Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how communities along Sudan and south Sudan borders surpass hurdles created by state structures that followed the secession of South Sudan in 2011.

Paper long abstract:

South Sudan voted for secession from Sudan in July 2011. The boundaries (social and administrative) were thus made into international borders. Legally, people along the borders of the two countries suddenly became part of either of the two countries although, sociologically, they belonged to both. The borderline between Sudan and South Sudan lies in the most fertile and resourceful zone and this means that as much as this provides opportunities for border communities, it can also pose challenges. Immediately after secession, borders between Sudan and South Sudan were sealed; making it difficult for communities along the border to move across. This paper looks at the dynamics at the Sudan-South Sudan border to see how people procure their social security beyond state regulation regimes and structures that restrict people's options.

Paper short abstract:

Migrants that has escaped to the town of Maroua from the Boko Haram insurgeny, navigate complex conditions marked by continuities in their utilizaton of priviously established networks, and rupturs in the ways the cross border population is attempted devided according to nationalities.

Paper long abstract:

Maroua, the province capital of the Extreme North province in Cameroon, has received numerous migrants from the border areas with North-Eastern Nigeria as a consequence of the Boko Haram insurgency. The extreeme violence has been well documented by the media. My interest is how these people on the move navigate the complex and fluent conditions they are faced with. Continuities exists in the ways the migrants make use of previously established networks - religious and business networks, relatives, friends, ethnicity. But the conditions are also marked by ruptures. Families have been dispersed and have lost their previous livelyhood, but also the way the Cameroonian state and the UN/NGO systems attempt to separate internally displaced Cameroonians and Nigerian refugees creates ruptures. The authorities pretends that they are able to order the migrants into these two categories in a neat and tidy way. As cross border citizens, the migrants have multiple identities and have earlier been floating quite freely across the boarder. Based on their resources the migrants now tries to navigate the established categories of refugee and internally displaced in order to realize social security and economic opportunities.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on research on refugees and South Sudanese transnational networks in the Horn of Africa and beyond, this paper will explore the impact of long-term forced displacement on societies with little history of strong central authority. What new formations emerge and what are their implications?

Paper long abstract:

This paper will draw primarily on two bodies of work: research into South Sudanese transnational networks based on fieldwork in South Sudan, Gambella and Melbourne that has sought to understand and describe the economic, social and political impact of these networks from the perspective of individuals and communities living in the Horn of Africa; and research into the impact of current refugee policies and programming on the choices and perspectives of refugees and borderland communities in Ethiopia.

It will set out the findings of this research through a governance lens, seeking to understand the new forms of governance that have emerged out of the chronic displacement of the last half century, the unintended consequences of the international legal regime related to refugees, and the ways in which these new forms of governance transcend and exploit existing state structures.

It will explore the implications for both national and transnational governance, from the perspective of both conflict-affected countries and those that have received refugee populations. It will place the agency of displaced people at the heart of this analysis, asking whether a keener understanding of the nature of mobility in the 21st can better inform policymaking in such environments.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyse the Congolese War Economy through tree main concepts: the war habitus, the anthropological regionalism in the Great Lakes Region and the Middleman figure. I will show how social network and refugee camps can be understand as an economic infrastructure to sell ore hand by hand

Paper long abstract:

How anthropological interactions in Eastern DRC and in the Great Lakes region enable the war economy to take place as a normality? I will conceptualise two main figures, the "middlemen" (Bonacich) and the "masterless men" (Trapido) (versus the figure of the "big men") to show how "informal" social network (de Villers, de Boeck, Ayimpam) can be understood as an economic infrastructure (Elyachar) to extract ore and sell it hand by hand. Through a multi-sited fieldwork, I will focus on two main activities: rebel's recruitment as a war force and ore traffic as a war profit. I will focus on refugee camps as a strategic place.

As factual as these activities are (rebels recruitment and ore trafficking), the anthropological context needs to be understood to show how people can so easily take part in the regional war economy. More precisely, I will draw two contextual concept before drawing my main argument, I call the first one the "war habitus", considering that I will demonstrate why the Bourdieusian concept needs to be contextualized. And the second one will show how big the regional social interrelations are among Eastern Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda (or even Kenya), questioning the very notion of citizenship and nationality (and so the notion of "refugee" and "National State") in an anthropological and regional perspective. This paper will be an economic, conflict and post-conflict analysis that contributes to the understanding of the social interactions in the Great Lakes region.

Paper short abstract:

Refugees from East Africa and the Horn of Africa have used securitized humanitarian programs in ways not intended and not always desired by governments, as they attempt to use them to preserve moral obligations and sociality across national and continental borders.

