Paper short abstract:

In Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, political activists that engage in their 'home' countries' party politics risk forced disappearance. As a result, political actors use religious spaces for security, transforming the forms of political practice within the camp.

Paper long abstract:

In Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, refugees are prohibited from participating in party politics by the camp's managerial bodies, the UNHCR and the Kenyan Refugee Affairs Secretariat, in accordance to the OAU refugee convention. These institutions attempt to limit refugees' political activity to community leadership roles that they bestow and control. Refugees that engage in their 'home' countries' party politics in these camps risk forced disappearance by various trans/national state actors working on behalf of foreign governments, such as the South Sudanese government. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research in Kakuma and Kalobeyei, this paper examines the effect of disappearances on two political groups and their actors, the SPLM-IO and a Somali organisation. The analysis builds upon scholarship that engages with 'shadow' organisations (Nugent, 1999; Nordstrom, 2004) to critically examine the effect of forced disappearance on political communities (Huttunen, 2016) and their understandings of the state (Krupa & Nugent, 2015). I argue that forced disappearances of political actors produce an effect that shapes an understanding of the state, while simultaneously changing the political actors' social lives and political communities. This effect also has tangible and material consequences, forcing political activists and agitators to operate in spaces not considered political by the camp authorities, such as churches and Sufi lodges. Within these religious spaces, political actors reconstruct understandings of the Kenyan state and also their 'home' states of South Sudan and Somalia.