Sovereignty & Scales: Recognition & the Power of Mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: The Political Effects of Forced Migration on States

Abstract

This paper explores what heightening fluidity due to migration and displacement mean for practical expressions of state power and sovereignty. Using material from across Sub-Saharan African cities, it argues that by working against the standardisation of norms, values, and institutional interactions, mobility complicates the consolidation of centralised forms of sovereignty while reinforcing multiple forms of socio-political boundaries. The results include translocal and decentred political authority in which states are but one of many actors and instigators. Without the ability of a single body or consortia to centralise these regulatory systems, displacement means that African cities are unlikely to serve as progenitors for the kind of nationalism and centralised domination seen elsewhere in the world. Instead, we are witness to multiple visions or ‘faces’ where the state and the regulations associated with it exist in varied forms among the resident populations.

Author

• Loren B Landau, University of the Witwatersrand