Publikationen

The decline in the smuggling of people from Indonesia to Australia since late 2013 is primarily attributable to unilateral deterrence policies under Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, rather than to bilateral or multilateral cooperation in enforcing anti-people smuggling laws in the region. Yet, more than 30 asylum-seeker boats have departed from Indonesia since that time. Australia’s handling of one boat in particular stands out, not least because of the intense media attention it attracted.

Worldwide, children and teenagers are recruited for activities related to people smuggling. The reasons for their recruitment range from the lower cost of their labour and their readiness to obey orders to their perception within smuggling operations: since children have a low chance of being prosecuted, it is often believed that laws are more lenient when they are tried for their involvement in smuggling.

The multi-directional nature of labour migration flows has resulted in an increasing number of countries having become both senders and receivers of regular and irregular migrants. However, some countries continue to see themselves primarily as senders and so ignore their role as a receiving country, which can have negative implications for the rights of migrants in their territory.

Asylum seekers and refugees currently living in Indonesia tend to see Indonesia as a transit rather than a destination country, despite the fact that their stays are increasing in length. Based on contact with Muhamad (not his real name), a young refugee from Iran currently residing in Indonesia whose adjustment and development I observed over four years, I illustrate the changing priorities in his decision-making, the constant flux of circumstances and context, and the extreme complexity of primary and secondary factors that come into play in planning for the future.

Indonesia remains a country in transition even now, some two decades after its extraordinary shift from authoritarianism to democracy and from economic crisis to a rapidly growing economy. What explains the trajectory of that shift? What challenges does this island nation of 270 million people—with the world's largest Muslim population—face now, as the quality of democratic life erodes and it grapples with profound social and economic inequalities?

Roughly 38,500 Gambians left the country through ‘irregular’ means between 2013 and 2017. Today, almost every family has ties abroad. The influx of immigrants to Europe and elsewhere was caused by political oppression under the long-serving former president Yahya Jammeh. His oppressive politics also severely affected the economic prospects of The Gambia’s young population.

To understand events in Bolivia, we need to unpack its many contradictions over the past decade. But make no mistake, this is a coup.

On 10 October, 123 refugees were evacuated from Libya to Rwanda. This is the second evacuation under the new emergency transit mechanism (ETM) set up in September by the government of Rwanda, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the African Union (AU), and funded by the AU and the European Union (EU). The ETMs – a humanitarian scheme – threaten to be co-opted by politics as they are changing in their very nature, with resettlement increasingly off the table.

In the context of a greater focus on the politics of migration, the ‘refugee entrepreneur’ has become an increasingly important figure in humanitarian, media, and academic portrayals of refugees. Through a focus on Jordan's Za‘tari refugee camp, which has been deemed a showcase for refugees’ ‘entrepreneurship’, this article argues that the designation of Syrian refugees as ‘entrepreneurs’ is a positioning of Syrians within colonial hierarchies of race that pervade humanitarian work.

Since 2014, Nigeria has outlined several initiatives on migration, including a National Migration Policy, strategies on labor migration and diaspora matters, and a coordinating framework to reform migration governance. However, in order to have a significant impact, the policy frameworks need full implementation.When it comes to migration, the Nigerian government is active on policy development but less so on putting it into effect. This tendency is exemplified by a proactive interest in diaspora migration yet a much more reactive approach toward irregular migration and trafficking.

The Africa Yearbook covers major domestic political developments, the foreign policy and socio-economic trends in sub-Sahara Africa – all related to developments in one calendar year. The Yearbook contains articles on all sub-Saharan states, each of the four sub-regions (West, Central, Eastern, Southern Africa) focusing on major cross-border developments and sub-regional organizations as well as one article on continental developments and one on African-European relations.

This volume explores the issues and debates surrounding the ongoing processes of democratization in sub-Saharan Africa, illuminating the central dynamics characterizing Africa’s democratic experiments, and considering the connections between democratization and economic, social, and cultural developments on the continent.

