Returning to South Sudan:

A political economy of refugee return migration.

My dissertation examines how people’s everyday life and habits have been transformed by living in a refugee camp, and what this means as they migrate home after the end of conflict. I explore how the spatial organization of the camp is enforced by various forms of formal and informal regulation, including head-counts, police corruption, and refugee-host violence. Together these connect particular categories of people to particular resources, available in particular places and deeply shape how people think about sustenance and subsistence. In particular, I focused on how the receipt of food aid coupled with the foreclosure of the possibility of subsistence production reshaped practices, subjectivities and productive labor.  Given these changes, my research then asked:

To what extent do these camp-based practices persist as people return to their home areas in rural South Sudan?
Is the renewed possibility of subsistence production enthusiastically embraced, grudgingly accepted or actively rejected?
How is access to resources, broadly considered (e.g. land, environmental resources, political belonging, security and justice), negotiated between returnees, stayees, and other migrant groups?
And what might this mean for the future of South Sudan–economically, politically, and socially?

The dissertation is based on 13 months of ethnographically informed qualitative research in two main locations–a small rural town in South Sudan, and Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Below are links to articles that have grown out of this project.

This research was generously supported by:

 The National Science Foundation

ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius “Settling into Motion” Scholarship in Migration Studies

Gerlach Dissertation Writing Award, Department of Geography, University of Washington.