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This epilogue offers a blunt response to diverse explorations of varied forms of externalised bordering modalities. It argues that when taken together, such approaches reflect a form of chronoscopic policing that uses data and narrative framing to pre-criminalise potential migrants. Collaboration among agencies, states and researchers visibilise and moralise, framing poor people’s inclinations to move as misguided, dangerous betrayals of law, community, country and self. Wealthy states then use the accounts and materials they produce as foundations for externalised controls that seek to prevent future deviations through current interventions. This short piece reflects on possibilities for addressing this emergent regime in ways that can produce systemic, humane change. More specifically, it considers three potential affronts – alternative narratives and practices – on contemporary border mechanisms at work between and within states: bodily assault on borders or ‘storming the gates’; ‘migration as decolonisation’; and broader practical and narrative efforts to destabilise histories and territories. I propose that this latter approach – informed by notions of ’nomadic power’ and decolonial imaginaries – offers the most potent opportunities for countering the moralising affect underlying the current chronoscopic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We critically examine a multi-year initiative led by Cities Alliance with municipalities and civil society groups in Somaliland, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia to respond to refugees and migration. Adapting Goffman's work, we posit that in ambiguous and resource-scarce political environments, network success rests on supporting two "frontstages" and a shared "backstage". On stage one, authorities "visibilize" refugees to attract funding and national support while shaping national-level norms. On stage two they make refugees "invisible" within their own development strategies, integrating displaced populations into urban planning through data collection, service investments, and inclusive strategies. In an experimental and collaborative backstage, municipal actors share resources and workshop varied scripts for their respective audiences. The initiative has lessened host–refugee tensions, strengthened municipal voices in national and regional policy fora, fostered local accountability, and created financial and bureaucratic resources better able to outlast the vagaries of humanitarian or emergency aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Immigration governance scholars often focus on formal, national regulations and how local implementation and resistance rations access to space and resources. Research into 'xenophobic' exclusion across South Africa suggests recalibrating research along two spatial and temporal dimensions. First, while legal and political discourse often evoke national principles, exclusive speech and action can be highly spatialised and distinctly sub-national. Consequently, people objectively belonging to the same, excludable category (e.g., international migrants; sexual or ethnic minorities) face varied vulnerabilities corresponding to where they work or reside. Moreover, when mobilising nationalistic discourses of exclusion and belonging, sub-national actors customise and emplace them. Such co-authoring infuses them with particularistic interests and language while imposing spatial limits on their legitimacy. This in turn generates a dynamic patchwork of regulatory regimes where local variations may be more practically important than national policy. Second, the effects of co-authored exclusion are spatial, but their foundations may be temporal. South Africa's national political project rests on forms of restorative justice: of building futures for those materially disadvantaged and disenfranchised by Apartheid's racist machinations. For South Africans, making claims to a future in place (i.e., in the country or a given site) are predicated on one's position in this national temporal arc. Even if apartheid disadvantaged millions across Southern African, non-citizens are historiographically excluded from these claims. Immigrants are, in effect, run out of time. By eliding shared pasts, officials and citizens deny the possibility of a spatial future shared with non-nationals. These elements help explain the popular legitimacy of anti-immigrant mobilisation and surface the multiple modes of citizenship and exclusion operating across the country. Recognising this, the article ultimately encourages scholars to re-spatialise and temporalise the study of migration governance in ways that also recognise the dialogical dimensions of bordering and emplacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial concentration of production in cities attracts international and domestic labour in ways that change the character and scale of urban space. Drawing on two decades of research on migration and informal trading in Johannesburg, South Africa, this article argues that the global trade in Chinese lfast fashion' interacts with South Africa's immigration policy, transportation networks, informal trade and established migration infrastructures to transform the city's Park Station neighbourhood into an enclave entrepot. Operated and supported by a network of infoc mal logistics services that keep the enclave within but apart from the city, it is exquisitely tailored to cross-border shoppers. At the social and legal margins but at the city's geographic core, it enables fluidity in an otherwise hostile space; it is at once highly visible and invisibilising. Formed in the shadows of formal institutions and law enforcement, this entrepot is migrant-driven and serves the needs of people often seeking to remain invisible from the South African state and citizenry. As such, its services are adapted from the infrastructures that service legal and irregular migration in the subcontinent. Unlike ethnic enclaves or neighbourhoods that work as arrival zones, it provides the means to move 'through' rather than 'into' the city. The entrepot is a form of migrant space-claiming by vulnerable and mobile people wishing to be in but not of the city. It acts as portal into, through and beyond national territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethnic, political, or religious groups within it but also through connections to allies, families, and interlocutors elsewhere that people in the margins draw in. Powerful states, corporations, and other play a role, but the contributors do not presume they are the most significant force at play. To be sure, margins can reflect liminality and suspension, but they are also sites of contentious politics. As space–time compression, multi-localism, economic precarity, and political fragmentation continue apace, margins are decreasingly discrete spaces between, but are instead spaces where lives are made. As sites that help structure engagements among groups—and sometimes within the groups themselves—appear and fade, margins take on varied levels of significance as contestations and convivialities take shape and transform. They are multiple, often intersecting, sometimes geographic and formally demarcated, sometimes largely invisible or unspoken but no less powerful. And they can be anywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 11 May 2008, violent attacks against non-citizens began in Alexandra before spreading rapidly across Gauteng and then elsewhere in the country. This article explains what helped translate long-term concerns [...]