This forum contributes to debates on migration, displacement, and place-making in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. We bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to move the existing literature beyond the dominant focus on the causes of displacement to a rich and granular exploration of its consequences. The forum focuses on Somali refugees and migrants for two reasons. First, Somalia is one of the largest refugee-producing countries in the world. Second, depending on the host states in which they find themselves, Somali migrants and refugees can encounter many different fates, ranging from living in refugee camps to migrating to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa to a small minority being resettled in countries of the global north. These varied circumstances make it possible to study strategies of place-making among Somali communities from several different perspectives. A central theme of this forum is to highlight the agency of migrants and refugees and to emphasize the fact that these groups are more than mere victims of their circumstances. The articles in this volume will be of interest to scholars of African studies, anthropology, comparative politics, migration studies, peace studies, and Somali studies.

Host governments have responded to the migration of Somali refugees throughout Africa in recent decades in different ways. Kenyan policymakers have treated Somalis primarily as a security threat, imposing restrictions on them that especially target this group. In South Africa, where economic and political competition fuel xenophobia, Somalis are part of a larger foreign national population that is seen as having disproportionate economic influence. However, Somali Bantus have been welcomed in Tanzania, which granted them citizenship even as it limited the mobility and activities of other refugees. A comparative analysis suggests that the relative balance among security, economic, political, and normative considerations shapes the extent and scope of host government policies.

Refugee resettlement is accomplished through the intersecting administration of state and non-state actors with competing claims and interests. These competing claims are caught between humanitarian imperatives to rescue the most vulnerable refugees on one hand and security demands to protect national borders from those deemed undesirable and undeserving on the other. Based on ethnographic research with Somali refugees in Nairobi from 2013 to 2015, Balakian examines the ways in which refugees maneuver through an unsynchronized assemblage of institutions to which they are subject; she brings this assemblage into relief through ethnographic accounts of Somali refugees as they attempt to navigate the resettlement system and are simultaneously caught in Kenya’s 2014 anti-refugee security operations. Based on this case, the research demonstrates that being subject to multiple, competing governing bodies is central to the condition of statelessness in twenty-first century Africa.

An ethnographic analysis of two interconnected cities for the Somali diaspora—Nairobi and Johannesburg—helps to uncover alternative narratives about the lives of Somali women and the ways they renegotiate their cultural and religious identities in diasporic contexts, moving beyond the widespread representation of Somali women in the global imagination as helpless victims. Using the domains of marriage and female circumcision, Ripero-Muñiz analyzes how these women exercise their agency while at the same time negotiating the cultural and religious practices of their community. By focusing on the ways in which Somali women re-negotiate their identities, this article helps to locate the agency of women in refugee and migrant communities in sub-Saharan Africa.

Research on Somali mobility and migration has predominantly focused on forced migration from Somalia and diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America, neglecting other experiences and destinations. This article traces the journeys of Somali traders from East Africa to China, mapping the growth of a transnational trading economy that has offered a stable career path to a few but a chance to scrape by for many others. Understandings of migration and mobility must encompass these precarious terrains, allowing for a richer examination of how individuals have navigated war, displacement, and political and economic change by investing in transnational livelihoods, not just via ties to the West, but through the myriad connections linking African economies to the Gulf and Asia.

This study explores social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as emergent sites of youth citizenship in Guinea. These need to be understood within a longer history of youth citizenship, one that includes street corners and other informal mediations of youth politics. This counters dominant discourses both within the Guinean public sphere and in academic research that decry Guinean social media practices as lacking, or Guinean youth as frivolous or inconsequential in their online political engagements. Instead, young Guineans’ emergent digital practices need to be approached as productive political engagements. This contributes to debates about African youths by examining the role of digital technologies in shaping young Africans’ political horizons.

This article explores the health service provided by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) during the Eritrean Liberation War, and its political dimensions and implications. The EPLF used healthcare to define itself politically against its rivals and to penetrate communities. It aimed to incorporate population groups into the struggle, to inculcate EPLF ideology, and to transform the national community. EPLF practitioners were most successful when they cooperated with existing structures of power. The progressive, dynamic, and transformative nature of the healthcare system is inextricable from the coercion sometimes used to achieve the ideals of the EPLF, and the way in which healthcare became an instrument of biopolitical control.

The global geography of art has changed greatly in recent years. Whereas global art hubs were formerly found only in the West, they now exist in locations all over the world, including Africa. Though some art worlds in Asia and Latin America have been studied in recent times, there is insufficient empirical data on art worlds in Africa. This is a study of the Lagos art world, which shows how an “art system,” with all of its attendant structures and agents, has emerged in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, in the last few years. Lagos reflects the dynamics of globalization and is building up the art infrastructure and the critical mass needed for a sustainable art world: an ambitious and fast-growing group of young local collectors, an art fair, an international photography festival, regular art auctions, new art galleries, historical and critical publications, a university art museum, symposiums, art foundations, residencies, and competitions. Lagos is becoming not only a “global city,” but also a “global art hub.”