Full Description
Human mobility has long played a foundational role in producing state territories, resources, and hierarchies. When people move within and across national boundaries, they create both challenges and opportunities. In Mobility Makes States, chapters written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists explore different patterns of mobility in sub-Saharan Africa and how African states have sought to harness these movements toward their own ends.
While border control and intercontinental migration policies remain important topics of study, Mobility Makes States demonstrates that immigration control is best understood alongside parallel efforts by states in Africa to promote both long-distance and everyday movements. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets. They examine short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting and urban expansion, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of gatekeepers and officers of the state who push and pull migrant populations in different directions. Through the experiences and trajectories of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this empirically rich volume sheds new light on larger global patterns and state making processes.
Contributors: Eric Allina, Oliver Bakewell, Pamila Gupta, Nauja Kleist, Loren B. Landau, Joel Quirk, Benedetta Rossi, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Simon Turner, Darshan Vigneswaran.
Contents
Chapter 1. Mobility Makes States
-Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran
PART I: CHANNELING HUMAN MOBILITY
Chapter 2. Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in SÃo TomÉ and Angola, 1400s-1700s
-Filipa Ribeiro da Silva
Chapter 3. "Captive to Civilization": Law, Labor, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique
-Eric Allina
Chapter 4. Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Postgenocide Rwanda
-Simon Turner
Chapter 5. Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg
-Darshan Vigneswaran
Chapter 6. Policy Spectacles: Promoting Migration-Development Scenarios in Ghana
-Nauja Kleist
PART II. MOVING CONCENTRATIONS OF POWER Power
Chapter 7. Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert's Edge
-Benedetta Rossi
Chapter 8. Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa
-Pamila Gupta
Chapter 9. Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands
-Oliver Bakewell
Chapter 10. Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa's Urban Estuaries
-Loren B. Landau
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
