Paper short abstract:

Meet Abshir, ‘citizenship broker’, who embodies Somali ‘refugeeness’ in Nairobi. Abshir is a gatekeeper for refugee citizenship in Nairobi and abroad.

Paper long abstract:

Meet Abshir, a Somali refugee living in Nairobi. A self-proclaimed 'Urban Refugees and Embassies Consultant', Abshir consults Somali refugees in obtaining resettlement to third countries. Additionally, he is a middleman between resettled refugees and family members in Nairobi. He is a trusted payee receiving remittances from abroad to pay for rent and other expenses.

Drawn from fieldwork in 2015 and 2017, this paper focuses on Abshir because he is the embodiment of the Somali refugee 'transnational nomad' experience. Fleeing war in Somalia, deported from Saudi Arabia, and finally settling in Nairobi, Abshir is both constrained and thriving in Nairobi, a dialectic characteristic of many Somali refugees. He exemplifies 'displacement economies' where decades of transnational mobilities create livelihoods in Nairobi that did not exist before.

This paper engages with Critical Citizenship Studies to challenge citizen/non-citizen binaries, which argues that citizenship is not only rights/responsibilities imposed by the state from above, but 'acts of citizenship' are how subjects constitute citizenship from below. Abshir acts as a 'citizenship broker' by enabling Somali refugees to live in Eastleigh despite their non-citizen and unwelcome status in the city. Moreover, Abshir's knowledge of the resettlement programme, facilitating legal migration for refugees to the West, exemplifies a 'topological approach to citizenship'. This approach examines the fields of relation in bordering processes rather than physical and geographical boundaries. Paradoxically, for Somali refugees in Nairobi, the 'poisoned promise of [refugee] resettlement', personified in Abshir, illuminates citizenship as exclusion and integration, vulnerability and enrichment.