Governing Refugee Disposability: Neoliberalism and Survival in Nairobi

Kenya currently hosts close to 1 million refugees in two of the world’s
largest refugee camps in Dadaab and Kakuma. While these camps have
held refugees for nearly three decades, they face ongoing threats of
closure resulting in an uptick of urban refugees in Nairobi. This article
places refugees in the context of urban disposability and hinges this
concept on three interrelated aspects: citizenship, housing, and incomebased
survival against the backdrop of neoliberalisation in Kenya. Lack
of state support and widespread xenophobia on the national scale has
led to piecemeal market-based policies of self-reliance such as
microfinance and entrepreneurship as institution-led strategies for
survival. These solutions forego refugee life in favour of capital
accumulation creating unsustainable indebtedness and poverty on the
urban scale. I argue that urban refugees are rendered disposable
populations and are forced to survive through informal structures within
Kenyan neoliberalism. In doing this, refugees are not passively wasted
populations, rather, they are brought into the folds of capital
accumulation through modes of survival based on self-reliance.