Migration and Making an Income in the Context of ‘Human Trafficking’: Imponderable Experiences and Sense-Making at a South African Border

✍ Scribed by Anna S. Hüncke

• Publisher: Springer VS
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 263
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The book focuses on volatile processes at the South African-Zimbabwean border that arise from practices of migration and income generating activities. The processes are influenced by neoliberal developments and controversial discourses on migration, commercial sexual services, and human trafficking. In this unstable environment, different actors continuously negotiate, trying to achieve stable positions. By addressing issues related to migration and income generating activities, they maneuver between legal rules and their own moral values and interests. In their attempt to classify incidents in the border context that are unclear to them, actors’ explanations are partly based on the concept of transnational human trafficking. Thereby, they transfer the impenetrability discursively associated with this concept to what they see as obscure cross-border migration, disconcerting sexual services, and other alienating economic activities. Alternatively, actors understand undocumented cross-border migration, commercial sexual services, and other illegalised income-generating activities as common everyday practices at the border and also assume that human trafficking does not play an important role there.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Acronyms
1 Introduction
1.1 “There Is Something Wrong Here!” – Unpredictability and Uncertainty at the South African-Zimbabwean Border
1.2 Introducing the Subject and the Perspective of the Thesis
1.2.1 In Times of Uncertainty: Perceiving Imponderables, Pondering on Repercussions
1.2.2 A Wide Horizon of Expectation as a Resource
1.2.3 Sense-Making of Unclear and Unforeseen Issues, Uncertainty through Sense-Making
1.3 Introducing the Research Context
1.3.1 Experiencing Migration, Practices of Making an Income, and the Border in South Africa
1.3.2 Historical and Geographical Positioning of the Border Area
1.4 Reflections on Access to and Positionality in the Field
1.5 Outline of the Thesis
2 At a Crossing Point – Introducing the South African-Zimbabwean Border
2.1 Officials and Travellers Encountering the Border
2.2 Conceptualising the South African-Zimbabwean Border
2.3 The Border as a Dangerous Place
2.3.1 Narratives about Dangerous Border Actors and Actants
2.3.2 Officials’ Imponderable Making for Border Actors
2.4 Questioning Practices of Border Control
2.4.1 Border Crossers’ Questioning Practices of Border Control
2.4.2 Border Actors’ Pursuing Alternative Control of Border Processes
2.4.3 Border Officials’ Countering Practices of Border Control for Unauthorised Border Crossers
2.5 Challenging Challengers: Border Officials’ Countering of Their Observers
2.6 Conclusion
3 The Temporariness of Categories and Local Arrangements – Asylum Seeking and Detention in Musina
3.1 Approaching Asylum Seeking and Detention
3.1.1 Introduction
3.1.2 Contextualising Undocumented Migrancy, Asylum, and Detention in Musina
3.1.3 A History of Temporary Arrangements: Asylum and Detention in Musina
3.2 Encounters with Asylum Seeking and Detention
3.2.1 Migrants, Humanitarians, and Security Officials in Between: Sans Papiers, Asylum, Detention
3.2.2 In Search of Decision-Making: Negotiations between State Actors and Humanitarian Stakeholders
3.3 Conclusion
4 Migrants’ Belonging and the Legal Practice of Migration – Sense-Making of Facilitated Undocumented Long-Distance Migration to South Africa
4.1 “The People Were Running All Over!”
4.2 Contextualising Facilitated Undocumented Long-Distance Migration to South Africa
4.3 Speculations About the Ethiopians’ Border Crossing
4.4 The Opaque Respectively Discernible Market of Facilitated Undocumented Long-Distance Migration
4.4.1 Opaque Syndicates: Deceitful Concealment of Exploitative Slavery
4.4.2 Discernible Entrepreneur Structures: Agreed Deals in the Context of Profit-Oriented Facilitation
4.5 Investigations into the Case: Migrants as Subjects of State Authorities or as Flexible Agents in the Legal Practice of Migration
4.5.1 Migrants as Subjects and Non-Transparent Legal Procedures in the Ethiopians’ Case
4.5.2 Agency and Flexibility: Migrants’ Adaptability to Confinement and State Authorities’ Pragmatic Decisions in Legal Matters
4.6 Conclusion
5 Negotiating around ‘Human Trafficking’ in South Africa and the Border Area
5.1 “Trafficking is Prone in the Border Town Musina!”
5.2 Contextualising Human Trafficking, Cross-Border Movement, and Selling Sex
5.3 The International and South African Opinion Spectrum and Legal Range of Human Trafficking
5.3.1 Historic Developments: Abolitionism of Slavery of African People and of ‘White Slavery’
5.3.2 The Debates are Merged: The Palermo Protocol
5.3.3 Anti-Trafficking Legislation and Trafficking Paradigms in South Africa
5.4 Speculations about and Campaigns on Human Trafficking in the Border Region
5.4.1 (In)visible and (In)discernible Cross-Border Human Trafficking
5.4.2 “Trafficking is Prone in the Border Town Musina!” The Paradox Concept of Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation
5.5 Conclusion
6 From Hoping for Benevolence to Fearing Trafficking – Speculations about a New NGO in Musina
6.1 Glimpses into a Newly Established NGO
6.2 Contextualising Changes in Sense-Making about the New NGO in Musina
6.3 About the Founder’s Refuge to South Africa and about Police Investigations
6.4 Between Hope and Doubt
6.5 The Tunisia Trip as a Turning Point
6.6 The Mutual Impact of Social Relations and Actors’ Involvement in the New NGO
6.7 The Rumour of Human Trafficking
6.8 From Philanthropist to Perpetrator
6.9 Conclusion
7 Conclusion: Weaving Together Imponderable Experiences, Sense-Making of Unclear Issues, and Matters of Personal Relevance
Bibliography