Migrants, Citizens, and the State in Southern Africa (review)

The topic of this volume is migration in southern Africa, looked at from the perspectives of human rights, development, state capacity, and regional cooperation. In general, the book's thesis is that migration and development strongly affect one another, and that neither can be addressed effectively unless one looks at them regionally. Necessarily implied by this is substantially greater regional cooperation. While a powerful subtheme of the book is the need to address directly and with more energy the needs of women migrants, there is little analysis of the reasons why little has been done, and still less in projecting ways of overcoming some of the obstacles. In this regard, the volume is unfortunately more rhetorical and exhortatory than analytical and specific. In particular, the authors offer little beyond acknowledging two massive obstacles to the sort of regional cooperation, effective policy making, and implementation by individual states which they advocate: weak states and domestic interests contrary to these policies. Nonetheless, much useful information is conveyed, and the authors certainly make the case for looking holistically at migration, development, human rights, and southern Africa.

The volume includes two chapters which attempt to draw the issues together, as well as overview chapters taking a historical overview of migration in Southern Africa (du Pisani); showing the linkage among migration population patterns, and individual state's population policies and programs (Schoeman); and international and regional agreements regarding human rights and migration (du Pisani and Schoeman). The last of these concludes, as much of the book does, that there are plenty of international laws and agreements on the proper treatment of migrants (and refugees) on the books, but little enforcement. The reader might wish the authors had gone further into analyzing the concluding point. Perhaps they might delve into the issue of when such agreements are observed, in contrast to when not, and thereby begin to develop an analytical framework to offer propositions as to why these agreements are not enforced. The latter might lead both to strategies to get other agreements enforced, or to the realization that enforcement is highly unlikely under any realistic conditions, and that other strategies should be pursued to reach these goals.

An additional overview chapter by Reitzes focuses on the tension between the traditional concept of state sovereignty and current emphasis on human rights as something transcending state sovereignty. Complicating both of these is the contrast between the Republic of South Africa, with high-state capacity, and the rest of southern Africa, where there are weak states, largely unable to guarantee human rights for their population. This situation leads to migration from the weaker states into South Africa, which now faces strengthening domestic pressures to "keep migrants out." Lost in this process are human rights, as well as progress toward effective regional policies to manage the problem. Unfortunately, suggestions on how to deal with this problem are not compelling, essentially trying to coerce people to "look at things differently." A more useful question might be "why do they not do so?" Rather than calling for a rather vague "reconceptualization" and new "paradigms," one might better look at the current situation from such perspectives as rational choice and neoinstitutionalism, and then proceed to recommend changes based on behavioral, rather than normative, grounds. Nonetheless, the chapter does highlight several key issues.

Other more focused chapters cover South Africa's Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), and the problems the author sees in implementing it under the current nine-province system (Tsheola). Sabela explores in detail the Mozambique--Swaziland--South African migration triangle, and points out powerful cultural dynamics that supplement economic factors, such as the legal disabilities of Swazi women, which force them to migrate. In another chapter, Chokeuwenga further develops the issue of state policy-related migration, detailing a list of policy failures in the region which encourage migration. He emphasizes the problem of weak states and poor governance. While...