Category: Publication abstracts in English

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Governing Mobility Through Exemptions: Cross-National Dependencies, Immigration Policy, and Migrant Labour in South African Historical Perspective

Xolani Tshabalala

Over the last century, the South African state has periodically engaged in the practice of ‘exempting’ various migrants from their otherwise irregular immigration statuses. Always backed by official legislation, exemptions represent one way by which dominant capitalist interests have relied on the legitimacy of the state to meet their labour needs by sometimes employing undocumented migrants from the Southern African region. Through insights from sub-imperialism and bordering, this paper discusses historical case examples from policy articulations, parliamentary debates, secondary literature and archival materials. By exploring cross-national relationships of exploitation and differentiation, the paper argues that exemptions should be understood as attempts by which the contradictions of ubiquitous informal cross-border mobility and employment in a regime of unfree regional movement might be resolved. Exemptions also attest to the challenge of governing human mobility in a region invested with a historically vast infrastructure of producing, attracting as well as exploiting cheap migrant labour.

Governing Mobility Through Exemptions

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Swedish ‘cultures of rejection’ and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic

Celina Ortega Soto

While many countries were locking down due to the spread of COVID-19, Sweden remained open with few restrictions, as authorities relied predominantly on a civil sense of responsibility and collective compliance with government recommendations. Drawing on interviews conducted with workers in retail and logistics in 2020–21, ethnographic work in digital environments as well as in public spaces and demonstrations, this article analyses discourses of everyday life and discourses of rejection, exploring how rejections were shaped in reaction to how the government and the Public Health Agency of Sweden handled the pandemic. Ortega Soto’s article uses the concept of cultures of rejection—emphasizing a complex compound of values, norms and affects that reject different phenomena in different contexts—to analyse how working and living conditions, political opinions, social views and media habits informed workers’ disagreements with and reactions to the official handling of the pandemic, as well as how this may have led to a growing loss of trust in government. Ortega Soto further investigates how the expression of cultures of rejection differs across generations by looking closely into the ways that nostalgia and a sense of loss enhance such responses among various social groups. The article contributes to a wider understanding of the political shifts and cultural changes that were manifested in the context of the pandemic in Sweden.

Swedish ‘cultures of rejection’ and decreasing trust in authority during the COVID pandemic

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Challenging cultures of rejection

Sanja Bojanić, Stefan Jonsson, Anders Neergaard, Birgit Sauer

In this article, Bojanic, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer present a synthetic overview of the five country cases included in the special issue that analyse the emergence of cultures of rejection since 2015. In general, they discuss the conceptual framework of ‘Cultures of Rejection’, elaborated throughout the issue as a more encompassing approach that is sensitive to the values, norms and affects that underlie different or similar patterns of exclusion and rejection in different contexts. These cultures are located in the everyday lives of people. The article, therefore, first identifies contexts, objects of rejection­—often migrants and racialized Others, but also ‘the political’ or state institutions—narratives and components of cultures of rejection that we label reflexivity, affect, nostalgia and moralistic judgement. The contrasting reading of the five cases shows that people struggle for agency under precarious and insecure conditions, and fight against imagined enemies. As Bojanić, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer conclude, cultures of rejection mirror ongoing processes of neoliberal dispossession, authoritarization and depolitization that culminate in a wish for agency and resovereignization. Second, and based on this overview, trends in cultures of rejection are detected against different national contexts as well as against common trends of social and economic transformations and crises, such as, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic. This results, finally, in a discussion of ways of challenging the cultures of rejection towards more democratic and solidaristic societies. One starting point might be the ‘re-embedding’ of the economy in society, that is, a more equal distribution of resources and future perspectives.

Challenging cultures of rejection

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The diaspora vote in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Caught between efforts to reverse the political effects of ethnic cleansing and voter suppression through procedural disenfranchisement

Aida Ibricevic

This chapter contributes to the growing literature on external voting, viewed as a transnational practice of external citizenship. Our chapter adds to the debates on the legitimacy of the right to vote without residing on the national territory by focusing on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post-conflict society with a large, mainly conflict-generated diaspora. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovinian external voting is particularly interesting, because of a large disparity between its normative intention of reversing the political effects of ethnic cleansing and its actual implementation. The question we aim to answer is whether external voting in Bosnia and Herzegovina lives up to its normative claim. To explore this question, we conduct legal analysis of Annex VII and Annex III of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which respectively provide the constitutional basis for physical and “political” return. We next turn to legal analysis of the BiH Election Law and BiH Law on Residence to show how both these laws have moved away from the original intention of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) the de facto acceptance of postwar permanent residence as the main basis for all voter registration, including external voting registration. Finally, we attempt to evaluate the normative claim within the DPA, the promise of external voting allowing for “political return” through the reversal of the political effects of ethnic cleansing. To evaluate this claim we present a brief historical overview of postwar elections in BiH, describe some notable initiatives for mobilizing the diaspora vote such as “Glasaću za Srebrenicu” (I will vote for Srebrenica), “Prvi mart” (March First), and “Moja adresa Srebrenica” (My address is in Srebrenica), and discuss some illustrative examples from the 2018 general and 2020 local elections, which could potentially be indicative of trends within BiH external voting.

LINK: The diaspora vote in Bosnia and Herzegovina