Content area
Abstract
The central objectives of this dissertation are, first, to place the refugee crisis within the context of some of the major political, social, economic, and environmental challenges facing most of the sub-Saharan African countries that generate and host refugees, and, second, to critically examine some of the principal local-level dynamics inherent to refugee situations, as large and diverse populations of displaced people strive to refashion their lives in forced exile. It is argued that refugee situations in sub-Saharan Africa are best understood within the framework of borderland regions, i.e., in areas that transcend local international boundaries, and that the context of regional underdevelopment determines not only the parameters of relief efforts made on behalf of the refugees but also defines the kinds of physical and psychological environments that are faced by foreigners and citizens alike.
It is also argued that refugee populations are comprised of diverse groups of people who have different reasons for fleeing their countries of origin and for pursuing particular (and sometimes antagonistic) objectives in exile. The important and principal perception that African refugees are powerless victims of political forces beyond their control is contested by explicitly placing specific groups of refugees--rather than their persecutors or the international actors who respond to their plight--at the center of the analysis.
Empirical data collected for a case study of the 250,000 Ugandan refugees who had sought asylum in the war-ravaged southern Sudan between 1979 and 1986 are analyzed to examine the ways in which the refugees (and their citizen hosts) strove toward economic self-sufficiency and local integration in the context of the region's rural political economy. The organized and internationally-assisted refugee settlements are investigated not only as sites of lived exile but also as the terrains on which questions of nationality, ethnicity, state sovereignty, and control over resources were articulated by the refugees, their hosts, the UNHCR, the NGOs, and the host regional and central governments. Finally, it is argued that both the refugees and their citizen-hosts employed modified rational decision-making mechanisms in response to the exigencies of life in a region engulfed by political instability, armed violence, and chronic underdevelopment.
