Security at the Margins (SeaM): Spaces and strategies for negotiating security in urban South Africa

Globally, urban areas are viewed with great optimism and suspicion, as potential engines for development and destabilising vortexes of violence and degeneration. Both visions have traction in South Africa. Urban living has offered opportunities for some to better their economic standing, strengthen capabilities and expand freedoms. However, given the pace of urbanisation and problematic urban governance, urban areas remain spaces of inequality, degradation, crisis and conflict. This is particularly true for those on the margins, whose lives are profoundly shaped by the need to negotiate security and justice. The welfare of urban Others and their long-term prospects for socioeconomic development are intimately bound up in the outcomes of these negotiations, as recent waves of xenophobic violence demonstrate.

Positive urban transformation requires understanding how multiple marginalities interact in urban areas. At present, this intersection has been neglected. This South Africa-UK Partnership forges an international academic network to build capacities to rigorously and innovatively address this issue. Our ambitious agenda focuses primarily on (internal and external) migrants and lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer (LGBTQ) communities. Although the freedom to embrace diversity and difference is at the heart of a democratic city, these urban Others face the stresses of everyday prejudice and spectre of severe violence, like xenophobic riots or acts of 'corrective rape'. Security threats facing migrants and LGBTQ people are comparable, but the logics animating them are distinct, making them conducive to comparison.

Our Partnership will strengthen capacities in South Africa to explore strategies individuals use to negotiate these varied marginalities, embedded in wider economic, social and political systems. It will also particularly build skills to explore roles that digital technologies play in this process, shaping flows of power, resources, and information in urban areas; and how policymakers and civil society groups are responding to complex challenges of urban wellbeing.

The Partnership develops skills, knowledge, and networks, supporting cutting edge research that actively engages communities, civil society groups and government agencies. We will identify research synergies; provide methods training in Big Data, Social Network Analysis, Remote Event Mapping, and Visual Methods to push the boundaries of urban research; fund 'urban lab' pilot projects to encourage innovative methods and questions; organise visiting fellowships to provide time and space for meaningful collaboration; and provide impact training to ensure that our timely interdisciplinary research agenda has effective and wide-reaching influence.

ODA statement: The primary purpose of this project is to promote the welfare and development of the partner country. It will do this in three primary ways. First, the topic of the collaborative research is crucially important for South Africa, where rapid urbanisation, entrenched inequities and uneven development risk positive urban transformation, especially in relation to vulnerable groups such as migrants or LGBTQ communities. Secondly, we will address these key concerns through drawing on the comparative and complementary strengths of our two partners, Wits University's strengths in detailed local historical, ethnographic and qualitative research and generating impact in South African policy networks and Edinburgh's strength in methods, especially interdisciplinary approaches. Thirdly, the project will draw on Edinburgh's expertise in quantitative methods and data science, and the project is designed to build the research capacity of Wits University researchers in new approaches and generate future collaborative research.

We have identified several beneficiaries who will gain from this project. These are DfID, South African civil society groups, and the South African government at a local, provincial and national level.

1. Government
The knowledge generated in this project will greatly benefit the strategic aims and missions of several national government departments. For example, the Department of Social Development's strategic aim to 'reduce deprivation and protect poor and vulnerable members of our society by expanding its social assistance and social welfare services' will be greatly aided by a more incisive analysis of everyday lives on the urban margins. Likewise the Department of Health will be better able to appreciate health risks and service uptake amongst vulnerable populations to aid in their mission to provide 'access, equity, efficiency, quality and sustainability' of healthcare, and the Department of Labour will have a clearer idea of the challenges complicating their mission to provide 'social and income protection'.
The research agenda also helps inform the creation of new Integrated Development Plans at a municipal level in 2017. Understanding the security risks and strategies of vulnerable populations in peri-urban areas is crucial if IDPs are going to help build 'sustainable human settlements and viable communities, improve all public services... and fight poverty'.
Finally, our work will benefit portfolio committees, working groups, and departments who focus directly on the marginal populations groups that we study, such as Department of Justice and Constitutional Development through their National Action Plan on Racism and Xenophobia, the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs, the Technical Working Group on Migration, Mobility and HIV, and - at a local level - institutions like the City of Johannesburg's Migration Unit. Key stakeholders from these groups will be involved in the project's advisory panel, sharing their research needs, learning the findings of our 'urban labs' as our research agenda evolves.

2. Civil Society
South Africa has a rich civil society with key groups committed to providing protection and support to migrants and sexual minorities. Adopting the principles and priorities of the MoVE research approach at ACMS by blending social action and research, our research network would seek to engage civil society at all stages of our research: Placing key stakeholders on our advisory panel; collaborating with organisations and individuals in the shaping of our research questions; providing training so that affected populations can act as research assistants or engage in auto-ethnography, and sharing the findings of our 'urban labs' projects with them.
In doing so we would help to empower, capacitate, and inform both individuals from the affected populations and groups working with the LGBTQ community - Lesbian and Gay Equality Project, Out, Gender Dynamix, The Triangle Project - and groups working with the migrant community - Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA), the Johannesburg Migrant Health Forum, SANGOCO, SA Red Cross, Gift of the Givers, Abahlali baseMjondolo, South African Council of Churches. Groups working specifically with migrant sex workers - the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) and Sisonke, the national sex movement - will also be included.

3. Department of International Development
Understanding insecurities faced by urban Others and the spaces and strategies they utilise to negotiate their security, is central to our understanding of vulnerability and resilience. DfID's increasing attention to 'resilience' stems from their realisation that by cultivating resilience they can move towards their vision of 'a world that is healthier, more stable and increasingly prosperous'. New research methods and evidence will help DfID to engage with lives on the margins, strengthening initiatives to improve wellbeing.