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Time for a Rethink

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Africa on the Move

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Abstract

The translocal perspective is not yet fully established in social science. As an analytical perspective, translocality represents an alternative to some dominant approaches. In this chapter, we demonstrate the need for a change in perspective by highlighting the conceptual pitfalls of conventional approaches in migration studies and development research and practice. First, we take a critical look at previous research on the relationship between migration and development (Sect. 2.1), exploring how interdisciplinary research on this nexus has long been caught in two methodological traps : an “ideological trap ” and a “territorial trap ”. We then examine conventional urban/rural thinking in development research and cooperation (Sect. 2.2), showing that the container-spatial bias of this dichotomizing view can lead to some grave misconceptions of rural and urban development. From the analytical limitations of the traditional views, we derive the need for a rethink and introduce the idea of translocal livelihoods as a conceptual link between migration research and development studies (Sect. 2.3).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On the history of development research in Germany, see Scholz (2004) and Bohle (2007).

  2. 2.

    For a review of the migration-related studies of German-speaking development researchers, exemplified by research in Africa, see Wenzel (2012).

  3. 3.

    For more comprehensive remarks on this, see Geiger and Steinbrink (2012: 16–25).

  4. 4.

    Authors like Wolpe (e.g., 1972), McGee (e.g., 1982), Standing (1985) and Potter and Unwin (e.g., 1995) placed migratory movements in countries of the Global South in the context of postcolonial structures and capitalist transformation processes in peripheral capitalist states. These systemic or structurally oriented approaches attempted to explain migration in terms of the functional requirements of growth and change within the capitalist world system.

  5. 5.

    See, among others, the literature overviews of McDowell and De Haan (1998), as well as Waddington and Sabates-Wheeler (2003), de Haas (2010) and Steinbrink and Schmiz (2019).

  6. 6.

    Here we refrain from comparing and weighing up the various approaches to migration theory in detail, but it should be emphasized that while each has valuable explanatory potential, none of them alone suffices to analytically grasp the complexity of the various migration phenomena. Although their basic assumptions, arguments, and conclusions are sometimes mutually exclusive, they are complementary in that, strictly speaking, they often attempt to explain different matters. Migration is simply too heterogeneous and context-specific in its manifestations to be regarded as a uniform object of research. Nevertheless, in the past, migration was largely treated as if it were a single phenomenon that could be explained by a single theory. For this reason, since the 1990s, Massey et al. (1993) and many other migration researchers have rightly argued that there cannot be one “grand theory” of migration studies .

  7. 7.

    Menzel (1993) spoke in this context of a “failure of the grand theories,” which had structured development discourse for about two decades.

  8. 8.

    For an example of early European research in this field, see Müller-Mahn (1999). In an empirical case study of south–north migration based on the example of Egyptian “sans papiers” in France, the author examines the relationship between irregular immigration and irregular employment.

  9. 9.

    “Transmigrants are immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across […] borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state.” (Glick Schiller et al. 1997: 121)

  10. 10.

    Faist (2010) also speaks of a “meso-level theory”.

  11. 11.

    See Chambers (1989); and on the adoption of the idea of vulnerability in German development research , see Bohle (1993) as well as Bohle and Watts (1993). These concepts have been used as a starting point and analytical framework for various extensive development-geographical studies.

  12. 12.

    In fact, the “livelihoods perspective and vulnerability thinking have much in common (Bohle 2009). Both require a concise analysis of the baseline conditions and triggers of people’s vulnerability to, for instance, natural hazards, economic shocks or political violence. Both sharpen the researchers’ foci to asses the capacities and strategies of actors, households and communities, and their respective embeddedness in networks and their position in the broader society. And both bear in mind the structural formations of people’s vulnerability or livelihood security in terms of social norms, values, legal rules, and governmental policies.” (Etzold 2017: 46)

  13. 13.

    See, among others, Lohnert and Steinbrink (2005), Thieme (2008), Zoomers and van Westen (2011), Steinbrink (2012), Steinbrink and Peth (2014) and Etzold (2017).

  14. 14.

    This model of dualism assumes that societies are divided into two incompatible sectors: the modern, dynamic sector integrated into the world market on one hand and the traditional, backward, and stagnating sector on the other. In the view of modernization theorists, both are subject to different developmental dynamics, each with its own rules (see Gilman 2018; Pieterse 2010).

  15. 15.

    For a more recent work on dependency theory , see Mahoney and Rodríguez-Franco (2018).

  16. 16.

    As such, rural spaces represent the last and weakest link in a worldwide hierarchical chain of exploitation, with the cities in developing countries profiting, as the penultimate link, at least from the exploitation of their rural areas (see Potter 1989; Potter and Unwin 1995).

  17. 17.

    See also Gilles 2015: 44–45.

  18. 18.

    Likewise, see Greiner and Sakdapolrak (2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Geography, University of Passau, Passau, Bayern, Germany

    Malte Steinbrink

  2. Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Niedersachsen, Germany

    Hannah Niedenführ

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  1. Malte Steinbrink
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Correspondence to Malte Steinbrink .

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Steinbrink, M., Niedenführ, H. (2020). Time for a Rethink. In: Africa on the Move. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22841-5_2

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