ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the refugee threat to a host state's security has been presented in terms of the real and imagined links to terrorism. It examines how refugees in Kenya and Tanzania have been linked to the terrorist threat in both countries and, in the process, further constructed as security threats. East Africa's vulnerability to terrorism is linked to the region's geographical proximity to and historical bond with the Middle East, which have facilitated the movements of terrorist agents within and across the two regions and to the presence and cross-border movement of refugees. The chapter then examines the refugee-terrorism nexus. The heads of state of the Great Lakes region countries have also declared the Forces Nationales de Libration (FNL), the armed wing of PALIPEHUTU, a terrorist organisation. So far, however, there has been little empirical evidence to warrant generalisations about a refugee-terrorism nexus in Kenya and Tanzania.
