Suchergebnisse

"The story of six children who were stolen from their homes in Africa and sold into slavery across the Atlantic in 1839. They were transported by ship from West Africa to Cuba to the United States, and after protracted legal struggles they returned to Africa to restart their lives"--

Introduction : conceptualizing periurban colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa -- Mobility, locality, and Ewe identity in periurban Eweland -- Intervention and dissent : manufacturing the model periurban chief -- Crisis in an Ewe "capital" : the periurban zone descends on the city -- Vodou and resistance : politico-religious crises in the periurban landscape -- The German Togo-bund and the periurban manifestations of "nation" -- From Eweland to la République Togolaise : the Guide du Togo and the periurban circulation of knowledge

Trafficking is not simply a new form of slavery, but rather a complex multivalent and multi-sited process (Anderson and O'Connell Davidson, 2003). This article explores the exit strategies employed by coerced laboring subjects (Fernandez 2014; O'Connell Davidson 2015), to shed light on some of the many "varieties of unfreedom" (O'Neill 2011) in the global labor marketplace. Just as documentation has become indispensable for contemporary global mobility (Bales 1999; de Genova 2003; de Genova and Peutz 2010; Lawrance and Stevens 2017), trafficking survivors also need documentation to protect their newfound liberty. I argue that today trafficking victims deploy "unfreedom papers" as powerful evidentiary counterweights to resist securitized migration policies that would seek to reinstantiate their vulnerability and their potential for further trafficking, and in so doing obviate gradations of trafficking subjecthood created by the politicization of asylum. In the absence of corroborating testimony, trafficking survivors and their advocates engage expert witnesses in order to gain humanitarian protection. "Unfreedom papers"—documentation consisting of diverse records detailing the persistence of coercion and the failures of neo-abolitionist legislation interpreted with the authoritative voice of an expert witness—are now indispensable to trafficking survivors.

This opinion piece examines evidence that Boko Haram is being invoked in asylum and refugee contexts. The author suggests that Boko Haram has emerged a meme of contemporary Africa, insofar as it appears to have become a cultural reference tool for wider anxieties and jeopardies, one that is transmitted by repetition and replication. The Boko Haram meme may benefit asylum-seekers and refugees who struggle to document their experiences or sustain their narratives of persecution, and has implications well beyond Nigeria and the continent of Africa.

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between multidimensional child advocacy campaigns and the enactment of Ghana's Human Trafficking Act (2005). I argue that while child advocacy has a rich history, the diffuse labor-oriented advocacy characteristic of the 1990s failed to articulate an achievable goal. Child labor advocacy was impotent because the diverse agencies involved adopted different positions about the permissibility of child labor. By contrast, the anti-trafficking initiatives of the early 2000s focused narrowly on legislative remedy and formulated a discourse of "crisis." An anti-trafficking coalition built on an international regulation model that emerged from the cocoa industry. As agents of social and political change, domestic, regional, and foreign nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental organizations played important roles in shaping debates and framing new law. The Ghanaian law, however, is of limited effectiveness because it ignores autochthonous social practices with historically rich traditions, and it enjoins a narrow, economic model for the proliferation of trafficking.