Challenges to Refugees’ Socioeconomic Inclusion: A Lens Through the Experiences of Congolese Refugees in South Africa

Abstract

In antithesis to the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development (socioeconomic inclusion for all) and a relatively progressive refugee policy framework (Refugee Act 130 of 1998), refugees in South Africa continue to face targeted exclusion and reduced living potentials. Impediments to refugee groups ability to ‘thrive and not just survive’ (as called for in the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees), are examined in this paper through a synopsis of the conditions surrounding their access to legal documents (a conduit to socioeconomic rights), their equitable participation/inclusion within the formal labour markets, financial sectors etc. In examining these issues, a case-study-based interpretive research design technique with eight FGD participants and two life history participants (drawn from Congolese refugees’ residing in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) was done. Several conceptual frameworks as well as a single principal theory (Murphy’s theory of monopolization) were utilized so as to fully examine forced migrant groups socioeconomic participation/inclusion in South Africa. This articles findings revealed that primary cultural, as well as structural agentive processes of obstruction significantly inhibit refugee groups full socioeconomic participating in the life of their host communities. The said obstructions included but were not confined to: adverse forms of incorporation, opportunity hoarding, as well as the normative unobtainability of social, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital.