Urban Fringes and Forced Migration: Refugees’ Survival Strategies in Camps in East Africa (original) (raw)
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Abraka Humanities Review, 2023
In the last few years, the world has witnessed a surge in refugees escaping from violence in one form or another, leading world leaders to adopt a new framework for addressing the crisis. The central idea of this framework is to support hosting countries in integrating refugees into their development plans, moving away from camplike interventions to an approach that enhances mobility and freedom for refugees. Despite being hosted in camps, displaced populations have found ways of interacting with their humanitarian space through developing socioeconomic relationships amongst themselves and with their host communities, thereby contributing actively to the development of the local economy.
African Studies Review
A significant number of refugees in Africa choose to live outside of designated camps; they locate in urban areas instead for a variety of reasons, including seeking better access to economic opportunities and social services such as schools or health facilities. While the amount of research on urban refugees in Africa has grown in recent years, it remains much more limited compared to the research conducted on refugees living inside traditional refugee camps. Refugee Spaces and Urban Citizenship in Nairobi: Africa's Sanctuary City by Derese G. Kassa represents a welcome endeavor that seeks to narrow this gap. Drawing upon urban theories, the author examines multiple aspects of the quotidian lives of Ethiopian refugees living in Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi is seen as a "melting pot" of refugees from various neighboring African countries; nevertheless, most of the published scholarly works have focused either on Somali refugees or to a lesser extent on Congolese refugees, the two largest refugee populations in the Kenyan capital. From an empirical perspective, a study on Ethiopian refugees thus provides an important contribution to the existing forced migration literature. The book consists of five chapters. Chapter One, "Setting the Scene," sets out the key arguments, drawing upon urban citizenship literature, in particular Henry Lefebvre's concept of "The Right to the City," as a main theoretical framework for the book. Chapter Two, "Africa's Sanctuary City," provides the research context, including a brief history of Nairobi and of refugee influxes to Kenya. It also includes an overview of the research methods; the author employed interviewing as a key data collection tool and conducted a total of fifty interviews during the research period. The subsequent two chapters present the empirical findings. Chapter Three, "The Making of Urban Refugees," gives a detailed profile of Ethiopian refugees in Nairobi and explores the ways in which they navigate the range of challenges as well as opportunities available to them in the city. This chapter also discusses their livelihood strategies, including some businesses established by refugees, such as restaurants and beauty salons. It also highlights
Forced migration and displacement in Africa: contexts, causes and consequences
African Geographical Review
The impetus for this special issue is the continuing need to identify, deconstruct, situate, analyze and re-situate the regional, national and internecine conflicts which drive the forced migration of citizens of the continent, and their impacts on the lived experiences of those Africans forced to flee their homes. The contributors to this special issue elucidate the impacts of these conflicts, their spatial, material and place-driven forms, as well as the processes by which refugees, internally displaced persons, and people displaced by environmental factors establish and navigate network, material and economic resources in the course of flight and re-location. These resources enable, inhibit, or make complex the routes and paths required to forge means of survival and sustainability in the making of these new geographies of living. The experience of forced migration, as these authors explore, involve, from the outset, people becoming identified in a multitude of bureaucratic ways that are of great consequence to the outcomes of their lives (Zetter, 1991). Displaced people take on new identities as encamped or urban refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs'), environmentally displaced persons (EDP's) or those refugees who have been resettled abroad in the course of their personal geography of dislocation and relocation. Contributors to this special issue are committed to debunking stereotypes of Africa as a continent in perpetual dire straits, wherein war, famine, unending streams of refugees, and the need for charity define the order of the day. Yet, the persistent issue of forced migration across the globe, not excluding Africa, renders its vast territory, these authors evince, a place where critical perspectives and narratives reveal the nuances, intricacies, and numerous complexities constituting the very human phenomena that is forced migration. Moreover, Africa's diversity, dynamism, and changing political landscapes and spaces, policy formations and specificities of place render the need to research how peoples, communities and states on the continent contend with the daunting human challenges posed by forced migrations. This special issue is concerned to foreground the ways in which African-forced migrants are individually and collectively forging spaces of survival, and embarking on geographies and practices of adaptation to the forced re-location of their entire lives. This collection of articles centers human agency in interaction with places, routes and networks that foreground the means by which people are contending with their status as displaced persons. Constructing and deconstructing refugeehood in Africa remains a continuous concern-as western media images and reportage regularly reinscribes incomplete and reductionist perspectives on displacement in Africa. Geographer Angela Subuwla (2012) affirms this need to destabilize the 'refugee crisis-centric' constructions, discourses and practices associated with such representations. Indeed, this project, as
Refugee Coloniality: An Afrocentric Analysis of Prolonged Encampment in Kenya
PhD, 2021
This thesis is a critical examination of ‘prolonged’ refugee encampment in Kenya. By foregrounding encampment in Kenya, the thesis demonstrates how the camp – a temporary solution to the refugee phenomenon – has become a permanent institution for the concentration of so many refugees. With 33 of 54 African nations establishing some of the largest refugee camps in the world, millions of refugees have effectively become in situ, trapped in prolonged encampment. Current approaches such as the institutionalisation of the camp and the securitisation of borders, are critically analysed by placing the problem of refugee encampment against the context of colonial relations in Africa. Refugee encampment prevents free movement across borders and those borders must be understood, this thesis argues, as part of the legacy and persistence of colonial power. Methodologically, this thesis is an interdisciplinary undertaking; a critical legal analysis of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the 1951 Convention), the 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (the 1969 Convention), and Kenyan domestic legislation relevant to refugees. It uses the socio-political and cultural frameworks of the camp, and key themes such as securitisation, sovereignty, borders, campzenship and Ujamaa to reveal the colonial/imperial continuity embedded within encampment paradigm. The interdisciplinary methodology applies diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks to the legal texts/laws that regulate the existence and persistence of the camp as a permanent security architecture. Addressing encampment as emanating from colonially bordered Africa reveals the continuation of the colonial logics structuring prolonged encampment while also highlighting that current theoretical and practical approaches to resolve the problem have failed. As such, this thesis makes a significant contribution to knowledge by enriching scholarly understanding of the camp. This thesis offers a detailed and nuanced reading of the role played by international refugee law in producing the problem of prolonged encampment in Africa. Inspired by my own embodied history of encampment in Kenya, this thesis models and advances an Afrocentric approach to understanding prolonged encampment in Africa.
A Post-Cold War Geography of Forced Migration in Kenya and Somalia
Drawing on recent research in the Horn of Africa, emerging patterns of managing forced migration in the post-Cold War landscape are identified and analyzed. While camps continue to house refugees, the meaning and value of 'refugee' have changed dramatically since the Cold War. Efforts to prevent people from crossing political borders to seek safety are increasing, giving rise to a new set of safe spaces. These new spaces are expressions of a distinct geopolitical discourse and take the names 'UN protected area', 'preventive zone', and 'safe haven'. Their significance as a challenge to state-centric geopolitics both within conflict zones and as refugee camps is explored in the Kenya-Somalia context.
2008
Africa is a useful compendium of displacement issues and a significant contribution to the resource base of a fairly well established academic fraternity engaging with Africa oriented refugee studies. As suggested in the title, displacement in this text is primarily concerned with refugees or displaced populations who physically relocate, rather than nonrelocation displacement. A focus on the overall nature of the refugee and displacement predicament in Africa in terms of reintegration and resettlement is addressed as Part One. Jeff Crisp provides a comprehensive review of the nature of protracted refugee situations. The message is that there is no reason to believe there will be an end to it, but that vital lessons are waiting to be learnt in dealing with the inevitability of long-term refugeedom. Furthermore, building risk into displacement analyses highlights how prevention of displacement impacts could avoid grappling with often-ineffective cures. The editors point out that 'discourse and instruments focus on the treatment of effects rather than causes of human uprooting' (p.6), a sentiment that is supported by several of the contributions