Migration and Agency in a Globalizing World: Afro-Asian Encounters

302 Pages·2018·3.66 MB·English

by  Scarlett Cornelissen

International Political Economy Series
Migration and Agency in
a Globalizing World
Afro-Asian Encounters
Edited by Scarlett Cornelissen and Yoichi Mine
International Political Economy Series
Series editor
Timothy M. Shaw
Visiting Professor
University of Massachusetts Boston, USA
Emeritus Professor
University of London, UK
The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises
impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its
development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It
has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increas-
ingly challenges the North as the centre of development, also reflected in a
growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone
economies in Southern Europe. An indispensable resource for scholars and
researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by
focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and poli-
cies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic
North declines and ‘the rest’, especially the BRICS, rise.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13996
Scarlett Cornelissen • Yoichi Mine
Editors
Migration and Agency
in a Globalizing World
Afro-Asian Encounters
Editors
Scarlett Cornelissen Yoichi Mine
Stellenbosch University Doshisha University
Matieland, South Africa Kyoto, Japan
International Political Economy Series
ISBN 978-1-137-60204-6 ISBN 978-1-137-60205-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60205-3
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F
oreword
At the time of writing nearly two decades have already passed since we
entered the twenty-first century. Having pronounced ‘America First’ during
the 2016 presidential election campaign, President Donald Trump began to
implement part of his political resolve to withdraw the United States from
the world stage. He also began to reverse the course of its traditional diplo-
macy of external engagements as a guardian of what is called the ‘liberal
international order (LIO)’, to follow John Ikenberry’s terminology. President
Trump apparently believes that the LIO has cost a lot for the United States
and its people have become its loser. As a result, it is warned that world order
is most likely to be followed by world disorder even if China, however ambi-
tious but inexperienced, takes the pinnacle in place of the United States. One
recent example is China’s initiative, if not a concrete action plan, to promote
the ‘One Belt, One Road’ infrastructure development programme. Several
African countries have shown interest to participate in it.
However, the key phrase of the new century is further intensifying glo-
balization. Its negative side, simultaneously coexistential with positive
aspects, has haphazardly been represented by those politically ‘forgotten’
and socially and economically ‘discontented’ voters, who helped to bring
about not only electoral victory for Donald Trump but a successful Brexit
referendum. Globalization is irreversible, however, in terms of unrestricted
flows of goods, capital, information, ideas, and people. Globalization is
transnational, trans-territorial, transoceanic, transcontinental, and transcul-
tural in nature. Globalization is also transformational as a source of poten-
tial change for human future, though frightening if poorly managed.
v
vi FOREWORD
This volume, entitled Migration and Agency in a Globalizing World:
Afro-Asian Encounters, is a product of several years of collaborative
research work by a group of scholars of a variety of nationalities and whose
disciplines range from history, sociology, political science, and develop-
ment economics. The main theme is about the interactions of the African
and Asian world regions through enhanced mobility and migrant flows. It
is also about the regions’ transformational influences in transnational and
sociocultural dimensions. The volume traces historical layers, enriched and
diversified by narratives of entanglements, which form the basis of con-
temporary Afro-Asian migration patterns. It acknowledges the distinct
feature of the dynamics of Afro-Asian migration that does not fit well into
North-South migration patterns. In this regard, the volume examines an
‘understudied’ aspect of Afro-Asian interactions: that is, ‘a new form of
transnationality’, exemplified as ‘aloof’ coexistence or ‘ethnic exclaves’, to
take a few examples, which is at play in Afro-Asian relations driven by
growing migrant and sociocultural contacts. To that end, the volume
adopts a bottom-up approach, or ‘case studies with context-specific narra-
tives on the “lived experiences” of Africans and Asians in their encounters
in multifarious “contact zones”’.
On May 27–28, 2016, I had the privilege to participate in a workshop
of the group held at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town, South
Africa. I was afforded a rare opportunity to share my own understandings
of what social capital is all about. As a practitioner-turned-academic in
peace-building studies, I am an ardent follower of Francis Fukuyama’s
scholarship in this field. And I especially espouse his social capital theory
which comprehends those of his predecessors such as James Coleman,
Robert Putnam, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who is yet to be properly
appreciated. One of Fukuyama’s intellectual assets is his daring challenge
to ‘ask bigger questions’ of social science drawing on a multidisciplinary
method.
This current volume notes the role social capital plays as one of the
driving forces, together with networks, to connect multiple societies, both
internally and externally. The volume argues however that ‘the existing
framework of social capital is still inadequate when we attempt to apply the
concept to the reality of transnational migrants’. It maintains that ‘almost
all major works on social capital have been written in a national rather than
transnational framework’ and that ‘in our research on cross-border
migrants… it is imperative to move from national social capital to transna-
tional social capital’. The volume concludes that ‘the ambition of this
FOREWOR D vii
book is therefore to shift the study of social capital a little towards the
South and to bring transnational rather than international entanglements
of Afro-Asian human exchange to the fore’. I have nothing to add to these
lengthy quotations. I am rather tempted to take the conclusion as part of
my task as well. The volume is worth a read for every student of a variety
of subfields in the social sciences. It is because the term of social capital has
now gained its own ground as an analytical as well as explanatory tool.
Adjunct Fellow of the Japan Institute Hideaki Asahi
for International Affairs (JIIA)
Former Professor of International Politics
at the University of Tokyo
A
cknowledgements
This book is the culmination of several years of collaboration among Asian
Africanists and African Asianists who, intrigued by the growing societal
encounters they were witnessing between Africa and Asia, decided to
bring experts from both regions together to study the dynamics of these
encounters. The project saw its formal launch in late 2013 when a sympo-
sium was held at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, to bring Asianists
and Africanists in direct conversation with each other and to try to explore
the various facets of Afro-Asian entanglements. Over the next three years,
follow-up conferences were held in Japan (at Doshisha University, 2014,
and Kansai University, 2015) and South Africa (at Stellenbosch University,
2016). We thank all participants as well as the university staff and graduate
students who helped to make these events succeed.
In addition to the assistance from these host universities, our research
meetings received substantial grants from various schemes such as the
bilateral joint research programme funded by the National Research
Foundation of South Africa (NRF) and Japan Society for the Promotion
of Sciences (JSPS); the Global Resource Management (GRM) Program at
Doshisha University; and the Emerging State Project (ESP) at the National
Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS)—JSPS KAKENHI Grant
Number 25101006.
It was a great honour that South African Ambassador to Japan, Mrs.
Mohau Pheko, gave a keynote speech at Doshisha University in 2014.
Professor Hideaki Asahi, former Japanese Ambassador to East Timor and
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
former Professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, par-
ticipated in our final workshop at Stellenbosch in 2016 and contributed
the glorious foreword to this book. Finally, we express heartfelt gratitude
to Professor Katsuhiko Kitagawa of Kansai University for his continuous
support and intellectual advice from the beginning of the project.