Governing Refugee Disposability: Neoliberalism and Survival in Nairobi

ABSTRACT

Kenya currently hosts around half a million refugees in two of the world's largest refugee camps in Dadaab and Kakuma. While these camps have held refugees for nearly three decades, they face ongoing threats of closure resulting in an uptick of urban refugees in Nairobi. This article places refugees in the context of urban disposability and hinges this concept on three interrelated aspects: citizenship, housing, and income-based survival against the backdrop of neoliberalisation in Kenya. Lack of state support and widespread xenophobia on the national scale has led to piecemeal market-based policies of self-reliance such as microfinance and entrepreneurship as institution-led strategies for survival. These solutions forego refugee life in favour of capital accumulation creating unsustainable indebtedness and poverty on the urban scale. I argue that urban refugees are rendered disposable populations and are forced to survive through informal structures within Kenyan neoliberalism. In doing this, refugees are not passively wasted populations, rather, they are brought into the folds of capital accumulation through modes of survival based on self-reliance.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• migration
• surplus populations
• race
• urban refugees

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the generous W.C Good Memorial Fellowship at Queen's University and the IDRC for their International Doctoral Research Award. I would also like to thank Susanne Soederberg for her keen insight and constant support, along with the adjudicators of the Robert and Jessie W. Cox award at the ISA for honouring an earlier draft of this paper. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ali Bhagat is a W.C Good Memorial Fellow and IDRC Doctoral Award Recipient at Queen's University. His work focuses ondisplacement in the global North and South within the context of racial capitalism.

ORCID

Ali Bhagat http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9329-1019

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by International Development Research Centre [Doctoral Research Award].