" and "Them" division in the EU between "mobile citizens" and third-country national "migrants," this paper investigates whether similar dynamics exist in the ECOWAS. Through document analysis and interviews with policy actors in both regions, the analysis shows that the distinction between migrants "from the inside" and "from outside" the region is more ambiguous in ECOWAS than the EU-focused literature suggests. Despite a strong regional identity rooted amongst others in historical intra-regional migration, migrants from outside the West African free mobility space are not per-se considered more problematic. Regional identity partially extends beyond ECOWAS member states to encompass the entire African continent. In the meanwhile, predominantly low-skilled intra-regional migrants are often perceived more critically by policy actors than extra-regional migrants that are expected to bring skills or financial revenues. Casting this lens back on the EU, it becomes apparent that similar mechanisms are at play, with the notorious problematization of ‘welfare migration’ within the EU versus the race on talent from the outside. Thus, the paper traces the meaning of the West African regional mobility space for the categorization mobile populations, while highlighting the logics of “wanted” wealthy and utile vs. “unwanted” poorer migrants that cross-cut regional belonging in both regions.

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What do Ghanaian men fearing being forced to become chief and Beninese women being coerced into a vodou community have in common? Both are examples of asylum application narratives before US and UK refugee tribunals, conveying forms of sociocultural violence that sit uncomfortably with refugee law.

Paper long abstract:

The exilic mobilities of African refugees are embedded with strategies of escape and survival revealing forms of sociocultural violence that sit uncomfortably with refugee law. Since the earliest efforts to globalize humanitarian protections with the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, Africans have struggled to find themselves represented in the classic five categories garnering protection: race, political opinion, nationality, particular social group (PSG) membership, and religion. In this paper, I demonstrate how two groups of refugees from sociocultural persecution - namely young Ghanaian men fearing being forced to become chief and young Beninese women being coerced into a vodou community - navigate resituating their experience within established legal frameworks. In recent decades, the PSG category has proved capacious and useful for African refugees. A vast spectrum of forms of persecution, many not historically documented prior to or during the drafting of the refugee convention, have found a plausible haven within the PSG framework. This paper asks, however, if refugee advocates may be underserving their clients and future asylum-seekers by passing on clearer or better-founded arguments anchored by alternative categories. In the case of chiefly disputes, I ask why political opinion is not a better fit, and with respect to vodou coercion, whether the caselaw on religious persecution provides sufficient protection. Moreover, by prioritizing a PSG over other potential protective categories, are such choices missing an important opportunity to decolonize refugee law and instead further reinstantiating Eurocentric and Western and Judeo-Christian monotheistic paradigms of political and religious persecution.

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Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the Ethiopia-Sudan border, the paper argues the fluid character of mobility in and out of Ethiopia does not align with how international hegemonic discourses categorize migration as ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ and its interpretation into national and regional policy frameworks.

Paper long abstract:

The global agenda to improve safe, orderly and regular migration impacts migration policy, which frame particular forms of movement as ‘acceptable’ or ‘illegitimate’ and labelling of migrants as ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’. Drawing on the Ethiopia-Sudan border, this paper traces how international hegemonic discourses are incorporated into national and regional policy frameworks, and how different actors (including government officials, community and business leaders and civil society) share a common understanding of what constitutes safe, orderly and regular migration.

Mobility along the Metema-Gallabat border, a crossing point from Ethiopia to Sudan, shows different recognition of migrants within the different contexts takes place, unfolding through and with the border. Going beyond the simplistic narratives of ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’ based on attaining legal documents, the concept of ‘illegality’ is applied in contexts of increased risks. Further, illegality shifts while migrants, using tourist visa, and thus ‘legal’ becomes 'illegal' as they do not fulfill the criteria for being tourists and overstay their visa. Among the local communities, as well, regardless of their legal status, migrants are condemned as ‘illegal’, sometimes objectified due to the economic contribution they bring, given names that degrade their status to a mere object. Further, these categories go through a process that is affected by economic interdependence, generational divide, historical narratives, state politics, and gender, among others. Therefore, by looking into the categories of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, this paper sets out to understand how mobility is defined and represented in national and local experiences in Ethiopia and Sudan.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper talk about mobility with regards to its classifications in the local dialect of the study area, the reasons and period of their movement. Pastoralists were very familiar with the concept of mobility; therefore, the classifications were provided by the pastoralists themselves.

