A comparative political economy of regional migration and labour mobility in West and Southern Africa

This paper asks to what extent we can categorise distinct patterns of migration in the regions of West and Southern Africa. In doing so, it documents and seeks to explain the dynamics of appreciable continuities and discontinuities with established regimes of labour mobility. Our aim is to recognise migrants in communities as agents who are taking actions, but to avoid reducing the discussion to motives and household strategies; instead considering that actions are pursued under specific contexts. In locating local communities in regional patterns and in global processes, we are adopting a political economy perspective on different scales of analysis. Colonial and apartheid states explicitly articulated and regulated patterns of national and intra-regional migration in southern Africa in the 20th century to an extent far greater than in other regions. These formalized mechanisms spawned models that set labour migration at the explanatory core of entire social formations with distinct processes of social reproduction, meant that categorisations such as Samir Amin's 'Africa of the labour reserves’ had broad validity. Changes in the last two or three decades have not only dramatically altered the direction and scale of actual flows but have led to a more complex and less state orchestrated set of patterns, whose major divergences and few continuities will be explored. Migration within West Africa was not controlled as comprehensively as in Southern Africa. Yet alongside established regional patterns of mobility, the circulation of labour from underdeveloped hinterlands into particular centres of European capital underpinned ‘Africa of the colonial economy’ (Amin 1972). The contemporary disjuncture from these geographical patterns of coercion has largely put structural economic explanations to rest. This paper, however, asks to what extent the role of migration in West African communities is socially, as well as spatially, reproduced, with analysis of the changing political economy in which contemporary West African migration has developed. This paper makes no attempt to extract a single theory of the political economy of migration but in comparing regions and periods aims to suggest agendas and methods for approaching contemporary patterns of labour mobility.