Recent decades have seen a surge in extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric in many countries and regions, including the Southern African Region, despite the African Union's emphasis on continental mobility as a key aspect of sustainable development. Xenophobia, a form of hatred directed at foreigners, immigrants, and people who are perceived as foreigners, has been flooding social media. The COVID-19 pandemic further amplified xenophobic sentiment in politics, the media, and online, especially toward Chinese people and people of East Asian descent (Shen et al. 2022). Documented harms to groups and individuals range from fear and dignitary insults to increased face-to-face encounters and hate-motivated violence. At the policy level, anti-immigrant sentiment leads to enforcement policies that shock the conscience. Political candidates and government leaders have “bully pulpit” options such as modulating speech about immigrants and emphasizing positive rather than punitive immigration policy, but the malleability of public sentiment encourages them to take the low road. Inter-governmental bodies and civil society, including academia, are responding to this devastating trend.

South Africa was one of the first - if not the first - country to develop a national action plan to address xenophobia. The plan was soon criticized for falling short of the “radically transformative agenda” needed to address escalating violence against immigrants effectively (Dratwa 2024). Though traditionally a country of origin, Zambia is also a country of transit and a host to migrant communities. Zambia “awoke to [the] scourge” of xenophobia in a 2016 incident of mass violence against Rwandan refugees in Lusaka (Akinola 2018). As the tenth anniversary of this attack approaches, our speakers will discuss deeper meanings behind xenophobia and how the Southern African Region is addressing this scourge.

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Panelists

O’Brien Kaaba is a Lecturer in Law and Assistant Dean for Research in the School of Law at the University of Zambia, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR). His expertise spans comparative constitutional law, African human rights, and protection of outsider groups. Dr. Kaaba has held numerous policy roles. He formerly served in Zambia as the elections manager for the national Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), political specialist for he US Department of State at the US Embassy, Lusaka, and as a human rights and rule of law advisor for the germany Development Cooperation (GIZ). A graduate of the Central European University and the University of Zambia School of Law, Dr. Kaaba is the co-editor of Democracy and Electoral Politics in Zambia (Brill, 2020).

George Makari is Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, Dr. Makari is Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he also is in clinical practice. For over a decade, he was the director of the Payne Whitney low-cost psychotherapy clinic. He is Guest Professor at both Rockefeller University and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. A historian, essayist, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist, Dr. Makari is the author of Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction of the year, and a New York Times Editor's Choice. He also wrote Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, a 2015 Guardian Best Book of the Year that the Wall Street Journal called "brilliant" and "essential reading," and the widely acclaimed Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, which the Financial Times called "magisterial." His books have been translated into twelve languages. His essays have won numerous honors and have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Raritan, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He conducts a podcast with artists and writers on the nature of the imagination. He is a graduate of Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.

Moderator

Beth Lyon is a Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School where she serves as Associate Dean for Experiential Education, Clinical Program Director, and Founding Director of the Farmworker Legal Assistance Clinic. Prior to joining the Cornell Law faculty, Professor Lyon worked at Villanova Law School, Washington College of Law, American University, and Human Rights First, and held internships at Ayuda, Comisión Andina de Juristas, Friends of the Earth, and Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. Her clinic provides free deportation defense services and policy research support to low-income farmworkers and farmworker communities. Her areas of scholarly focus include domestic and international migrant and farmworker rights, language access to justice, controlling government xenophobic speech, and provision of legal services to rural minorities. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and the Georgetown University Law Center, Professor Lyon lives in Ithaca with her family.

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