ABSTRACT

Extended exile is exacerbated by states in the global North when they externalize asylum and refuse access to their borders, while managing refugees in their “regions of origin.” The prevailing international refugee regime, its “durable solutions” and international refugee law no longer align with salient contemporary geopolitics, leaving the vast majority of refugees in conditions of long-term displacement. The first two chapters have traced theoretical and global perspectives on the scope and intransigence of protracted displacement. The value of such “big pictures” should be apparent: most refugees worldwide are stuck in conditions of extended exile. We are also committed to analyzing the “smaller pictures” at finer scales of analysis, and their co-production with local, national and global power relations (Pain & Smith, 2008). In this chapter, we present our own research of protracted human displacement in two specific contexts: Afghans in Iran; and Somalian refugees in Kenya. We begin this chapter by highlighting salient findings and then contextualizing

conditions of “temporary” asylum among Somalian refugees in the Dadaab refugee camps and in Nairobi, and then for Afghans in Tehran and Zahedan in Iran. We then move on to the fine-grained analysis of livelihoods and decisions made by Somalians and Afghans facing protracted exile. Our choice of research sites was prompted by a growing awareness in the mid-2000s that humanitarian policies are universal and often carried out homogeneously across the board in diverse refugee settlements. The temporary asylum experiences of Afghan and Somalian refugees in Iran and Kenya differ markedly, and so do the geopolitical contexts of their flight and reception in the host countries. Nonetheless, common questions about their locations, livelihoods and futures make this juxtaposition a productive one. Our interest in the quotidian conditions of temporary refuge is based on our desire to know how refugees have made these very different and marginalized sites “into places of life, relationships and identification” (Agier, 2011b: 180). To start, we outline several key findings from this research. First, while

long-term refugee situations are pervasive throughout the world, the conditions of temporary asylum vary greatly. For example, in Iran almost all Afghans are located in towns and cities and only a small number live in camps, most of whom are from impoverished rural backgrounds. In contrast, the Kenyan

government aims to contain refugees in isolated camps and actively discourages urban settlement, despite the tenacious informal presence of many refugees in Nairobi. Most Somalian refugees living in cities are sans papiers, and face police round-ups and requests for bribes in order to remain in urban areas. The inclusion of camp and urban refugee contexts allows us to analyze and juxtapose these different arrangements. A second salient finding is that livelihoods, and the independence and

meaning that they generate among refugees, make lives livable, as long as the host government allows them to stay. Afghan refugees have been allowed to work in Iran, providing they do not take jobs away from Iranians. They have historically been welcomed in Iran as migrant or temporary workers, as long as they are economically productive and will accept low wages and precarious working conditions (Stigter & Monsutti, 2005). During times of war and increased militarization in Afghanistan, they have tended to enter Iran as refugees. The migration of Afghans has historically swung between movements of migrant workers and of refugees, yet Afghans in Iran are constantly weighing their options to return during periods of calm in Afghanistan, as authors of their lives in ways that have not often been available to Somalians in Kenyan camps. Despite the uncertainty of life under the label of “refugee,” most of the Afghans interviewed do not desire to return quickly to Afghanistan if schools are not as good and job prospects less fruitful than in Iran. In contrast, exiled Somalians in Kenya are prohibited from seeking or holding

employment, thus creating conditions of dependency on erratic international aid and frustration among camp residents. Some move to the cities and engage in the informal economy to support themselves. Similar to the situation of Afghans in Iran, by refusing to provide work permits to refugees, the government of Kenya increases the vulnerability of Somalians in the informal employment sector (Horst, 2006). In the camps, they are able to access a very limited number of camp-based jobs as volunteers in schools and international agencies where they are paid an honorarium or “incentive wage” at a fraction of that which Kenyans are paid for the same job. A third area of concern is the ontological insecurity and precariousness, or

precarity, that long-term displaced people confront in both Kenya and Iran, as in other parts of the world. The tenuous status of “permanent temporariness” (Bailey et al., 2002) is manifest every day, in all aspects of life, including access to employment, food, health, education and housing. Alison Mountz (2010) has called the process that shapes the behavior of people living in longterm exile as “transnational panopticism.” By this, she means that they behave as though the host state is watching them, highly self-aware about how they are perceived by the public and the state. Their actions are often those of “model citizens” who aspire to be full legal residents with permanent status in their temporary home. While Mountz refers to Salvadoran refugees in the US under a temporary protection regime, she demonstrates that the quotidian effects of precarity can be tangible, performative and debilitating when they result in no change in material well-being or legal status.