Paper long abstract:

Pastoralists are individuals who hinge on raising and herding cattle for their livelihoods. As such, their mobility is closely tied to the movement of their animals in search of pasture and water. This paper examine various classifications of pastoralists mobility, their period of movement and the reasons behind each movement. Through the focus group discussions, it was revealed that pastoralist mobility can be categorized into three (3). These include Nigi-Daabihi (cattle traders), Dang-Kaabu (family Visit), and Modoo/Nzo Kokpagu (Resource-Based) forms of migration. The purpose of Nigi-Daabihi is not only to buy and sell cattle but also to establish relationships with their colleagues’ pastoralists who reside in Ghana. Most mobiles found within these categories do not stay in the country for long. Pastoralists who form part of the Dang-Kaabu category of mobility are pastoralists who have family members in Ghana. They paid visits to their family members on a regular basis. Those who form part of Modoo/Nzo Kokpagu category send the animals to a places where they can get access to fodder and water for the animals. This category occurs on seasonal basis and does not exceed six (6) months. Findings further reveal that pastoralists whose movement is based on cattle trading (Nigi-Daabihi) and family visit (Dang-Kaabu) move throughout the calendar year. But those whose movements are based on the availability of resources, only move within a specific period of the year. These findings offer a deep understanding of the dynamics of the pastoralist movement, which are essential for our understanding

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Paper short abstract:

Categories used in migration research hide the physical mobility that young people engage in; both for those youth who migrate within Africa and beyond and those whose parents do but they do not. This paper proposes mobility-based categories to shed light on young people’s mobile lives in 3 ways.

Paper long abstract:

This paper develops mobility-based categories for studying young people with and without a migration background. Most migrant youth research uses the categories of ethnicity, defined by the country of origin of the youth or one or both of their parents, or generation, defined as 1st, 2nd or 1.5 generation. These categories hide the mobility that young people engage in; both for those youth who have migration in their biographies and those who do not. Using insights from the transnational and mobilities turns in the social sciences, this article argues that mobility based categories can help shed light on young people’s lives in three ways. First such categories allow investigating other elements of commonality and difference between youth, irrespective of where they or their parents come from. This allows going beyond the nation-state lens that still guides most large-scale migration research and investigating within-group differences. In a globalising world the ability of young people to move is increasingly a marker of difference and therefore needs to be considered when studying young people’s lives. Second, mobility-based categories take youth’s past and present mobilities into account, allowing a temporal understanding of how mobility affects their lives. Finally, mobility-based categories are a way to operationalize the notion that mobility is a process rather than a one-time move. The article exemplifies what alternative mobility-based categories could look like, based on a recent, large-N, primary data collection project on secondary-school youth’s mobility in three European and one African country.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper is on visualizations of space as expression of environmental perception. The materialized objects are crucial for reproducing history. They re-present a situated knowledge which is related to people who were moving to, through or from a region with intentions, imaginations or expectations.

Paper long abstract:

The Western Plateau of today’s Tanzania is comparatively sparsely populated. However, for decades it provided an area of encounter and refuge to different people. The arrival of the Ngoni in the area was accompanied by decades of turbulence, former enslaved people sought shelter in the plateau’s woodland, Uvinza’s inhabitants came to the region to maintain social and political contacts or they followed economic objectives, Nyamwezi, Swahili and Arabs passed by transporting goods on the long-distance trade, European missionaries and so-called explorers crossed the area on their way to promising fields, Tongwe were relocated from the region to avoid epidemics, and Rwandese and Burundians were settled in there for security and humanitarian reasons.

This paper is part of a historical research project on mobility, migration and environmental transformation which covers Tanzania’s Western Plateau in a period of roughly one hundred years (1870s-1980s). Based on extensive archive material, categories like missionaries, travellers and refugees are analysed as references to and as expressions of environmental perception. They constitute nodes for the creation of space within the process of knowledge production. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the paper presents examples of visual materializations of space, focussing on imaginations (e.g. “civilizing mission”), processes of annexation (e.g. colonialism), transformations and visions (e.g. REDD+).

By emphasising diverse identities, the arbitrariness and impermanence of space, knowledge and categorization becomes obvious, but also perspectives and hidden or underlying intentions. It is the aim of this paper to offer examples of alternative interpretations of colonial data.

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Paper short abstract:

Migration research relies on analytical categories to differentiate various types of migration and migrants. I question the use of the analytical categories of regular and irregular migration through Senegalese (returned) migrants’ and their families’ and friends’ perceptions and self-designations.

