Migration, xenophobia and security-making in post-apartheid South Africa

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This article—an edited version of Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book First Among Unequals: South African Security Discourses on Southern Africa—focuses on the ideological conceptualization, and brutal treatment, of foreign migrants in post-apartheid South Africa. Notwithstanding the sacrifices of Africa's people to the cause of South Africa's liberation or the reality that South Africa was made by migrants, foreign African migrants in 'liberated' and 'democratic' South Africa have been subjected to a regime of violent othering. Contribution to this rising tide of xenophobia, the so-called 'think-tank' arm of the security industry, has woven a discourse around the idea that migration to South Africa constitutes a threat to national security which, in turn, has watered the notion that post-apartheid South Africa needs a powerful, modern and well-armed military. The end result is that the received understandings of the apartheid era as to what constitutes the state and its security have been neither changed nor discarded, but reinvented and reinforced, in what was once imagined would be a new beginning to thinking about security in this region.