ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, we introduced the externalization of asylum and the geopolitics that aim to keep refugees in their “regions of origin.” Advancing that analysis, this chapter illustrates how refugees who have fled violence may themselves become threats through the politics of securitization. While refugee protection and state security are not mutually exclusive, they are in acute tension in some contexts of protracted displacement, especially among Somalian refugees living in the Dadaab camps of Kenya. Scholars have long analyzed the possibility of “refugee warriors” (Zolberg et al., 1989), who might play a role as combatants or sympathizers in the conflicts that displace them, but the notion of “refugee terrorists” introduces a distinct twist on this scholarship. This chapter presents a case of “embodied geopolitics” whereby international humanitarian aid workers, Kenyan security personnel and Somalian refugees all become politically inflected subjects, if not of their own choosing. Humanitarian efforts to assist refugees in sanctioned camps supervised by
the UN normally exist quite separately from counterterrorism measures to mitigate security threats. When these two projects do converge spatially in camps, however, refugees may come to be seen as security threats. Somalian refugees living in the Dadaab camps of northeast Kenya illustrate this tension and dilemma all too well. Refugees are sometimes perceived as a threat greater than the violent conditions they have fled. In such cases, national security tends to trump refugee protection. Fear of Al-Shabaab (“the Youth”) rebel movement based in south-central Somalia is not without foundation, given its incursions onto Kenyan soil and the brutal killing of Kenyan security forces guarding the camps and deadly attacks on Kenyan citizens, including 147 people at Garissa University in 2015 who were mostly students (BBC, 2015). Al-Shabaab is implicated in the abduction of international aid workers in refugee camps and of tourists from France and Britain. The subsequent suspicion cast on Somalians living as refugees in the camps exacerbates their already precarious status in long-term exile. When refugees are construed as a threat, steps are taken to lock down the
open-air camps and monitor their inhabitants, managing their mobility in exclusionary ways. Such securitization, a concept we unpack below, consolidates but also destabilizes their already extended exile after more than
two decades of displacement. This chapter traces how the humanitarian space of refugee camps collides with Kenya’s own national security concerns, and more global concerns about the “war on terror” linked to the Dadaab camps in northeast Kenya.1 The scale and meaning of “security” are probed with a view to framing the violence, kidnappings and insecurity in the camps in new ways. By definition, refugees lack legal protection from their own governments which are either unable or unwilling to guarantee the rights and safety of citizens. While they too are seeking security from human rights abuses, persecution and violent conflict, they can become objects of suspicion and perceived sources of insecurity. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US dramatically
decreased its refugee admissions, authorized by Congress each year (Martin, 2005). While there was no obvious link to the events of 9/11, and not one of the 19 suicide bombers was a refugee or asylum seeker, refugees were viewedwith deep suspicion, if only because they often came from the same countries or regions as people linked to the “war on terror.” Asylum claims and approvals in the US since 2001 have become increasingly scrutinized and require a heightened burden of proof, new corroboration requirements and a more exclusive definition of membership in a social group: “Terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility have led to the exclusion of thousands of refugees and denials and delays in hundreds of asylum cases …” (Kerwin, 2011: 1). The US government, at least, appears to err on the side of precluding asylum applications altogether, rather than sifting through the evidence. Yet refugees flee countries like Somalia because lawless rebels act with impunity, recruit youth to their cause and make it impossible for some Somalian citizens to stay at home. We use “war on terror” in quotation marks to denote inflammatory and
politicized language that rationalizes extraordinary security measures. It does nothing to question the use of state violence against criminals or rebel forces in war, or demand accountability for such violence. The very nomenclature “terrorist” ushers in the emergency and produces the threat on which securitization is predicated. It tacitly authorizes extraordinary, even extra-legal, measures on the part of governments, where legal instruments that criminalize violent behavior or codify them as war crimes exist. Terrorism is a state-centric concept in that governments tend to have a monopoly on defining “terrorist,” instilling the name with their authority and legitimacy. When the Kenyan state calls Somalian refugees “terrorists,” they also serve to undermine the ontological security of those living in the camps by introducing even greater uncertainty and precarity for them. We begin by defining the two principal concepts that underpin this chapter and by extension the book: securitization and ontological in/security.
