ACMS' research focuses on seven research themes primarily within the region of Sub-Saharan Africa. Due to a flurry of recent policy and practice changes within South Africa's refugee, asylum, and migration systems, however, this quarter's research feature focuses on South Africa itself. (Peruse these scholarly outputs for regionally focused research findings.)
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Report Feature: Current Developments in the South African Asylum and Migration System
Author: Roni Amit
Several recent developments may affect the administrative justice accorded to asylum seekers in South Africa. These include the resumption of deportations to Zimbabwe following the completion of the Zimbabwe Documentation Process (ZDP), the use of the First Safe Country principle at the border, the closure of the Johannesburg refugee reception office together with plans to move all refugee reception offices to the border, and changes in the Refugee Appeal Board rules.
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Research Feature: New Books
Description: On 11 May 2008, residents of Alexandra Township turned violently on their neighbours, launching a string of attacks that, two weeks later, left 60 dead, dozens raped and over a hundred thousand displaced. Most of those killed were from beyond South Africa's borders, but at least a third were citizens who, for reasons of ethnicity or political affiliation, failed to protect their space in the country's urban core. Although not the most severe political violence in South Africa's turbulent past, the 2008 attacks reflect an important moment in the country's post-apartheid, post-authoritarian existence: a moment when the government's legitimacy and the post-apartheid order were called into question. This xenophobic violence made evident cracks in
the cohesion of law and society while helping to redefine both.
It is these events and subsequent consequences for the ordering of power, population and place that this book explores. Exorcising the Demons Within makes sense of recent anti-outsider violence by situating it within an extended history of South African statecraft that both produced the conditions for the attacks and has been reshaped by it. Drawing on an interdisciplinary team of expert scholars and on new research, this is the first academic text to fully theorise the events that made global headlines in 2008. Through its subtle, empirical and theoretically informed analysis, the book reshapes discussion of xenophobia and violence in South Africa
while injecting local debates into global considerations of
the meaning of citizenship and the post-colonial state.
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Student Research Profile
Five ACMS alumni (and two ACMS researchers) presented original research and analysis at the 13th annual IASFM Conference in Kampala, Uganda. Congratulations to:
- Jessica Anderson, South African Responses to Xenophobic Violence: The Relevance of International Peacebuilding to Urban Displacement
- Becca Hartman, Religion, Identity and Resources: a case study of 2 Migrant Churches in Alexandra Township, South Africa
- Hilton Johnson, The discursive evolution of internal displacement and its significance to issues of governance in Africa: A discourse analysis of texts related to the African Union's adoption of the Kampala Convention
- Elsa Oliveira, Keep Your Hands Off My Body: A look at the governing of sex work in Hillbrow
- Kathryn Takabvirwa, (Mis-)Representing the State: Zimbabwean Migrants' Perceptions of Immigration Policing in South Africa
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A Note to Students
Join us on facebook to keep up with opportunities for fellowships and jobs, upcoming events, and ACMS in the news.
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Staff News
Alex Wafer is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany. He joined ACMS in August 2011 as a visiting researcher as part of the Global Divercities project.
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Sincerely,
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Room 6, South West Engineering Building, East Campus
School of Social Sciences
University of the Witwatersrand
P. O. Box 76, Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel: +27 (11) 717 4033 | | |
Impact Feature
Addressing health and poverty in Johannesburg: the importance of migration
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Author: Jo Vearey
The City of Johannesburg is currently undertaking a nine-week consultative process around the finalisation of its Growth and Development Strategy (GDS). The City of Johannesburg describes the GDS as "closely tied to the five-yearly Integrated Development Plan (IDP). The GDS charts the long-term strategic course of the City, and makes some of the bigger, overarching decisions about what to emphasise if Joburg is to accelerate economic growth and human development." With a different theme each week, City officials engaged with a range of stakeholders to obtain inputs to the GDS. Within the draft GDS, the City recognises migration as a dynamic shaping development and acknowledges that inequality within the city needs to be addressed for development targets to be achieved.
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Event Feature
Transforming Research to Policy & Practice
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