Invisibility in African Displacements

Jesper Bjarnesen is a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden, working on regional and war-related mobilities in West Africa, with a focus on inter-generational relations and urban youth culture in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire. Bjarnesen has published articles in Migration Letters, the Nordic Journal of African Studies, and Anthropology Southern Africa and edited a theme section of Conflict and Society. He also co-edited a special issue of the journal Africa and was co-editor of Violence in African Elections (Zed 2018).Simon Turner is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He works on forced displacement, diaspora, conflict and humanitarianism in the African Great Lakes region and on Europe. He has worked on a project on anticipating violence in the Burundi conflict and another on carceral junctions in European refugee policies. He is the author of Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life (2010), the editor of journal article Diasporic Tensions: The Dilemmas and Conflicts of Transnational Engagement (2008) and the co-editor of journal article Agents of Change - Staging and Governing Diasporas and the African State (2013).

• Table of contentsIntroduction: The Production of Invisibility in African DisplacementsPart I: Humanitarian In/Visibilities1. Renegotiating Humanitarian Governance. Challenging Invisibility in the Chad-Sudan Borderlands2. Encamped Within a Camp: Transgender Refugees and Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya)3. Displacement and Strategies of Invisibility in Post-War Burundi4. Sufficiently Visible/Invisibly Self-Sufficient: Recognition and Displacement Agriculture in Western TanzaniaPart II: State in/visibilities5. Forced Migration and a ‘Tolerant’ Administration. Processes Making Refugees Invisible in Adamoua, Cameroon6. Entangled Hypervisibility: Senegalese Migrants Everyday Struggles for a Place in the City7. Paths to Paris. Hodological space and invisibility among Malian migrants without papers8. Invisibility as a Livelihood Strategy: Zimbabwean Migrant Domestic Workers in Botswana9. The Nigerien Migrants in Kaddafi’s Libya: Between Visibility and Invisibility10. Violence, Displacement and In/Visibility of Bodies, Papers and Images in BurundiPart III: Social In/Visibilities11. (Dis)Connectivity and Invisibility of Mobile Fulani in West Africa12. Fugitive emplacements: Wahayu Concubine Visibility Tactics through Fugitive Cross-border Mobilities, Niger-Nigeria13. The Paradoxes of Migrant In/Visibility: Understanding Displacement Intersectionalities in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina FasoAfterword

An important book that highlights African migrants’ agency in the face of structures of inequality and violence. It offers invaluable insights into the processes of invisibility and visibility that mark the trajectories of African migrant encounters with the global migration industry. The accounts provided challenge the normalization of border enforcing mechanisms that work to exclude and distance Africans while living off the wealth extracted from the continent.