Compatible Compacts? The 'social life' of vulnerability, migration governance and protection at the Zimbabwe - South Africa border

Do the Global Compacts’ engagement with questions of vulnerability match with the realities of African migrants living on the African continent? In this article, we engage this discussion using South Africa as a case study to examine the representation of vulnerability in the Global Compact on Migration (GCM) and Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) and how these approaches interact with the everyday experiences of irregular migrants in South Africa. We examine this relationship by looking at a humanitarian border space that has been significantly shaped and transformed by migration and humanitarian interventions in the past two decades.