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Constitutionally empowered to be a leading force for development, provincial and municipal authorities have been wary of addressing population movements or seeing them as fundamentally tied to socio-economic development. In many instances, authorities fear that developing pro-active, positive responses to migration would only encourage more of it. Whatever the reason, budgeting and planning exercises make little reference to extended population projections or other insights into the relationships among mobility, livelihoods, and community development. As the population continues to move, the shortcomings of these planning exercises and interventions have become increasingly evident in terms of limited access to critical services, physical and economic insecurity, marginalisation, and social conflict. This essay explains why and suggests means of addressing these challenges.

Accepting that successful 'development' is premised on a population's participation in a collective undertaking, we must understand urban residents'; interactions and ambitions. In African cities being transformed by geographic and social mobility, it is unclear what forms of inclusion, solidarity or mutual recognition are desired or possible among those who live there. This paper argues that the pursuit of three objectives - profit, protection and passage - shaping these cities' social formations in ways that limit the ability of official and non-official institutions to interweave popular aspirations - however temporarily - to promote a common and mutually beneficial future. The paper starts from the premise that the novelty of the emerging social forms within Africa's cities requires a willingness to induce: to build a conceptual vocabulary of belonging reflecting practices of those living in and moving through Africa's cities. Only after doing this will we have the building blocks for further debate. With this in mind, the paper works towards a pair of interrelated tasks. The first is to challenge three premises often informing discussions of mobility and urban politics: (i) the presence of a dominant host community or political order; (ii) that cities are destinations and not points of transit; and (iii) that state institutions are the primary source of exclusion and the most potent tool for fostering inclusion in a collective endeavour. Second, it considers one form of membership and inclusion that can emerge where the presumptions outlined above do not hold. In doing so, it points to a kind of 'tactical cosmopolitanism' a set of discourses and practices that can subvert ethnic or national chauvinism and restrictive migration or anti-urbanization policies and practices. Drawing primarily on examples from Johannesburg, it shows how migrants negotiate partial inclusion in transforming societies without becoming bounded by them. The paper ends by reflecting briefly on the challenges such tactics pose for generating a collective urban project.

The imperative to protect national territory from the unplanned movements of people across borders has generated exceptional, often extra-legal, responses from countries throughout the world. Although intended to reassert state sovereignty, little is known about such exceptionalism's lasting effects on the nature of political authority and territorial control. Through a comparison of Johannesburg, South Africa and Western Tanzania's Kasulu District, this article demonstrates that measures designed to alienate or liquidate non-national populations may be broadly popular, but the subterranean and extra-legal practices they engender can criminalise the state and prevent leaders from re-establishing a normal legal order. These effects depend on the measures employed while being conditioned by pre-existing practices of state power. In Tanzania, the creation of temporary camps in response to a massive influx of refugees has generated spatially delimited extra-legality that is unlikely to threaten sovereignty. Amidst South Africa's post-apartheid transitions, emerging networks of corruption stemming from exceptionalism are challenging the liberal state's mandate and creating incentive systems that leaders can no longer control. These findings illustrate the significance of immigration, humanitarianism, and migration management for the exercise of political power and suggest that exceptionalism not only threatens democratic principles, but also may undermine the sovereignty it is designed to protect.