Paper long abstract:

The U.S. refugee resettlement system is a highly bureaucratized and complex assemblage of humanitarian and security systems, increasingly under scrutiny now during the Trump regime. Refugees living in places such as Kenya work to manage the uncertainty, arbitrariness, and apparent unfairness of refugee resettlement programs. While individual safety, security, healing, and dreams are central to motivating people's resettlement aspirations these programs have also fundamentally been woven into existing norms of obligation to kin. In this paper, I show that while governmental and non-governmental officials working in resettlement regard one of their primary obligations as protecting the integrity of their programs by separating true from false claims, refugees often have obligations to kin and community that conflict with official notions of truth telling. Refugees have used securitized humanitarian programs in ways not intended and not always desired by governments like the United States, as they attempt to use these programs to preserve moral obligations and sociality across national and continental borders. In doing so, they continually develop security and opportunity where it fails to be provided, and is even threatened, by states. This paper is based on 24 months of ethnographic research with Somali and Congolese refugees in Nairobi, Kenya and in Columbus, Ohio.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how local forms of political community and citizenship have been forged in the western South Sudan-Uganda borderlands over the past century. It suggests that anti-witchcraft measures reveal both the overlaps and spaces between state and local forms of authority and citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how local forms of political community and citizenship have been forged in the western South Sudan-Uganda borderlands, particularly by those seeking to define, regulate and govern these small-scale communities. Going back to the nineteenth century and drawing on oral histories, the paper will emphasise the long history of migration and movement in this frontier region. Yet in spite - or perhaps because - of the mobility and fluidity of social and political relations and identities in this borderland, local authorities have attempted to assert and govern communities defined by ancestral belonging to a localised territory. In doing so they have drawn on ritual relationships with the land, often asserting these as a counterforce to the dislocating, translocal power of governments, armies and sometimes churches. Yet the increasingly powerful idea of bounded communities emerges also from the long-term interactions with state attempts to categorise and control people on both sides of this boundary, as well as from broader changes in land values and rights. The paper argues that these multiple sources for envisioning and enforcing territorial communities are particularly apparent in the attempts by various local authorities to offer solutions to the threat of witchcraft and poisoning. Because witchcraft is frequently located outside the realm and capacity of the state legal regime, it is particularly useful as a focus of action for those working to carve out and defend more localised regimes of authority and citizenship, even as they define their jurisdictions in relation to the state.

Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to show how the South Sudanese refugees in Kakuma have deployed social and religious networks and groups as strategies to preserve their national identities within paternalistic emergency context.

Paper long abstract:

There has been an expansion in the field of "humanitarian governance", which Barnett defines as "the administration of human collectivities in the name of a higher moral principle that sees the preservation of life and the alleviation of suffering as the highest value of action". Yet, the concept is not always unqualifiedly benign. While humanitarian governance is organized around the principle of care, it also features an element of control, where it creates structures within which such values as respect for difference, self-determination, and even national and individual identities are sacrificed for the sake of care. Hence, even while victims of crises find solace and security in safe havens provided by emergency aid systems, quite often these benefits come at the cost of autonomy and identity. Within a refugee camp, every victim is "a refugee", and often, nothing more. This paper, using the concept of paternalism, and the case study of South Sudanese refugees at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in North-Western Kenya, seeks to show how humanitarian governance systems can undermine, and in extreme cases even deprive victims of their autonomy and identities. Paternalism is a concept defined by Gerald Dworkin as "the interference with a person's liberty of action justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness, needs, interests or values of the persons being coerced". The paper seeks to highlight how the South Sudanese refugees in Kakuma have deployed social and religious networks and groups as strategies to preserve their national identities within paternalistic emergency contexts.

Paper short abstract:

I want to explore how South Sudanese people w are searching for a normal life. Using the life story of Poni I argue that Poni succeeds in sustaining a normal life by maintaining relationships to neighbors, by diversifying her economic activities and by claiming belonging to more than one place.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I want to explore how South Sudanese people who have been exposed to war and displacement since the beginning of the first civil war are searching for a normal life. The concept of normal life refers to the concept of homing desire (Brah. 1996), and to the discourse on human security. However more imprtant it is based on the expereince of people who are at odds with dominant discourse of belonging and identity. Using the life story of Poni, a woman who has moved over decades between Juba and Khartoum I argue that Poni succeeds in sustaining a normal life despite economic crises, political instabilities and teh frequent eruption of violence by maintaining relationships to old and new neighbors, by diversifying her economic activities and by claiming belonging to more than one place. The paper is based on fieldwork I conducted between 2006 and 2018 in Khartoum and Juba. During this fieldwork, I had followed Poni to different places and became part of her social network.