Governing at the Edges: Migration, Informality and Multi-Level Politics in Musina’s Peripheral Spaces

Peripheral and non-urban spaces have become central to contemporary migration governance, yet research often focuses on metropolitan contexts when analysing how mobility, authority, and belonging are negotiated. This paper examines Musina, a South African border town shaped by mixed, circular, and undocumented migration from Zimbabwe, to explore how governance functions in areas where the state is intermittently present and where migrants live in legal, social, and infrastructural precarity. Drawing on participatory action research conducted in 2024–2025, including community workshops, farm-compound mapping, mobility-route mapping, and qualitative engagements with migrant women, men, and farm workers, the paper questions how migrants experience, interpret, and navigate governance in a non-urban borderland. The findings reveal that Musina functions through a fragmented, layered system of governance. Official state structures such as clinics, hospitals, police stations, and social workers exist geographically but are often not experienced by many migrants due to documentation barriers and exclusionary bureaucratic practices. This was evident in participatory mapping exercises where participants deliberately omitted the hospital and police station, noting that these institutions provide little practical access or protection. Instead, migrants rely on informal infrastructures and social networks that serve as alternative forms of governance. Garages, for example, act as 24-hour information centres for new arrivals; farms offer employment opportunities that do not require documentation; and “gathering trees,” churches, and informal service nodes become vital sites for support, mental wellbeing, and community life. These findings demonstrate how peripheral spaces are continually created and reshaped through migrant practices, risk negotiations, and the symbolic and material meanings attached to everyday places. The Limpopo River influences Musina’s border dynamics, seasonal flooding, cross-border banditry (Magweja), and mixed-status mobility, creating an informal migration system that often replaces formal governance. Migrants’ movements, choices, and well-being are affected not just by state policies but also by environmental hazards, informal protection networks, and social connections that help navigate a fragile environment. This makes Musina a place where sovereignty, care, and exclusion are enacted through multiple actors at various levels: state agencies, NGOs, faith-based organisations, informal brokers, farm owners, and migrants themselves. The paper contends that Musina exemplifies a form of bordered rurality where governance cannot be understood through urban-centric frameworks. Instead, governance of peripheral migration arises from the intersection of formal authority, informal systems, and migrant agency. By highlighting migrants’ spatial knowledge and participatory mapping insights, the paper demonstrates how space-making, peripheralisation, and mobility governance are experienced, contested, and co-produced in non-urban settings. This analysis contributes to theoretical debates on core–periphery relations and offers new perspectives on how migration politics unfold beyond the city, especially in borderlands where state power is dispersed and everyday governance is negotiated at the margins.