Hope and Uncertainty in Contemporary African Migration

Nauja Kleist, Dorte Thorsen, Nauja Kleist, Dorte Thorsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317335474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

This volume examines the relationship between hope, mobility, and immobility in African migration. Through case studies set within and beyond the continent, it demonstrates that hope offers a unique prism for analyzing the social imaginaries and aspirations which underpin migration in situations of uncertainty, deepening inequality, and delimited access to global circuits of legal mobility.

The volume takes departure in a mobility paradox that characterizes contemporary migration. Whereas people all over the world are exposed to widening sets of meaning of the good life elsewhere, an increasing number of people in the Global South have little or no access to authorized modes of international migration. This book examines how African migrants respond to this situation. Focusing on hope, it explores migrants' temporal and spatial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices. Such analysis is pertinent as precarious life conditions and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility characterize the lives of many Africans, while migration continues to constitute important livelihood strategies and to be seen as pathways of improvement. Whereas involuntary immobility is one consequence, another is the emergence and consolidation of new destinations emerging in the Global South. The volume examines this development through empirically grounded and theoretically rich case studies in migrants' countries of origin, zones of transit, and in new and established destinations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Latin America and China. It thereby offers an original perspective on linkages between migration, hope, and immobility, ranging from migration aspirations to return.

1
Introduction

Studying Hope and Uncertainty in African Migration

Nauja Kleist

DOI: 10.4324/9781315659916-1

Contemporary migration is characterized by a mobility paradox: the increased reach and accessibility of communication, media and transport technologies mean that people in many parts of the world are exposed to visions of the good life elsewhere. At the same time, because of growing inequality, paired with restrictive mobility regimes, the vast majority of people in the Global South are excluded from the circuits of legal mobility, not least on the African continent.

This volume uses hope as an analytical prism through which to examine the mobility paradox in African migration. For millions of Africans, migration constitutes one of the ways in which to cope with uncertainty and difficult life situations. The volume analyzes migrants’ temporal and spatial horizons of expectation and possibility and how these horizons link to mobility practices in contexts of uncertainty and precariousness. Such analysis is pertinent, we argue, because deepening marginalization and increasingly restrictive regimes of mobility define the lives of many Africans, while migration continues to offer important livelihood strategies. The consequences are the intensification of high-risk migration, such as the crossings over the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, involuntary immobility when (aspiring) migrants cannot leave their countries of origin or are stranded in transit zones surrounding the desired destinations (cf. Carling 2002; Lubkemann 2008), and, finally, the emergence and consolidation of new destinations in the Global South and BRIG countries, like China, Brazil, and Argentina.

We argue that hope constitutes a fruitful analytical framework in which to link questions of political economy and mobility regimes with analyses of the collective social imaginaries and aspirations which imbue migration projects—to examine the social effects of the mobility paradox, in other words. We approach hope in a broad sense as an anticipation of the ‘not-yet’ (Bloch 1986), characterized by simultaneous potentiality—faith or confidence in the future—and uncertainty. As Lubkemann suggests in this volume, hope can be perceived as the ‘sustenance of the possibility of a (desired) alternative to a (currently lived) reality’. Hope is neither a description of the present nor pure fantasy. It is linked to social imaginaries understood as ‘what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society’ (Taylor 2004, 2). Hope is grounded within the realm of the thinkable or imaginable and hence has a strong collective and normative dimension. It may inspire action (Cole and Durham 2008; Sarro 2015), make people cope with suffering and difficult life situations (Zigon 2009), or lead to resignation and passivity (Crapanzano 2003). Being embedded in uncertainty, hoping is different from knowing or from having absolute faith. Hope can be disappointed and may remain a distant horizon. Yet uncertainty may also invoke hope in that the future remains unpredictable (Cooper and Pratten 2015a; Johnson-Hanks 2005). In that sense, hope offers a particular take on uncertainty, one which emphasizes potentiality and anticipation rather than fear and doubt.

Approaching hope as an analytical framework thus implies examining both potentiality and uncertainty. The focus on potentiality means analyzing social imaginaries of the good life or ‘sparks’ of faith or confidence, however frail; uncertainty implies examining precarious or unpredictable life conditions and how the hoping subject deals with them. A hope perspective enables us to analyze how visions of the good life or future are generated and distributed, and how horizons of possibility and expectations are linked to different places and temporalities. It thus illuminates meaning-making practices and the potentiality of life, to explore how and whether migrants maintain or create a sense of anticipation or faith in the future in uncertain and precarious situations.

There has been a revival of interest in hope and the future in anthropology and social philosophy since the turn of the millennium (e.g., Crapanzano 2003; Miyazaki 2004; Rorty 1999; Thompson and Zizek 2013; “Webb 2007). Key themes include temporality (Appadurai 2013; Cole and Durham 2008; Dalsgård et al. 2014; Miyazaki 2004; 2006; Piot 2010), social change (Castells 2012; Hage 2003; Zournazi 2002), and uncertainty (Cooper and Pratten 2015b; Horst and Grabska 2015; Johnson-Hanks 2005). Despite the centrality of mobility and migration in contemporary life, studies of mobility and immobility constitute a surprisingly small strand of the anthropological literature on hope (for exceptions, see Cole 2014; Hage and Papadopoulos 2004; Kleist and Jansen 2016; Lucht 2011; Mar 2005; Narotzky and Besnier 2014; Pine 2014; Vigh 2009). Our volume contributes to this literature in three ways—first, by suggesting an analytical framework for studying hope in relation to migration and (im)mobility, second, by situating African migration in the mobility paradox, and, third, by exploring hope in a range of ethnographically grounded and theoretically informed case studies on the continent and beyond.

