Invisibility in African Displacements: From Structural Marginalization to Strategies of Avoidance (Africa Now) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178699920X ISBN 13: 9781786999207

Publisher: Zed Books, 2020

Synopsis

African migrants have become increasingly demonised in public debate and political rhetoric. There is much speculation about the incentives and trajectories of Africans on the move, and often these speculations are implicitly or overtly geared towards discouraging and policing their movements. What is rarely understood or scrutinised however, are the intricate ways in which African migrants are marginalised and excluded from public discourse; not only in Europe but in migrant-receiving contexts across the globe.

Invisibility in African Displacements offers a series of case studies that explore these dynamics. What tends to be either ignored or demonised in public debates on African migration are the deliberate strategies of avoidance or assimilation that migrants make use of to gain access to the destinations or opportunities they seek, or to remain below the radar of restrictive governance regimes.

This books offers fine-grained analysis of the ways in which African migrants negotiate structural and strategic invisibilities, adding innovative approaches to our understanding of both migrant vulnerabilities and resilience.

About this title

About the Authors

Jesper Bjarnesen is a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute working on regional and war-related mobilities in West Africa, with a focus on inter-generational relations and urban youth culture in Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire. Bjarnesen has published articles in Migration Letters, the Nordic Journal of African Studies, and Anthropology Southern Africa and edited a theme section of Conflict and Society. He also co-edited a special issue of the journal Africa and was co-editor of Violence in African Elections (Zed 2018).

Simon Turner is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. He works on forced displacement, diaspora, conflict and humanitarianism in the African Great Lakes region and on Europe. He has worked on a project on anticipating violence in the Burundi conflict and another on carceral junctions in European refugee policies. He is the author of Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life (2010), the editor of journal article Diasporic Tensions: The Dilemmas and Conflicts of Transnational Engagement (2008) and the co-editor of journal article Agents of Change - Staging and Governing Diasporas and the African State (2013).

Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 178699920X
• ISBN 13: 9781786999207
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Bjarnesen Jesper, Turner Simon