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ID: 115037

Alibis for the state? producing knowledge and reproducing state borders after the May 2008 ‘Xenophobic’ attacks in South Afric / Monson, Tamlyn

Monson, Tamlyn	Journal Article
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Publication

2012.

Summary/Abstract

This paper examines the production of knowledge about the causes of the May 2008 attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa, embodied in state actors' recourse to discursive tropes of a 'third force' or mere 'criminality' in explaining the attacks. It explores the way in which this 'knowledge' reproduced statist notions of territory and power in the wake of a cataclysm that destabilised conventional notions of the congruence of nation, state and territory. The paper shows how official explanations of the attacks served both to camouflage the internal borders made visible by localised conflagrations and to reassert the state as the exclusive author of territorial borders.

Key Words

South Africa ; Territorial Borders ; Criminality

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ID: 081375

Displacement, estrangement and sovereignty: reconfiguring state power in urban South Africa / Landau, Loren B; Monson, Tamlyn

Landau, Loren B	Journal Article
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Publication

2008.

Summary/Abstract

Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant communities intentionally and inadvertently evade, erode and exploit state policies, practices and shortcomings. Rather than being bound by their ambiguous status, they exploit their exclusion to exercise forms of autonomy and freedom in their engagement with the state and its street-level manifestations. Through these interactions, displacement and the continued mobility of urban residents is generating new forms of non-state-centric urban sovereignties and new patterns of transnational governance shaped, but not controlled, by state institutions. To recognize these evolving configurations we must look beyond Manichaean perspectives to see the full nature and degree of territorial control

Key Words

Migration ; Refugee ; South Africa

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