The chapters focus primarily on West African migration. As a region, West Africa has been shaped by mobility for centuries. From the transatlantic slave trade, forced labor migration, and seasonal mobile livelihoods to inter-continental migration to Europe, North America, and emerging destinations in Latin America and Asia, West Africa is characterized by long-established mobility practices (e.g., Akyeampong 2000). Reflecting this nature, the volume is global in geographical scope, with case studies set in neighboring countries in West Africa, zones of transit on the continent, and new and established destinations further afield to migrants’ countries of origin in the case of aspiring migrants or returnees. The chapters analyze how African migrants contend with and circumvent impediments to their mobility: how they struggle with perilous situations, generate strategies to accumulate material and symbolic wealth and grasp new opportunities, and their imaginative work in insisting on the possibility of devising a meaningful life, but also elaborate on extended periods of waiting, and of suffering, shame, and social death when migration projects fail and hope is postponed or lost.

To avoid misunderstandings, let me also emphasize what we do not do in this volume. We do not claim that migration is determined by migrants’ individual hopes alone, as a kind of reversed rational-choice approach where ‘information’ has been replaced by hopes or dreams. Such an approach would ignore not only situations of conflict and violence but also the structural opportunities and constraints, including the sometimes restraining sets of social and economic obligations and expectations in which much migration is embedded. It also lends itself to the perception shared by many policymakers that migrants are uninformed and unrealistic soldiers of fortune whose mobility can be prevented through information campaigns about the hardships of life in Europe or other destinations. Not only is this a misguided perception, but it also reflects a theoretically flawed conceptualization of hope as naive optimism and individual desires. Rather, the volume as a whole emphasizes the pertinence of social and collective hope as well as anxiety, frustration, periods of waiting, shame, and failure, as much as achievement and notions of meaningful futures. A focus on hope thus offers a fundamentally ambivalent perspective.

The remainder of the introduction is structured in the following way. First, I elaborate on the mobility paradox; second, I present an analytical framework for studying the relationship between hope, mobility, and immobility; and third, I situate the chapters in relation to three overall themes: repositories of hope, temporality, and existential (im)mobility.

The Mobility Paradox: Stratified Globalization and Restrictive Mobility Regimes

Two sets of conditions make the analysis of migration, mobility, and immobility in relation to hope particularly relevant today: widespread crisis and rising inequality, and the consolidation and expansion of restrictive mobility regimes.

Crisis and precarity constitute permanent conditions of life for many people today (Cooper and Pratten 2015b; Hage 2003; 2009; Horst and Grabska 2015; Standing 2014). Stratified processes of globalization marked by privatization, the expansion of markets, and deregulation have deteriorated the living conditions of millions of people (Sassen 2014). Likewise conflict, political instability, everyday violence, and the effects of securitization create or deepen precarity. Such processes can be observed all over the world—including Africa, with its history of IMF—induced structural adjustment programs since the 1980s and, in many countries, the continuous deregularization of the economy and cut-back of state services (Ferguson 2006; Harrison 2005). Hence, whereas the global financial crisis unleashed in 2008 exacerbated conditions of precarity, it did not create them alone (cf. Makhulu et al. 2010). Indeed, in many African countries and elsewhere in the world, a sense of enduring crisis or marginalization is experienced as a permanent life condition, which has led to a diminished belief in the state’s capacity to secure a good life (Johnson-Hanks 2005; Narotzky and Besnier 2014). Crisis may indeed be the context, rather than the exception, as Vigh (2008) has suggested.

One of the implications of this observation is the pertinence of uncertainty (Cooper and Pratten 2015a; Horst and Grabska 2015). Two sources of uncertainty can be distinguished: imperfect knowledge and the unpredictability of the future (Williams and Baláz 2012,168). As Horst and Grabska (2015) point out, both sources are relevant in relation to conflict and displacement—and indeed to a range of other situations. Johnson-Hanks has described how life in Cameroun is characterized by such extreme unpredictability that ‘plans are always tenuous, partial, more hope than conviction’ (2005, 369). This, however, does not mean that uncertainty is implicating passivity or resignation. Rather, uncertainty can be productive, constituting ‘a social resource [which] can be used to negotiate insecurity, conduct and create relationships and act as a source for imagining the future with the hopes and fears this entails’ (Cooper and Pratten 2015a, 2; cf. di Nunzio 2015). Uncertainty implies an at least preliminary lack of closure and hence a space for hope.

Rising inequality constitutes another relevant dimension for examining the mobility paradox. Inequality in an African context is not novel, of course, given the history of the extraction of human and natural resources over several centuries, from the slave trade to colonization and postcolonial predatory regimes in some parts of the continent. Inequality today, however, is also linked to the contemporary processes of stratified globalization, as indicated above. Some African economies are booming. Seven out of ten of the fastest-growing economies in the world between 2011 and 2015 were African, yet income inequality increased in the same period (Chotikapanich et al. 2014, 3). One dimension of the African ‘lion economies’ and high growth rates is precisely increasing inequality, where some get rich and richer—quickly and visibly—while the number of poor people is rising (Chotikapanich et al. 2014; Mubila et at 2012). Another dimension is that the spectacles of modernity and conspicuous consumption of global and national elites—such as corporate buildings made of steel and glass, luxury cars, and expensive consumer brands—are plainly visible in African capitals and major cities. To be seen but not to be touched or lived in. Likewise, there are construction booms of comfortable private residences in many places, often owned by international migrants (Graw and Schielke 2012; Makhulu et al. 2010; Smith and Mazzucato 2009).

Inequality may inspire migration, especially in those parts of Africa with a well-developed culture of migration (Graw and Schielke 2012), where migration is often seen as o...