Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move.     

Caught between two worlds: mainland Chinese return migration,hukou considerations and the citizenship dilemma

Issues about migrant rights and protection are raised in cases of return migration when the country that migrants return to prohibits dual citizenship although the migrant has naturalised elsewhere. This article explores the politics of membership and rights faced by former citizens returning to reside in the society they had left. Returning Mainland Chinese migrants with Canadian citizenship status have to navigate China's dual citizenship restriction and the impacts on their Chinese hukou status that confers residency, employment and social rights. This analysis also keeps in view their relationship with the country in which they have naturalised and left, namely Canada. Migrants shuttling between the two countries face a citizenship dilemma as they have limited rights in China whereas their status as Canadian citizens living abroad simultaneously removes them from some rights provided by the Canadian state. This paper thus introduces new and pressing questions about citizenship in the light of return migration trends.     

Gender as catalyst for violence against Roma in contemporary Italy

ABSTRACT

Silvio Berlusconi's use of ethnicity and immigration as national security issues in his successful campaign for election to the Italian presidency in 2008 was by no means unique in contemporary Europe. What was surprising was the speed of his right-wing government's legislative restriction of migrants in the form of the so-called ‘security package’, first introduced just five weeks after the election. Woodcock explores the striking fact that this ‘security package’, and the intense wave of racist violence by Italians against Roma that it legitimized and encouraged, was proposed and justified in response to media reports of Italian babies being stolen by ‘Zingari’ from the ‘nomad camps’ and of Italian women being raped and beaten by Romanian men of ‘Zingari’ ethnicity. Gender and ethnicity are the twin constitutive discourses of modern European society, and racialized subjects are necessarily gendered. The stereotype of ‘dangerous black men sexually threatening white women’ has been mobilized in a vast range of European and colonial nationalist projects in order to justify the policing of both racialized masculine subjects and women as objects of the patriarchy. Similarly, the depiction of women as hysterical, sexually vulnerable objects in need of (white) masculine protection is an old story that the Italian media recognize as a fairy tale even as they reproduce the discourse. Woodcock explores what has not been mentioned thus far, namely, that gender stereotypes are vital to the mobilization of violent racism against the Roma in contemporary Italy, and how conservative gender binaries are strengthened and policed in a time of social crisis through the stereotyping of Roma as racial threat.     

‘Going away on foot’ once again: the revival of temporary labour migration from Russia's Dagestan

This article addresses temporary labour migration – known in Russian as otkhodnichestvo (going away on foot) – from the Russian republic of Dagestan. The discussion is situated within reviews of current work on migration in the former Soviet Union, push-pull factors determining migration behaviour in the North Caucasus, and the historical importance of otkhodnichestvo in imperial Russia and the USSR. The paper then turns to the results of a census conducted in summer 2006, which found that most migrants come from Dagestan's mountainous southwest, frequently obtain work at locations characterized by economic growth and high pay, and rely on ethnic or communal networks as a basis for choosing employment sector and destination when searching for work.     

论甘肃生态环境保护新思路

甘肃生态环境建设的新思路在于全面推进节水型社会的建设;研究国家水战略及南水北调工程中甘肃受益问题;搞好全省自然保护区的提升和自养发展;将生态环境建设与21世纪甘肃反贫困战略有机结合;构建长期支撑甘肃生态环境建设投资的长效机制。     

Can smartphones empower labour migrants? The case of Kyrgyzstani migrants in Russia

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, mobile phones and new technologies have transformed migration. Some scholars argue that they help empower migrants, who are otherwise often marginalized in their host country. We discuss the extent to which this is true for Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia, a relatively large diaspora that suffers from multiple levels of disempowerment, ranging from precarious living and working conditions to a lack of legal support and representation from their home government. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2017 and 2018, we explore the extent to which smartphones are enabling Kyrgyz labour migrants in Russia to be informed about migration rules, help each other abroad, connect as a diaspora, and discuss important diaspora topics. Our findings are relevant beyond academia, as many international and governmental agencies are trying to assist migrants through technology; they also point to several missed opportunities for these organizations.     

