Taming Liminality: Entrepreneurial Bricolage in the Underground Markets of Three Refugee Camps in Tanzania

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Abstract

Every year several thousand forcefully displaced people are thrown into statelessness within the confines of refugee camps. Refugees in camps are neither granted access to local job markets, nor are they allowed to pursue economic opportunities in the local economy. How do refugees endure the seemingly endless boredom in camps? Do they just passively accept and endure their alienation and powerlessness, or do they join hands to engage in a class struggle against their common misfortune, as alienation theorists expect? To answer these questions, we conducted ethnographic field work spanning over 6 months at three large, three-decade old refugee camps in Tanzania. Our ethnographic findings reveal that refugees in camps lived dual lives – one that was visible to the authorities, NGOs and naive external observers and another that was concealed from them. For the authorities of the UN and host nations, and the NGOs that worked closely with them, the lives of refugees in camps was resonant of the widely held notions of alienated and powerless individuals, but a closer look at their lives reveal that they were resilient and enterprising individuals who sought to differentiate themselves from the rest of the refugees. In this process, they converted what seemed like a land of monotony and confinement to a land of opportunities where a bustling informal economy flourished. To succeed in the informal economy, refugees exploited those very vulnerabilities that their liminality presented. They allied with unsuspecting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to obtain inputs to their businesses, they hoarded essential supplies that were rationed to them by the UN and traded those for a profit with other refugees and, most importantly, with neighboring villagers, who were forbidden access to the camps. They did so through the assistance of sympathetic camp guards with whom they built a long-standing relationship.

Authors

• Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode, Simon Fraser University

• Aloysius Newenham-Kahindi, University of Saskatchewan

• Rekha Krishnan, Simon Fraser University