Abstract
This book is a very significant book structured in three parts, Part one has five book chapters which all focus on conceptualizing migration patterns in Africa. Part two of the book consists of four book chapters with a critical focus on the post-colonial political economy of Development, Governance, and National-State formation. The third and last part of the book has four chapters and turns its analytical gaze on re-making migration, citizenship, identity formation, and development. This volume is a significant and intriguing key aspect of modern-day Africa which is hindering development in the region. The researchers made use of theoretical and empirical advances to provide fresh answers to the crisis, identity, and migration in Southern Africa in the post colony.
The book is significant to academics in many aspects; it laced an assortment of disciplines from development studies, international relations, and history, sociology, and policy studies. This is likely because the editors of this book are experts from different fields of study. This volume is a tapestry weaved by scholars form a variety of disciplines to unpack the political economy of crisis, identity, and migration in the post colony Southern Africa (p. 3). This interdisciplinary stance is vital in the sense that the study attracts a wider audience in the academic arena.
This is a case study research that covers southern Africa as a region. In so doing the researchers managed to avoid methodological nationalism, a practice within social sciences which postulate that the nation-state and its borders are an insufficient unit of analysis and that the national is at times the terrains of the global. To avoid methodological nationalism and better account of the inter-sectioning transnational phenomena that constitute the experience of transmigration and better explain the process of transmissions migrants the study combined transnational migration studies and conceptual frameworks such as colonialist of power, social location, geographical scale, and feminism.
The editors did justice by including contemporary issues in Africa’s development. the inclusion of gender and feminism issues in part one of the book emphasizing the need to recognize that there are many cultures, multiple and complex identities that need to be studied and understood in Africa and its diasporas, such as the growing focus on representation, identities, subjectivities, and sexualities, discourses on democracy, governance, and human rights, as well as geographical and linguistic diversities. Concerns over culture and identity are frequently found in African centered feminist responses to work by scholars based in the global North, as well as Afro centrists and Pan-Africanists or African Nationalists. This volume should be extolled for that because, in the field of feminist and gender studies it is now clearly understood that theorizing women’s experiences from these multiple angles of vision generates new questions, issues, and interpretations thereby broadening and complicating analysis of the historical, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape women’s differentiated lives and produce particular forms of individual and collective action
The book’s other most important aspect is its effort to try and address the Afro-phobia on African migrants. Afro-phobia on African migrants has become one of the recurring crises in southern Africa, especially in South Africa. From May/June through to September 2011, South Africans attacked foreign business owners at Reign Park and other businesses around Johannesburg (p. 103). The book did justice by acknowledging the existence of Afro-phobia and editors should be lauded for conceptualizing the terms xenophobia and Afro-phobia which are mostly used interchangeably. This section has surely pointed out Afro-phobia is a crisis of identity and is a result of migration in southern africa in the post colony. The book points out that the state seems to be the one promoting these attacks of African migrants. It should be pointed out that the realist school of thinking is applicable in this scenario. Realism postulates that there is no governing body in international politics and states are the primary actors. One can urge that the state was using these attacks to fend the pressures of unemployment, and failure to provide other necessities and essentials to the citizen and lay the blame on foreign migrants. This also exposes the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and African union as they failed to act decisively on the role of South Africa on the attack of African migrates. This reviewer commends the editors of this volume for doing justice in their research by examining this aspect in the context of crisis, identity, and migration. However, the book should have offer scholarly policy advice on how to deal with a future threat to human security like Afro-phobia attacks in the region and examine the implication of these attacks on international relations of SADC member states. There is need for a collective security arrangement in southern Africa as a solution to the crisis, identity, and migration challenges in southern Africa.
Part three of this volume recognizes various national migration policies in southern Africa and the need to harmonize these policies. The third observation is the need for integration of migration policies (p. 232). However, it should be pointed out that what is hindering development in Southern Africa is not that the policies are not harmonized but that SADC does not have a Migration policy. SADC must establish a migration policy rather than rely on the national policy of member states. Migration policy is crucial as it can be used to guide member states to develop their national policies on international migration. A sub-regional Migration policy like the SADC Migration policy will seek to empower SADC citizens towards their full participation in social, political, and economic activities towards liberation and attainment of dignity for all people.
This book is of significance to policymakers at national, sub-regional, regional, and global levels as it exposes the major factors hindering development in Africa in form of crisis, identity, and migration. The policymakers will see the need to advocate for all member states to ratify all sub-regional and regional policy instruments to stimulate development in the region. Policymakers will also see the need to prevent the sub-regional organization from becoming state-centric but rather consult civil societies and other stakeholders in the migration field in oder to speed up and come up with comprehensive regional plans beneficial to development.
This volume covers crisis, identity, and migration issues and their implication on public service delivery, governance, development, social construction, women, labor, trade and industrialization, regional integration, and other key aspects. It is a book of academic and professional importance which can be helpful to students from a variety of disciplines and government and stakeholders in international development. However much emphasis on the solution to challenges of crisis, identity, and migration should be put on the establishment of migration policy, harmonization of policies alone will not solve the problem.
