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.