Publications

On 10 October, 123 refugees were evacuated from Libya to Rwanda. This is the second evacuation under the new emergency transit mechanism (ETM) set up in September by the government of Rwanda, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the African Union (AU), and funded by the AU and the European Union (EU). The ETMs – a humanitarian scheme – threaten to be co-opted by politics as they are changing in their very nature, with resettlement increasingly off the table.

In the context of a greater focus on the politics of migration, the ‘refugee entrepreneur’ has become an increasingly important figure in humanitarian, media, and academic portrayals of refugees. Through a focus on Jordan's Za‘tari refugee camp, which has been deemed a showcase for refugees’ ‘entrepreneurship’, this article argues that the designation of Syrian refugees as ‘entrepreneurs’ is a positioning of Syrians within colonial hierarchies of race that pervade humanitarian work.

Since 2014, Nigeria has outlined several initiatives on migration, including a National Migration Policy, strategies on labor migration and diaspora matters, and a coordinating framework to reform migration governance. However, in order to have a significant impact, the policy frameworks need full implementation.When it comes to migration, the Nigerian government is active on policy development but less so on putting it into effect. This tendency is exemplified by a proactive interest in diaspora migration yet a much more reactive approach toward irregular migration and trafficking.

The Africa Yearbook covers major domestic political developments, the foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa – all related to developments in one calendar year. The Yearbook contains articles on all sub-Saharan states, each of the four sub-regions (West, Central, Eastern, Southern Africa) focusing on major cross-border developments and sub-regional organizations as well as one article on continental developments and one on African-European relations.

This volume explores the issues and debates surrounding the ongoing processes of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, illuminating the central dynamics characterizing Africa’s democratic experiments, and considering the connections between democratization and economic, social, and cultural developments on the continent.

Der Band richtet sich im Sinne eines aufklärerischen Sachbuchs an ein interessiertes, aber nicht unbedingt einschlägig vorbelastetes Publikum. Zahlreiche namhafte Autorinnen und Autoren tragen in fast zwanzig Kapiteln kompetent dazu bei, umfassender und differenzierter als je zuvor die deutsch-afrikanischen Beziehungen kritisch zu reflektieren. Sie leisten damit einen notwendigen Beitrag zu einem überfälligen Diskurs, der den Realitäten im Zeitalter des Postkolonialismus Rechnung trägt.

Despite not traditionally being a priority, the issue of migration continues to carry ever more political weight in Niger, mainly due to European interests in curbing transit migrants moving northwards, but also because of increased forced displacement in the country. European migration interests are overriding national interests, to the detriment of local ownership and with adverse effects on local economies, security, and free movement within the boundaries of the Economic Community of West African States.

A new evacuation plan to fly out migrants to Rwanda from Libya, recently announced, offers a way out for some individuals but for the majority the well-documented abuse and torture in Libya is still the reality. Talk of the new evacuation scheme reportedly started following the deadly airstrikes of the Tajoura Detention Centre in July this year, which led to the death of more than forty refugees and other migrants.

Since the start of the so-called ‘refugee crisis,’ ideas about Syrian men have circulated far and wide. The depictions have rarely been positive. In political discourse and in the media, Syrian men have regularly been portrayed as a threat – to ‘western’ states in general, and to ‘western’ women in particular. On twitter, under the hashtag #refugeesnotwelcome, users depict Syrian men as terrorists and/or cowards who have abandoned the fight.

Critical feminist scholars of conflict and displacement have demonstrated that “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1993) have become an uncontroversial object of humanitarian concern in these contexts (Carpenter 2003; Hyndman and Giles 2011). Yet very little scholarly work has attempted to understand the position of refugee men as a demographic within humanitarianism. Through an analysis of the Syria refugee response in Jordan, this article investigates how humanitarian workers relate to refugee men and think about refugee masculinities.

Critiques of humanitarian work with refugees have increasingly called for refugee men’s “vulnerabilities” to be recognized. The deployment of “vulnerability” reflects the term’s centrality within contemporary humanitarianism, and its rapidly expanding use in feminist analysis. This article argues that calls to see refugee men as “vulnerable” fail to critique, and even seek to expand, “vulnerability” as a mechanism of humanitarian governance. This approach is likely to lead to more humanitarian control over, and racialized violence toward, refugee men themselves.