阿拉伯海湾国家对外援助的战略、特点与影响

阿拉伯海湾援助国是新兴援助国的重要成员,在国际发展援助中的贡献与日俱增。援助国的实践服务于政治、经济与文化战略需求,与石油红利、君主制政权、历史地缘关系、伊斯兰文化的宗教属性及地区安全环境密切相关。从外交战略看,援助政策被纳入国家总体战略,在保持对战略重点区域持续投入的基础上向全球扩展,主要体现为团结援助和南南合作;从经济战略看,在全球范围内部署和循环利用石油财富,旨在加速推进国家经济多元化政策;从文化战略看,宣扬伊斯兰传统文化中慷慨施舍的精神,达到提升国家地位、塑造地区影响力之目的;从援助特点看,以王室和中央政府主导的援助政策,兼顾双边和多边的援助渠道,援助分配聚焦受援国经济与社会发展领域、积极对接国际发展合作新机制。援助不仅通过人道主义援助缓解了贫困国家的发展难题,而且彰显了其在国际发展合作中的多重作用,与中国深入践行合作共享的发展理念息息相通。     

The faith-based segregation of interments: insights from a Senegalese commune

ABSTRACT

In Senegal’s Thies Region, Joal has separate cemeteries for Muslims and Christians, while the neighbouring community of Fadiouth has one cemetery for the dead of all faiths. This paper uses these cases to shed light on why some communities have separate cemeteries for people of different faiths while others bury people of all faiths in the same cemetery. I argue that the manner in which Christianity and Islam spread in the two communities explains the differences in the spatial organisation of burials. This study of divergent approaches to burying people of different faiths sheds light on histories of migration and the important issues of inter-communal and interfaith relations. The paper is based on ethnographic research and also draws on a participatory cartography exercise.     

‘Only by learning how to live together differently can we live together at all’: readability and legibility of Central Asian migrants’ presence in urban Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper questions the effectiveness and usefulness of the Russian government's policies of migrant integration. Using a unique combination of ethnographic research methods (observations, interviews and survey) with methods from psychology (cognitive mapping) and urban studies (GIS mapping), I depict the presence of Central Asian migrants and their interaction with local long-term residents in two cities of the Russian Federation: Kazan and Saint Petersburg. On the basis of my findings, I argue that the readability (defined as the ease with which the city can be ‘read’ and understood) and legibility (defined as the degree to which individual components of an urban environment are recognizable by their appearance) of urban space in Kazan have positive effects on the relationship between these two communities, while the ambiguity and uncertainty of urban identity in Saint Petersburg make the life of migrants very vulnerable and unpredictable, and result in the growth of xenophobic views among the local residents. This allows me to argue that the policy of migrant integration will be more successful if it is built on learning to live with differences, instead of trying to ‘Russify’ migrants or create various forms of supra-ethnic identity.     

Birthplaces,migration and identity in the 2001 census for Ukraine

Ukraine used to be one of the most ethnically mixed Soviet republics due to a high level of immigration, mostly from other parts of the Soviet Union. This article uses the sample of households available at IPUMS International to study the information about birthplaces, migration and marriage partners in recently released microdata from the 2001 census. Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 a large emigration surplus and ethnic estrangement have turned the country into a place with a lower degree of internal migration and ethnic intermarriage. With the exception of the capital Kiev, there was relatively little interchange of migrants between the eastern, Russian-dominated regions and the western regions. The highest degree of intermarriage was among people with at least one partner born abroad, most often in Russia. There is evidence of an elite of migrants from Russia to the Russia-oriented south-eastern provinces, who may feel especially threatened by the Ukrainian nationalistic takeover of power which happened after the Maidan insurrection.