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Refugee Reception in Southern Africa

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18 July 2024

A new understanding of state-based refugee reception that reflects the complex dynamics of contemporary refugee arrival.
It is no longer realistic (if it ever was) to understand persons who flee across a border as a homogeneous group whose movement abruptly ends once they arrive in a host state or refugee camp. Through a comparative analysis of the politics surrounding the welcome afforded to refugees, this book offers an original perspective on refugee hosting in Southern Africa. Using the cases of Zambia and South Africa, the book explores why some countries maintain encampment reception policies for refugees, and others use more liberal ‘free settlement’ approaches, whereby refugees are granted freedom of movement and permitted to settle in cities and towns. While state-based reception is frequently framed as one-off moments, such as registration, Refugee Reception in Southern Africa examines reception as a complex and ongoing process of negotiations between refugees and state, with reception policies vital in shaping a refugee’s ability to settle and engage with local communities and labour markets.
With its new ‘refugee reception’ framework and in-depth case studies full of concrete examples, this book is a significant theoretical and methodological contribution to migration studies more broadly.

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration, Refugees and political asylum, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Human Rights, Migration, immigration and emigration, Human rights, civil rights

This is a timely and important book that makes a critical contribution to the literature on the politics of asylum in Africa. The book’s discussion of methodology and positionality are especially compelling and will serve as a template for a new generation of scholarship.
— James Milner, Associate Professor of Political Science, Carleton University, Canada
- Introduction
- 1 Framing refugee reception
- 2 Refugee reception policies in Africa
- 3 Investigating state behaviour towards refugees
- 4 Encampment: the maintenance of a camp-based reception in Zambia
- 5 Encampment: post-registration in Zambia
- 6 Free-settlement: the maintenance of a free-settlement reception in South Africa
- 7 The urban space: post-registration in South Africa
- 8 Conclusions and ways forward