Scaling Statelessness: Absent, Present, Former, and Liminal States of Somali Experience in South Africa

Abstract

This study analyzes how Somalis in South Africa perceive states and statelessness, and how their assertions of authority based on statelessness come into confrontation with competing antiforeigner claims, producing differentiated spatial domains of opportunity. Claims to the legal condition of statelessness provide putative Somalis—including other eastern African migrants who embed themselves in Somali-dominated neighborhoods and economic networks—protection as refugees in South Africa. Nevertheless, statelessness takes on multidimensional and competing meanings as South Africans accuse refugees of embodying the chaos attributed to their countries of origin, and as migrants mobilize claims to belonging that describe forms of stateness as differentially present and absent rather than uniformly encompassing. Somali migrants’ experiences in urban South Africa's segregated landscapes highlight ways in which assertions about state presence and absence travel across scaled spatial frames (from nation-states to migrant neighborhoods and individual bodies), and shape patterns of collective action and opportunity within differentiated spaces. Foregrounding assertions involved in scale- and place-making imaginaries, I argue that statelessness, like the state, may at times function as an assertion that generates spatial domains and structures life opportunities in these domains.