Refugee Welfare Councils as Spaces of Local Citizenship Production
The Case of Adjumani District, Uganda
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4807158 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sara De Simone (0000-0001-7539-1665, University of Trento, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 33-52 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1044-2057 • E-ISSN: 1911-1568 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/diaspora.22.1.2022.11.29 |
| OpenAlex | W4286426053 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
Recent literature on refugees' agency has shed light on refugees' capacity to claim political subjectivity and to creatively engage with their condition of vulnerability. Drawing on this literature, this article shows how refugees manage to reinvent spaces of participation created from the top down in refugee settlements, turning them from invited spaces to something more akin to invented spaces of participation. It does so through the analysis of Refugee Welfare Councils, local governance institutions created by the Ugandan government and UNHCR in refugee settlements, and drawing on field research conducted in April-June 2018 in Adjumani District, Uganda. The article argues that Refugee Welfare Councils (RWCs) are turned into invented spaces of participation, through which refugees undertake actions that produce a form of local citizenship based on claiming rights to food and services, the reorganization of society through the emergence of new leadership structures, and the production of new forms of identity and belonging. These all contribute to the emergence of a new imagined community which is based on geographical proximity and on the shared experience of exile, distancing itself from prevalent traditional forms of identification and belonging in South Sudanese society
Agency (philosophy · Citizenship · Distancing · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Human settlement · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Social science · Sociology · Vulnerability (computing · Welfare · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Public Administration · Sex work and related issues
Displacing Human RightsWar and Intervention in Northern Uganda
Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa
Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship
Unpacking 'Participation'
Citizenship and Social Class
The Perils of Belonging
Building a Fragmented State
Pulling the Wool over the Eyes of the Strangers
What Is a Refugee Camp? Explorations of the Limits and Effects of the Camp
The humanitarian-citizenship nexus
Locating Citizen Participation
Livelihoods in Conflict
Refugees,idpsand Citizenship Rights
Rule and Rupture
Reinventing Urban Citizenship
Campzenship
Humanitarian Space as Arena
Seeing Like a State
Speechless Emissaries
Resiliency Humanitarianism
Negotiations and morality
The Poison in the Ink Bottle
Urban Displacement and Resettlement in Zimbabwe
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |