Xolani Tshabalala

Postdoc

It is tempting to see state borders only as visible barriers – like the barbed wire or Trump’s “tall, beautiful wall”. Borders can also be imagined as mobile, perceptive entities – always barring, filtering, and reshaping human mobility everywhere.

Borders that shift shape

I do research on Southern African cross-border informality from the perspective of critical border studies. I am also interested in African migrant solidarity movements in the context of a retreating post-colonial state.

I joined the Institute for Research on Migration Ethnicity and Society – REMESO, at Linköping University, in 2012 as a PhD candidate. Prior to joining REMESO, I worked at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in Pretoria, South Africa, as a Researcher and Project Manager.

My skills and experience are in research project management, MSM sexual health and counterculture, migrant resistance movements and solidarities, and undocumented cross-border mobility and livelihood strategies.

As a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond postdoctoral fellow, I am currently working on the governance of cross-border mobility in Southern Africa in the context of the corona global pandemic.

Publications

2024

Xolani Tshabalala (2024) Governing Mobility Through Exemptions: Cross-National Dependencies, Immigration Policy, and Migrant Labour in South African Historical Perspective Critical Sociology

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2023

Xolani Tshabalala (2023) Posted Passports and Fake Stamps: Documented Mobility, Invisibility and the Informal Enforcement of South Africa's Border with Zimbabwe Migration, Borders and Borderlands: Making National Identities in Southern African Communities, p. 69-92

2019

Xolani Tshabalala, Milena Belloni (2019) On the key distinction between Trafficking and smuggling: Views and implications from the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa Forum on Crime and Society, Vol. 10, p. 25-49

Xolani Tshabalala (2019) Hyenas of the Limpopo: "Illicit Labour Recruiting," Assisted Border Crossings, and the Social Politics of Movement Across South Africas Border with Zimbabwe Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. 34, p. 433-450

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2017

Xolani Tshabalala (2017) Hyenas of the Limpopo: The Social Politics of Undocumented Movement Across South Africa's Border with Zimbabwe

2016

Xolani Tshabalala (2016) Brokerage Economies: Crisis, cultural acts, and contested subjectivities at the Beitbridge border of SouthAfrica and Zimbabwe Journal of Trafficking, Organized Crime and Security, Vol. 2, p. 141-156

Research environment

Man in refugee camp behind the Belgrade Central Station

Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society - REMESO

The institute conducts research with a multilevel approach to the understanding of migration, ethnicity and society.

Organisation

Division of Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO)

REMESO pursues research and education on transnational migration, ethnic diversity and citizenship in relation to changes in labour and welfare.

Department of Culture and Society (IKOS)

At the Department of Culture and Society (IKOS), social sciences and the humanities gather in environments where research and education work together.