Der Band richtet sich im Sinne eines aufklärerischen Sachbuchs an ein interessiertes, aber nicht unbedingt einschlägig vorbelastetes Publikum. Zahlreiche namhafte Autorinnen und Autoren tragen in fast zwanzig Kapiteln kompetent dazu bei, umfassender und differenzierter als je zuvor die deutsch-afrikanischen Beziehungen kritisch zu reflektieren. Sie leisten damit einen notwendigen Beitrag zu einem überfälligen Diskurs, der den Realitäten im Zeitalter des Postkolonialismus Rechnung trägt.

Despite not traditionally being a priority, the issue of migration continues to carry ever more political weight in Niger, mainly due to European interests in curbing transit migrants moving northwards, but also because of increased forced displacement in the country. European migration interests are overriding national interests, to the detriment of local ownership and with adverse effects on local economies, security, and free movement within the boundaries of the Economic Community of West African States.

A new evacuation plan to fly out migrants to Rwanda from Libya, recently announced, offers a way out for some individuals but for the majority the well-documented abuse and torture in Libya is still the reality. Talk of the new evacuation scheme reportedly started following the deadly airstrikes of the Tajoura Detention Centre in July this year, which led to the death of more than forty refugees and other migrants.

Since the start of the so-called ‘refugee crisis,’ ideas about Syrian men have circulated far and wide. The depictions have rarely been positive. In political discourse and in the media, Syrian men have regularly been portrayed as a threat – to ‘western’ states in general, and to ‘western’ women in particular. On twitter, under the hashtag #refugeesnotwelcome, users depict Syrian men as terrorists and/or cowards who have abandoned the fight.

Critical feminist scholars of conflict and displacement have demonstrated that “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1993) have become an uncontroversial object of humanitarian concern in these contexts (Carpenter 2003; Hyndman and Giles 2011). Yet very little scholarly work has attempted to understand the position of refugee men as a demographic within humanitarianism. Through an analysis of the Syria refugee response in Jordan, this article investigates how humanitarian workers relate to refugee men and think about refugee masculinities.

Critiques of humanitarian work with refugees have increasingly called for refugee men’s “vulnerabilities” to be recognized. The deployment of “vulnerability” reflects the term’s centrality within contemporary humanitarianism, and its rapidly expanding use in feminist analysis. This article argues that calls to see refugee men as “vulnerable” fail to critique, and even seek to expand, “vulnerability” as a mechanism of humanitarian governance. This approach is likely to lead to more humanitarian control over, and racialized violence toward, refugee men themselves.

The Jordan Compact was meant to be a “new paradigm” for a refugee response. In bringing together humanitarian and development approaches, it aimed to turn “the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity” – to provide jobs for Syrian refugees in Jordan and to aid the development of the Jordanian economy, benefiting refugees and host communities alike. But three years on, we can clearly see the challenges it has encountered, many of which are centred on questions of gender.

How does development aid shape democracy after civil conflicts? I argue that political aid conditionalities and the economic utility that recipient elites gain from office give rise to a rent-seeking/democracy dilemma: recipients can initiate democratic reforms but also risk uncertainty over office and rents. Or they can refuse to implement such reforms, but risk losing aid rents if donors reduce aid flows in response to failed democratic reforms. This dilemma is strongest in power-sharing cabinets.

There are numerous studies on the role of power-sharing agreements in the maintenance of peace in postconflict states. Less explored, however, is the impact of power sharing on the quality of the peace. Do power-sharing institutions in fact transform the balance of power among actors in the aftermath of civil wars? And if so, how? As they address these issues, seeking to establish a new research agenda, the authors provide a rich new analytical approach to understanding how power sharing actually works.

Assumptions about the political economy of African states predominantly centre on a dominant elite’s ability to stabilize power. A key assertion is that elites maintain clientelistic networks of rents and redistribution and in turn extend their control over their respective territories by instrumentalizing disorder. We challenge the assumption that disorder plays such a functional role.