Abstracts Anthropology

Beyond Refuge: Visions of Violence, Migration, and Abolition from Mirieyi Settlement

by Daniel Watt Krugman

The protracted refugee settlements of East Africa have become spaces of intense social, political, and economic change. This thesis explores these dynamics in one of these spaces called Mirieyi, located in the northwest corner of Uganda. Through the stories, life experiences, and everyday practices of the South Sudanese people called "refugees" who live in Mirieyi, the dynamics that drive this cosmopolitanism will be located as phenomena that are not simply produced by existence inside the structures of "refuges". Rather, it sees the institutions and agency of people called "refugees" as beyond the methods and rationales for managing forced migrants. I begin by repositioning "refugees" as part of the inherent structural violence of the global ordering of nation-states and Western supremacy. The second section outlines how the violence of neoliberal management has created resource scarcity in Mirieyi. The third part examines the indigenous institutions and relationships that the forced migrants have created for themselves. They survive structural violence not only as an everyday act of resistance, but also by enacting a process of social change that is gradually transforming social solidarity and cultural meanings beyond the relationships and ideas demanded by the national and global institutions of refuge. I conclude by calling for the abolition of refuge and a redefinition of the protracted refugee crisis in East Africa.