Darshan Vigneswaran

The construction of an edifice: the story of a First Great Debate

Over the last decade, critical historiographers have established that the story of a First Debate, which tells of a struggle between idealism/utopianism and realism between the 1920s and 1940s, is a misleading characterisation of the history of academic international thought. This article adds to this critical literature by exploring how the story of a First Debate became a part of disciplinary orthodoxy between the 1950s and 1990s. Our analysis reveals that scholars produced the myth of a First Debate by detaching the concept of a struggle between idealism and realism from the unique historical milieu in which it was conceived, and employing this dichotomy for a new set of rhetorical purposes. We use these findings to suggest refinements for the historiographical methods employed to understand past international thought, and to illuminate the historical contingency of contemporary notions of scholarly purpose in international relations.

Past Masters and Modern Inventions: Intellectual History as Critical Theory

In this article, we explore the relationship between past and present international relations (IR) scholarship, paying particular attention to the way in which various representations, interpretations and classifications of past works can collectively influence how modern scholars ask and answer questions. This serves two main purposes. On the one hand, we seek to contribute to a growing literature interrogating misleading and simplistic depictions of past authors and eras. On the other, we explore how the history of ideas can be utilized as a critical resource, which offers a compelling platform from which to refine and re-evaluate prevailing notions of the purposes of intellectual inquiry.

Waiting in liminal space: migrants' queuing for home affairs in South Africa

Waiting is a common feature of everyday encounters between individuals and organisations. Government officials and private sector workers make us wait for decisions, wait for services and sometimes, simply wait our turn. Yet, little attention has been devoted to theorising and developing the concept of ‘waiting’, and it is noticeably absent in the literature on social organisations and organisational behaviour. In this article, we seek to add texture and meaning to the experience of waiting and to explore the unique set of power relations and social processes the phenomenon may entail. More specifically, drawing on the work of Victor Turner, we describe waiting as a liminal experience, as a transitory and transformative space which lies between life stages, statuses and material contexts. We then develop the idea by scrutinising a particular form of encounter between individuals and organisations, that between the foreign migrant and the state bureaucracy in contemporary South Africa.

Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa

Human mobility has long played a foundational role in producing state territories, resources, and hierarchies. When people move within and across national boundaries, they create both challenges and opportunities. In Mobility Makes States, chapters written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists explore different patterns of mobility in sub-Saharan Africa and how African states have sought to harness these movements toward their own ends. While border control and intercontinental migration policies remain important topics of study, Mobility Makes States demonstrates that immigration control is best understood alongside parallel efforts by states in Africa to promote both long-distance and everyday movements. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets. They examine short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting and urban expansion, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of gatekeepers and officers of the state who push and pull migrant populations in different directions. Through the experiences and trajectories of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this empirically rich volume sheds new light on larger global patterns and state making processes. Contributors: Eric Allina, Oliver Bakewell, Pamila Gupta, Nauja Kleist, Loren B. Landau, Joel Quirk, Benedetta Rossi, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Simon Turner, Darshan Vigneswaran.

Territory, migration and the evolution of the international system

Preface: The Queue Jumping Analogy 1. Introduction 2. Migration and Mental Maps 3. Centralization in the Italian City-State 4. Expansion of the British Empire 5. Integrating Europe 6. Projecting Territorial Change Epilogue: Theory From the South

Protection and conviviality: Community policing in Johannesburg

The study of conviviality explores how everyday interactions and encounters mitigate or ameliorate sociocultural differences. This literature must address the critique that conviviality is a superficial phenomenon, which proves irrelevant in contexts where intergroup differences are deep, complex and punctuated by violent exchanges. This article addresses this criticism by attempting to define the meaning and purpose of convivial exchanges in a context characterized by high levels of violence: policing culture in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using ethnographic methods, the study illustrates how convivial practices often stem from individuals’ sense of insecurity and the search for protection in public settings. The article uses these findings to rethink the extent to which convivial practices might resolve social differences.

The Contours of Disorder: Crime Maps and Territorial Policing in South Africa

Organised violence strongly shapes political boundaries. The modern states monopoly on legitimate violence has made national borders the primary dividing line between peaceful and violent places. However, governments that are unable to achieve such a monopoly may opt for the more modest goal of moderating the distribution of violent behaviour across their jurisdiction. This paper explores how this latter approach redefines the contours of political space through a grounded ethnography of crime control strategies in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the postapartheid era, South African police and vigilantes have synthesised statistically oriented policing logics with the racial policing tactics of the past to anticipate, locate, isolate, and redistribute patterns of violent crime. In so doing, they have created forms of territorial power and violence that are neither new nor old, but undeniably postsovereign.

Incident reporting: a technique for studying police corruption

The study of police corruption faces seemingly insurmountable sampling and validity problems. This paper outlines an experimental technique for overcoming these issues by challenging the assumption that corruption is not prone to systematic observational research. Incident reporting combines a ‘combing’ procedure for sampling observable incidents of corruption in public spaces with a benchmarking procedure for coding observations of misconduct. After introducing the new forms of analysis that this technique makes feasible the paper reviews unique values and limitations of incident reporting. The main contention is that the technique constitutes a valuable tool for improving the study of everyday police corruption.

Migration control, documentation, and state transformation

Examines undocumented migration, one of the main outcomes of the transition from formal labor migration to a mixed system, gauges the long-term impacts of the bureaucratic stasis on governance in South Africa, and explores how an ongoing state of crisis in this policy sphere is shaping the everyday practices of government bureaucracies, including both those charged with specific responsibility for immigration policy and those that have taken up this task. The disjuncture between policy and practice opens the way for opportunism and corruption at lower and local levels of state institutions. Although there is consensus across government that current law and policy are inadequate and require substantial reworking, there is de facto acceptance that government agencies and officials must continue to implement control-oriented policies and practices, including arrests, detentions, and deportations. Reformers of immigration policy need to engage with the grassroots of departments and provide new incentive structures to ensure that new policies are mainstreamed in everyday bureaucratic practice.

The Transformation of Sovereign Territoriality: A Case Study of South African Immigration Control

More than 15 years after the publication of the seminal article ‘Territoriality and Beyond’ in the leading journal, International Organization, International Relations (IR) scholars are still coming to terms with John Ruggie’s (1993) analysis of fundamental change in the international system. Part of his larger, decades-long multidisciplinary project on ‘transformation’, this article asked readers to consider whether actors in the international system might change how they divided land among themselves, and, if so, why? Attempts to find answers have generated a small mountain of historically oriented scholarship (see, for example, Keene, 2002; Krasner, 1999; Linklater, 1998; Rae, 2002; Reus-Smit, 1999; Rosenberg, 1994; Sassen, 2006; Spruyt, 1994; Teschke, 2003). Yet IR scholars still struggle with the most pressing question Ruggie raised: if the modern state system based on principles of sovereign, territorial exclusivity is facing new challenges, what might a ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-Westphalian’ order look like?