The Jordan Compact was meant to be a “new paradigm” for a refugee response. In bringing together humanitarian and development approaches, it aimed to turn “the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity” – to provide jobs for Syrian refugees in Jordan and to aid the development of the Jordanian economy, benefiting refugees and host communities alike. But three years on, we can clearly see the challenges it has encountered, many of which are centred on questions of gender.

How does development aid shape democracy after civil conflicts? I argue that political aid conditionalities and the economic utility that recipient elites gain from office give rise to a rent-seeking/democracy dilemma: recipients can initiate democratic reforms but also risk uncertainty over office and rents. Or they can refuse to implement such reforms, but risk losing aid rents if donors reduce aid flows in response to failed democratic reforms. This dilemma is strongest in power-sharing cabinets.

There are numerous studies on the role of power-sharing agreements in the maintenance of peace in postconflict states. Less explored, however, is the impact of power sharing on the quality of the peace. Do power-sharing institutions in fact transform the balance of power among actors in the aftermath of civil wars? And if so, how? As they address these issues, seeking to establish a new research agenda, the authors provide a rich new analytical approach to understanding how power sharing actually works.

Assumptions about the political economy of African states predominantly centre on a dominant elite’s ability to stabilize power. A key assertion is that elites maintain clientelistic networks of rents and redistribution and in turn extend their control over their respective territories by instrumentalizing disorder. We challenge the assumption that disorder plays such a functional role.

Stefan Rother bewertet den ersten Entwurf des Globalen Paktes für Migration als ein beachtliches Dokument für einen rechtebasierten Blick auf Migration. Offen ist aber, was am Ende der Beratungen davon übrigbleibt und wie eine Umsetzung erreicht werden kann.

The Routledge Handbook of Civil Society in Asia is an interdisciplinary resource, covering one of the most dynamically expanding sectors in contemporary Asia. Originally a product of Western thinking, civil society represents a particular set of relationships between the state and either society or the individual. Each culture, however, molds its own version of civil society, reflecting its most important values and traditions.

Labour migration has become one of the defining features of Southeast Asia, impacting the local, bilateral, transnational and regional level. Within the region, many of these labour migrants are employed in the so-called low-skilled sector, encompassing such diverse groups as Philippine migrant domestic workers in Singapore, undocumented Indonesian plantation workers in Malaysia and Burmese fishermen in Thailand. There is also increasing student migration, while Singapore has become a hub for global talent, including high-skilled workers from Southeast Asia.

This two-part Special Issue has examined the migration–sovereignty nexus in the context of intra-regional migration in Asia, with specific focus on Southeast Asia (‘Special Issue’). The sub-region represents the perfect laboratory for teasing out the complexities involved in (actual and rhetorical) attempts made by states to control and regulate migration in what has become a space characterised by increasing diversity of (collective and individual) actors operating at various levels.

The aim of this article is to discuss and substantiate new spaces for the political participation of migrant civil society at the regional level in Southeast Asia through the lens of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Forum on Migrant Labour (AFML). The AFML process is shaped by the International Labour Organisation and mirrors its tripartite format, essentially bringing together governments, employers’ and workers’ organisations. Crucially, migrant support and self-organisations also have access, even if somewhat restricted, to regularly held deliberations.

This article focuses on the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) which has become one of the major global spaces for deliberations on migration but remains informal and non-binding. Drawing from literature on norm diffusion and state socialisation, it debates the role of the GFMD as a stepping stone for a more robust, multi-level and networked global migration governance by bringing together governments, global institutions, civil society and to a lesser degree the private sector.

The past decade has seen the emergence of a global migration governance architecture. But while – unlike other ‘objects’ of global governance – migrants are able to speak for themselves, only limited participatory space has been reserved for them in global processes. In reaction to this glaring democratic deficit, migrant organizations try to challenge and bring about change in the nascent global migration regime.