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In 2015, the Zimbabwean government announced that street vendors had one week to clear the streets or the national army would be deployed against them. This was part of a long-standing campaign of disavowing and displacing vendors. Yet street vendors are integral to economic life in Zimbabwe. In this paper, I examine vending and its policing. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Zimbabwe to ask what underlies the vitriol and violence targeted at vendors. I propose that vending is more than a constellation of individual traders and that its politics extend beyond the conceptions of (il)legality that often characterize debates around street trade. Rather, vending has weaved itself into an infrastructure of economic life in Zimbabwe, facilitating vital flows and undergirding an economy rocked by economic turmoil. Yet vending operates as an infrastructure of disavowal at the nexus of citizenry and spatial politics, as "unwanted" persons operate in unauthorized spaces. Recognizing vending as infrastructural opens up consideration of a decolonial approach to infrastructure and urban governance in African cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid economic and sociopolitical turmoil in Zimbabwe, police roadblocks proliferated throughout the country, creating sites not only of extraction but also of citizen engagement. These sites show that sociality mediates policing, as police and policed together negotiate the precarities of living in the wake of crisis. Roadblocks are key to the performance of the state as such. Yet this occasions the very stage on which the state's failings are manifested, as officers are rendered highly visible and scrutable on the road—this visibility is central to sociality, in a mechanism of power that relies on enfleshing the system of policing by those through whom the state acts. Whereas conceptualizations of governance in Africa often take people as a corrupting element, here, the peopling of the system is central to its operation. Encounters at roadblocks invite a reconsideration of reified ideals of policing and power in governance, including reified concepts of disciplinary power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The minister of police and other prominent politicians have interpreted violence against foreign nationals as 'just crime', implying that it is criminally motivated, and thus denying the presence or relevance of xenophobic motivations. This article deconstructs this claim by showing that the police have in factreacted strongly and specifically to this kind of 'crime'; analyses the assumptions about perpetrator motivations implicit in it; and reflects on the normative and political flavourings of terms such as 'crime' and 'xenophobia' suggested by the claim that violence against foreign nationals is 'only' crime. The article concludes by examining the implications of the distinction between 'xenophobia' and 'crime' in terms of shaping institutional responses to violence against foreign nationals and influencing general perceptions of xenophobia, including those of potential perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]