Southern Routes: Congolese Diaspora, Mobility Infrastructures, and Citizenship

Congolese migrants' lived experiences through a focus on South-South mobility.

Southern Routes draws on more than a decade of multi-sited ethnographic research of the Congolese diaspora, following migrants through various southern metropolises, including Accra, Cairo, Istanbul, Guangzhou and Rio de Janeiro. Centering migrants' everyday experiences and narratives, the book traces the diverse journeys through which they navigate transnational, diasporic, and religious networks in pursuit of better lives. It highlights migrants' agency, aspirations, risks and strategies as they contend with tightly controlled global migration regimes, foregrounding individual life trajectories often absent from the scholarly literature.

In a notable departure from most migration studies, the book emphasizes Congolese migration within global South cities, revealing interconnections shaped by family, kinship, religion, trade, and education, while also considering cases of onward travel to Europe and North America. In doing so, it examines how migrants confront securitized visa and border systems. Southern Routes offers original, grounded insights into contemporary African migration movements and the dynamics of transnational urban life.