Non-Migration Amidst Zimbabwe's Economic Meltdown addresses the complexities surrounding non-migration in Zimbabwe within the context of protracted political and economic uncertainty. Rose Jaji discusses how individual subjectivities mediate macroeconomic factors and critiques simplistic explanations of non-migration, paying particular attention the complexities and contradictions involved in the decision not to migrate. The book ends with a discussion of the synergistic relationship between non-migration and migration, demonstrating how one can morph into the other in response to evolving individual circumstances and macroeconomic factors.

In this book the author addresses the tenacity of the nation-state and how it continues to regulate transnational migration. She critiques assumptions on motivations embedded in the North-South dichotomy and shows how motivations transcend the regional divide with specific reference to non-missionary migrants in Zimbabwe in relation to South-North migrants. She also addresses Zimbabwe’s non-conformity to the conventional profile of a destination country. The circumstances of migrants from the global North living in Zimbabwe also challenge the migration lexicon in which countries and mobile populations are named and categorized in an either/or schematic. The author addresses spatial demarcation of space premised on the colonial dividend and neoliberalism’s influence on the organization and occupation of urban space. She specifically juxtaposes non-missionary migrants’ lives in the gated communities of Harare with those of missionaries in the low-income neighborhoods and at a rural hospital. She analyzes transnational outcomes in relation to the liminality that multi-sited belonging and cosmopolitanism engender.