Comparing Modes, Strategies and Trajectories of Insertion among Somali and Tanzanian Migrants in Joh

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Comparing Modes, Strategies and Trajectories of
Insertion among Somali and Tanzanian Migrants in
Johannesburg and Nairobi

• GDRI African Cities Workshop, Stellenbosch 16th
  -17th Nov 2006
• Godfrey Chesang
• Post-Doctoral Fellow, French Institute of South
  Africa
• Email godfrey_at_ifas.org.za

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Abstract

• This paper explores a conceptual framework for
  thinking about power and political contestation
  in the informal realm. It is argued that the
  informal realm constitutes a political arena
  where the authoritative allocation of resources
  dispenses as much as in formal arenas of
  contestation i.e. lobby groups, political
  parties, parliamentary systems, the bureaucracy
  etc. For purposes of political analysis
  therefore, the imperative is to understand how
  power is organised in the informal realm, what
  its implications on the authoritative allocation
  of resources are and what the strategic latitude
  of actors therein is. Building on the the
  instrumentalisation of disorder as a conceptual
  beacon, this paper further proposes technologies
  of insertion as a more specific and
  operationalisable analytic for understanding
  political contestation in the informal realm. I
  define technologies of insertion as organic
  outcomes of strategic choices adopted by migrants
  in a bid to reduce risk and maximise the utility
  of resources in the process of their insertion to
  urban areas. These outcomes subsequently regiment
  into informal rules, structures and regimes of
  practice. I argue that the end point of their
  trajectory is formalisation, as these
  technologies subsequently sediment and weave into
  the corporeal fabric of an evolving state
  apparatus. The cases of Tanzanian and Somali
  migrants in Nairobi and Johannesburg are used as
  key-holes for this exploration.

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Nearly every new, exemplary capital city has, as
the inevitable accompaniment of its official
structures, given rise to another, far more
disorderly and complex city that makes the
official city work that is virtually a
condition of its existence. That is the dark twin
is not just an anomaly, an outlaw reality it
represents the activity and life without which
the official city would cease to function. The
outlaw city bears the same relation to the
official city as the Parisian taxi drivers
actual practices bear to the Code routier.(Scott,
1998261)

• A

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Some theoretical considerations

• Informality is a multidimensional reality
  economic and political.
• Political informalisation is under-theorised and
  in fact mis-theorised.
• Informalisation is not a static social
  phenomenon. It is a stage in a longer historical
  trajectory of social development.
• Informalisation is not an aberration from a
  presumed formal ideal that needs to be
  corrected.
• It is an empirical and objectifiable social
  reality amenable to observation, documentation
  and theorisation.
• Analysis by analogy (Mamdani 1996) We need to
  understand informalisation on the terms of its
  historical context.

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Defining political informalisation

• Definition Political informalisation is a
  process by which non-states increasingly develop
  relationships of mutual disciplinary obligations
  with individuals which are not governed by a
  contractual arrangement underwritten by the
  state, or formal state institutions.
• Political informalisation is the result of
  systemic weaknesses in the state that lead to
  failure by the state to develop and sustain
  meaningful relationships of mutual disciplinary
  obligations with individuals.
• Failure to legibilise people and space.
• Bureaucratic weaknesses.

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Theoretical Justifications for the Choice of
Urban Migrants as a Case Study

• Migration urbanisation consequences and causes
  of rapid social transformation
• Production of liminality and reproduction of
  normalcy
• For the state imperative for the reconfiguration
  and expansion of the state apparatus in order to
  more efficiently perform representational
  functions, welfare functions and law order or
  control functions.
• At the social level Mutation of social
  boundaries and radical reconfiguration of the
  meaning of social boundaries, space and time
• For individuals
• Externally radical transformation of the social
  environment.
• Internally Adjustments of the normal order of
  things therefore change in the psychosocial
• The opportunity In migration and urbanisation,
  these processes are telescoped providing an
  opportunity to examine, in a shorter period of
  time, their trajectories.
• This way, we are able to empirically observe,
  within a shorter period of time, and at a
  micro-level, the processes by which an evolving
  state apparatus is negotiated.

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Technologies of Insertion

• Technologies of insertion are organic outcomes
  of strategic social responses by migrants to an
  otherwise otherwise limiting political context
  with the intention to to minimise risk and
  optimise the utility of resources and thus ensure
  more favourable political outcomes in the process
  of insertion into urban areas. Technologies of
  insertion are social responses to real social
  needs unmet because of functional gaps.
• Over a period of time, these outcomes regiment
  into informal rules, structures and regimes of
  practice that have wide social recognition and
  acceptance as the normal order of things. In an
  iterative process of negotiation with state
  principals, these technologies sediment and weave
  into the corporeal fabric of an evolving state
  apparatus as a presumably pre-existent if weak
  state responds to them by integrating them into
  itself, or as the state is reflexively
  reconfigured to suppress them.
• The process by which technologies of insertion
  articulate must therefore been seen as part and
  parcel of or at the very least as factors that
  contribute to shaping the contours of state
  formation process.

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Technologies of insertion continued

• Why they cant be called institutionsUnlike
  social institutions
• They do not have autonomous social legitimacy.
  Rather, their existence is characterised by
  normative ambivalence.
• They lack autonomy in themselves and are
  dependent etch themselves on the existence of
  formal institutions, more specifically the
  existence of weaknesses in these institutions, in
  order to construct an element of social
  legitimacy.
• They are thus social forms that thrive only in
  contexts of liminality, gaining relevance only
  when they serve the function of reproducing
  normalcy defined by the existence of an assumed
  normal order of things.

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Technologies of Insertion

• Technologies of Cohesion
• Technologies of Protection.
• Technologies of Engagement.
• Technologies of Accumulation.
• Technologies of Transfer

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1. Technologies of Cohesion

• Defition
• Technologies of cohesion are a response to the
  social disarticulation experienced by migrants in
  the process of insertion in a new social
  environment.
• Social problem
• Social displacement and marginalisation.
• Functions
• Ariticulating social structure in the
  psycho-social interaction between the individual
  and the new social environment.
• Insulate migrants from the new environment by
  providing a space where elements of the familiar
  are constantly reconstructed and replayed in an
  otherwise strange location. Such insulation
  allows a migrant to smoothly adjust to the new
  social environment from a position of safety thus
  reducing the shock of the radically unfamiliar.
• Logics
• Solidarisation identity formation
• Insulation
• Emplacement
• Examples The church/mosque, the tribe, the clan
  and the commune.