Paper long abstract:

Migration research heavily relies on analytical categories to differentiate various forms of migration and types of migrants. Yet, they often fail to grasp migrants’ own perceptions. In this paper, I question the use of the analytical categories of regular and irregular migration through Senegalese (returned) migrants’ and their families’ and friends’ perceptions and self-designations based on about 90 interviews and fieldwork conducted in Senegal, Italy and Germany between 2019 and 2021. Senegalese migrants use different modes and routes of migrating during their trajectories to Europe. Depending on their location and duration of stay, their legal status may be considered irregular or regular by states. Nevertheless, I find that Senegalese migrants use categories referring to mobility and less to a legal status. I argue that people’s self-perception does not change according to a changing legal status. Senegalese migrants call themselves „bitim rew“ or „tukkikat“ in Wolof, meaning „someone who is outside of the home country“ and „traveler“. They perceive their legal status mostly in relation to their possibilities of traveling, especially back to Senegal to visit family and friends. More generally, I suggest to take migrants’ own categories more into consideration in migration research because they can provide more analytical depth than and serve as an addition to well-established analytical categories, especially regarding people’s own understandings of migration and the meaning of being a migrant.

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Paper short abstract:

Adopting an inter-generational and transnational approach, this paper investigates the interrelation between post-slavery status ascription in the Gambia and how this is shaped by migrant status abroad, specifically in the context of illegalization among Gambian migrants in Angola.

Paper long abstract:

Adopting an inter-generational and transnational approach, this paper investigates the interrelation between societal and jural-political forms of categorization. It looks at the legacy of status ascription in rural Gambia, with a specific focus on post-slavery categorisation of people on the move. In the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, as slavery waned, a number of (free) immigrants settling in Soninke-speaking communities along the Gambia river were nevertheless classified and integrated as “slaves”. Their descendants have suffered from marginalization and stigmatisation as typically manifest in post-slavery societies in the Western Sahel. As members of these communities, regardless of their status, have emigrated to different countries across the world, their social ranking becomes entangled with other processes of categorization. In particular, the paper deals with how issues of illegalization in Angola during the mid-2010s played into status relations among Gambian and West African migrants. Angola’s stringent rules of entry and stay, together with active deportation policies and police violence, lead migrants to bracket off status categories in the name of solidarity among migrants. The paper investigates the ethic of strangerhood and alienation that fuels processes of categorisation and links them across space and time - through the generations and between locations.

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Paper short abstract:

Rent paying IDPs therefore not recognised as such in DR Congo, out-of-camp city residents in Ethiopia, irregular urban refugees in Tanzania, in-camp host communities in Kenya: The paper explores the dynamics of strategies of and policies for people forced to move that usually fall of the grid.

Paper long abstract:

The most widely used definition for refugees, the Geneva convention, stresses linear elements: to meet the bar, people need to have made it to particular places: beyond nation-state borders. To be recognised and obtain the papers to prove it, certain other conditions have to be met. Many are often defined by national laws - in e.g. countries with encampment policies, residence in a camp. People forced to move within national borders likewise have to move from A to B, and reach a space in which humanitarian actors reify otherwise merely theoretical rights outlined in the Kampala convention to be officially counted as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). In parallel to officially recognised and normatively prescribed forms of movements, an empirical micro perspective reveals patterns of mobility and immobility that do not always coincide with policy-normative categories.

The paper, thus, proposes to look at everyday realities with a bottom-up perspective. Such a perspective shows that people move back and forth between different categorisations, combine or abstain from them, find them to be limiting and enabling; it furthermore shows that categorisations are framing movements in a way that reaches beyond physical into social, economic, political spaces. The paper presents examples from case studies from across East Africa that reach beyond the officially recognised refugee/IDP spaces in order to illustrate everyday realities and navigations strategies of those affected and, last but not least, to examine their interdependence from official laws and norms.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses a rarely discussed issue of the host community's disguise as refugees, leading to an 'invisible diaspora,' and aims to broaden discussions on the refugee diaspora. Using interviews, the paper also explores transnational relations of the refugee diaspora with places of origin

Paper long abstract:

In the early 1990s, the civil war in Somalia caused a significant surge in the number of Somali refugees in East Africa. This influx has continued due to ongoing conflict, as well as drought and climate conditions in the region. The majority of Somali refugees are hosted in East African countries, with Ethiopia and Kenya having the largest number of refugees globally. The refugees and host communities are primarily composed of the same people, with camps located in territories inhabited by Somalis in Kenya and Ethiopia. Some members of the host community have registered as refugees to access the resources and benefits provided, resulting in the resettlement of host communities. This paper addresses the rarely discussed issue of the host community's disguise as refugees, leading to an 'invisible diaspora,' and aims to broaden discussions on the refugee diaspora. The paper is based on qualitative interviews conducted in Kebribayah, located in Ethiopia's Somali region, with refugees, hosts, and members of the 'invisible diaspora.' The paper goes beyond examining refugee-host relations by exploring the transnational relations of the refugee diaspora (consisting of resettled refugees and host communities) with their places of origin.