Paper short abstract:

Rent paying IDPs therefore not recognised as such in DR Congo, out-of-camp city residents in Ethiopia, irregular urban refugees in Tanzania, in-camp host communities in Kenya: The paper explores the dynamics of strategies of and policies for people forced to move that usually fall of the grid.

Paper long abstract:

The most widely used definition for refugees, the Geneva convention, stresses linear elements: to meet the bar, people need to have made it to particular places: beyond nation-state borders. To be recognised and obtain the papers to prove it, certain other conditions have to be met. Many are often defined by national laws - in e.g. countries with encampment policies, residence in a camp. People forced to move within national borders likewise have to move from A to B, and reach a space in which humanitarian actors reify otherwise merely theoretical rights outlined in the Kampala convention to be officially counted as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). In parallel to officially recognised and normatively prescribed forms of movements, an empirical micro perspective reveals patterns of mobility and immobility that do not always coincide with policy-normative categories.

The paper, thus, proposes to look at everyday realities with a bottom-up perspective. Such a perspective shows that people move back and forth between different categorisations, combine or abstain from them, find them to be limiting and enabling; it furthermore shows that categorisations are framing movements in a way that reaches beyond physical into social, economic, political spaces. The paper presents examples from case studies from across East Africa that reach beyond the officially recognised refugee/IDP spaces in order to illustrate everyday realities and navigations strategies of those affected and, last but not least, to examine their interdependence from official laws and norms.