This book discusses regional and continental integration in Africa by examining the management of migration across the continent. It examines borders and securitisation of migration and the challenges and opportunities that arise out of reconfigured continental demographics. The book offers insights on intra-Africa migrations and highlights how intra-continental migration creates socio-economic and cultural borders. It explores how these borders, beyond the physical boundaries of states, including the Berlin Conference-constructed borders, create cultural divides, challenges for economic integration and cross-border security, and irregular migration patterns. While the movement of economic goods is valued for regional economic integration, the mobility of people is seen as a threat. This approach to migration contradicts the intentions of true integration and development, and triggers negative responses such as xenophobia that cannot be addressed by simply managing the physical border and allowing free movement. This book engages in a pivotal discussion of these issues, which are hitherto missing in African border studies, by demonstrating the ubiquity and overreaching influence of various kinds of borders on the African continent. With multidisciplinary contributions that provide an in-depth understanding of intra-Africa migrations and strategies for enhanced migration management, this book will be a useful resource for scholars and students studying geography, politics, security studies, development studies, African studies and sociology.

This handbook provides an authoritative multidisciplinary overview of contemporary African international migration. It endeavours to present a single source of reference on issues such as migration history, trends, migrant profiles, narratives, migration-development nexus, migration governance, diasporas, impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. The handbook assembles a multidisciplinary contributor team of distinguished and upcoming Africanist scholars, practitioners, researchers, and policy experts both inside and outside Africa to contribute their perspectives on contemporary African migration. It attempts to address some of the following pertinent questions: What drives contemporary migration in Africa? How are its patterns and trends evolving? What is the architecture of migration governance in Africa? How do migration, diaspora engagement and development play out in Africa? What are the future trajectories of African migration? The handbook is a valuable resource for practitioners, politicians, researchers, university students, and academics interested in studying and understanding contemporary African migration.

This book investigates the diverse and dynamic forms of migration within Africa. Centring themes of agency, resource flows, and transnational networks, the book examines the enduring appeal of the Global South as a place of origin, transit, and destination. Popular media, government pronouncements, and much of the global research discourse continue to be oriented towards migration from the Global South to the Global North, despite the fact that the vast majority of migration is South-South. This book moves beyond these mischaracterisations and instead distinctly focuses on the agency of African migrants and the creative strategies they employ while planning their routes within and across the African continent. Case studies explore the flow of resources such as people, money, skills, and knowledge throughout the continent, while also casting a light on the lived experiences of migrants as they negotiate their sometimes precarious and vulnerable positions. Underpinned by intensive empirical studies, this book challenges prevailing narratives and provides a new way of thinking about South-South Migration. Composed by a majority of scholars from the Global South, the book will be crucial reading for researchers, students, and policy makers with a focus on South-South Migration, Migration and Inequalities, Migration and Development, and Refugee and Humanitarian Studies.

This book introduces readers to the age of intra-African migration, a period from the mid-19th century onward in which the center of gravity of African migration moved decisively inward. Most books tend to zoom in on Africa’s external migration during the earlier intercontinental slave trades and the more recent outmigration to the Global North, but this book argues that migration within the continent has been far more central to the lives of Africans over the course of the last two centuries. The book demonstrates that only by taking a broad historical and continent-wide perspective can we understand the distinctions between the more immediate drivers of migration and deeper patterns of change over time. During the 19th century Africa’s external slave trades gradually declined, whilst Africa’s expanding commodity export sectors drew in domestic labor. This led to an era of heightened mobility within the region, marked by rapidly rising and vanishing migratory flows, increasingly diversified landscapes of migration systems, and profound long-term shifts in the wider patterns of migration. This era of inward-focused mobility reduced with a resurgence of outmigration after 1960, when Africans became more deliberate in search of extra-continental destinations, with new diaspora communities emerging specifically in the Global North. Broad ranging in its temporal, spatial, and thematic coverage, this book provides students and researchers with the perfect introduction to age of intra-African migration.

This book provides a strong multidisciplinary examination of the links between migration, remittances and sustainable development in Africa. It makes evidence-based policy recommendations on migration to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The key themes examined are migration and remittances, and their relations with the following issues: economic transformation, education and knowledge, corruption and conflict. Cross-cutting issues such as gender equality and youth are weaved throughout the chapters, and a rich range of country contexts are presented. The volume also discusses challenges in managing migration flows. It will be of interest to advanced students, academics and policy makers in development economics and sustainable development.

Spurred by major changes in the world economy and in local ecology, the contemporary migration of Africans, both within the continent and to various destinations in Europe and North America, has seriously affected thousands of lives and livelihoods. The contributors to this volume, reflecting a variety of disciplinary perspectives, examine the causes and consequences of this new migration. The essays cover topics such as rural-urban migration into African cities, transnational migration, and the experience of immigrants abroad, as well as the issues surrounding migrant identity and how Africans re-create community and strive to maintain ethnic, gender, national, and religious ties to their former homes.

This book examines the influences of social class and inequality structures on migration in Africa using information from Ghana. As the country achieves moderate to significant economic gains driven (in part) by the country’s diaspora communities, the desire to migrate has intensified. Migration is now synonymous with social mobility and self-improvement. It has been found that existing class and status inequalities are analytically inseparable from the social and cultural processes underpinning the motivations behind Ghanaian migration. Migrant class and socioeconomic attributes are closely intertwined, reinforcing and operating at every level of the migration decision-making to influence the motivation to migrate, the type and form of migration, the direction of the migration, its timing, and ultimately the outcomes and expectations that migrants associate with their decision to migrate. From a historical and contemporary perspective, this book argues that power and class-based structural relationships are significant components in understanding how migratory diasporas shape and are shaped in turn by social class and inequality. The social class identities that Ghanaian immigrants manifest in the United States are often based on immigrant formulations and importation of class dynamics from the home country. These identities are then transformed in the countries of destination and replayed or relived back home, thereby creating multiple class identities that are powerful forces in inducing social changes. In essence, migrant social class attributes formed before and post-migration is significant because it holds the possibilities of transforming the social structures of migrant-sending countries. As migrants return home and seek reintegration into the body polity of the home society, conflicts emanating from changes in their class dynamics may hinder or promote sociocultural and economic development. Hence, the imperative of the central government is to understand and incorporate into national development planning the social class characteristics of its citizens who are leaving, as well as those who are returning.

Covers three broad areas: macro-level migration trends in sub-Saharan Africa; micro-level factors in South African migration; and a synthesis of current migration theory.