Compatible Compacts? The “Social Life” of Vulnerability, Migration Governance, and Protection at the Zimbabwe–South Africa Border

Abstract

The central argument of this paper is that interventions of humanitarian organizations at the Zimbabwe–South Africa border reveal the importance placed on making very clear distinctions between those needing protection and those who do not. This is the case even in times wherein migrants have other protection needs that fall outside these boundaries or intersect with those of others. These boundaries are retained in the stable definitions of migrant in/vulnerability that have been legitimized by the increased emphasis of two separate frameworks: one, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM) for managing migration and the other, the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) that determines a set of stable norms for international refugee protection. These mandates are also connected to other tidy, established identities of vulnerability that pertain to gender, health, legal standing, and persecution. In contexts marked by conflicting and overlapping experiences for persons on the move, and mixed migration flows, these ideas are unstable as a way of governing migration. This is because they can also reproduce and intensify social divisions that may lead to inconsistencies and unethical practices in international protection and migration governance for irregular migrants, as well as failures to respond to “the ‘social life’ of vulnerability.” We propose this novel concept in the paper to capture and reimagine the limits and possibilities for protection.