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Abstract

This article examines the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. The spectre of “terrorism” and its supposed remedy—“counterterrorism”—have loomed large in Kenyan politics since the 1990s and gained further traction since the country’s military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia in 2011. Few other spaces have been associated as persistently with threats to Kenya’s national security and sovereignty as the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the country’s Northern belt, which are popularly depicted as “wombs” of terror. In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. We provide a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. The article concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya’s counterterror state is (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid.

Keywords

Counterterrorism refugee camps humanitarianism Kenya global apartheid race

Introduction

In March 2017, Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta addressed a special meeting of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) on Somali displacement in the Horn of Africa and cautioned assembled delegates that “[Dadaab refugee] camp has, over time, lost its humanitarian character.¹ It is not acceptable to us that a space that is supposed to provide safety and assistance, is transformed to facilitate agents of terror and destruction.” Kenyatta’s words not only re-articulated his country’s long institutional suspicion towards refugees but identified “the camp” as a space of particular significance in the global fight against “terrorism.” Refugees are often imagined as threats to the national fabric, and camps spatialize such widespread anxieties about infiltration and territorial disintegration in stark ways (Hyndman and Giles, 2016). In Kenya, the twin figures of terrorism and the camp also have historical resonance: encampment and forced villagization were used by the British colonial administration as part of its counterinsurgency against “Mau Mau” rebels in the 1950s and again by the post-independence Kenyan state against “Shifta” secessionists in the 1960s (Elkins, 2005; Whittaker, 2015). At the time, camps were conceived as sites for containing the peril of popular anti-colonial or anti-regime struggles which were portrayed as “terrorism.” In turn, they also embodied a spatially organized form of colonial “state terror” against unwanted ethno-racialized populations (Boehmer and Morton, 2010). In the 1990s, massive displacement within the region further led to the proliferation of refugee camps within Kenya’s borders, of which only the Kakuma and Dadaab camps remain today. In populist discourse, these camps are often stigmatized as incubators of subversive activities and as metaphorical “womb[s] of terror” (Okari, 2016).

This article critically explores the multiple layered entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. It does so by bringing into conversation the geographies of state control at the territorial margins with the ways in which institutional camp management has been reorganized in recent years under the auspices of combating terror and insecurity. We argue that this reorganization has further blurred the already thin lines between humanitarianism and security governance and led to the intensification of “racialized triage” of refugees. Since 2011, Kenya’s role in the War on Terror has had a noticeable effect on domestic refugee policies and mobility control, reconfiguring the spaces of refuge and the lives of those under humanitarian protection (Mogire, 2011; Mwangi, 2019). In the aftermath of the globally televised attacks on the Westgate Mall in 2013, Garissa University College in 2015 and the DusitD2 hotel in 2019, Kenya’s government claimed—without offering evidence—that the perpetrators had planned the assaults from the Kakuma and Dadaab camps in Northern Kenya (Mutambo, 2015; Straziuso and Odula, 2013). In popular imagination, this reinforced existing racialized imaginaries of refugees as unruly, immoral, or dangerous and camps as ungovernable “microcosms of otherness” (Brankamp, 2021: 159). Building on over a century of colonial praxis and use of camps as technologies of counterinsurgency and immobilization (Elkins, 2005; Khalili, 2013), the charge of militant “Islamic terrorism” is the latest manifestation of the Kenyan state’s perennial anxiety around, and violent reaction to, the presence of mobile, non-citizen, and ostensibly disloyal populations within its borders.

Our argument is that the conditions of refuge in Kenya are continuously being remade and that this remaking occurs at the juncture of counterterrorism and global mobility control, humanitarian camp management, and the country’s unresolved ethno-racialized state-making processes. In Part One, we analyze how the relationship between camps and counterterrorism is rooted, firstly, in longer histories of counterinsurgency in Northern Kenya and, secondly, within wider trajectories of racialized policing and militarized apartheid on a global scale (Besteman, 2020; Tesfahuney, 1998). Encampment is a twofold spatial strategy: on the one hand, camps are part of the Kenyan state’s efforts to govern and domesticate its Northern periphery in a continual process of territorial (re)colonization through military occupation and counterinsurgency. On the other, they are nodes in which global mobility governance, security and counterterrorism policies converge and effectively touch down in space. In Part Two, we zoom in on the refugee camps themselves by tracing the transformations of their bureaucratic management in the wake of Kenya’s drive to securitize displacement. Part Three attends to the ways in which this overlay of counterterror measures on designated spaces of aid also reinforces what we call a “racialized triage” of encamped refugees (as well as ethno-racialized communities in Northern Kenya more broadly) into differential categories of risk.

This article is a collaboration based on separate studies examining the sociospatial politics of the War on Terror (Glück) and the policing of humanitarian camps in Kenya (Brankamp), respectively. Drawing, collectively, on two and a half years of ethnographic and archival research our data spans different scales and locations, including the Dadaab and Kakuma camps, Nairobi, Mombasa and several regional towns in Northern Kenya. In total, we conducted over 245 interviews and 22 months of field research between 2014 and 2017. Ultimately, we argue the camps are more than symbolic flash points for a present-day politics of exclusion but are productive spaces in which militarized state-making and quasi-colonial rule materialize in the peripheries of the postcolony. In this way, they geographically anchor a planetary control of mobility in the expansion and reconfiguration of contemporary Kenyan state power.

I. Entanglements: Camps and counterinsurgency in Kenya

On 13 October 2011, two Spanish aid workers from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) were abducted from the Dadaab refugee camps by a group of armed men, presumed to be Al-Shabaab militants. At the time, the two women were working as logistics officers, helping to build a hospital in the camps. In response, Kenya’s government launched Operation Linda Nchi the next day, which led Kenyan Defence Forces (KDF) to begin a military occupation of Southern Somalia that continues to this today. Despite objections from MSF that they did not condone retaliatory operations carried out in their name,² Kenya legitimated the intervention as a necessary action to combat terrorism (KDF, 2014: 34). The refugee camps were thereby positioned as frontlines in a regional War on Terror: simultaneously soft targets for terrorist attacks as well as spaces of threat in their own right, potentially harboring “terrorists”.

Africa generally, and Somalia in particular, have become major theaters in the US-led Global War on Terror, not least since the inception of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2006 (Glück, 2019; Hansen, 2019; Turse, 2015). Al-Shabaab itself emerged from the US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2007 which deposed the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), the first stable governing coalition in the country since 1991. In the wake of its dissolution, the ICU’s militant wing coalesced under the new banner of Al-Shabaab. While initially focused on fighting “imperialist” incursions within Somalia itself, by 2010 the group had embarked on a process of regionalization that has accelerated dramatically since Kenya’s occupation. The occupation in turn cemented Kenya’s position as the primary US ally for regional counterterror operations, becoming the largest recipient of security assistance in East Africa (US$566 million since 2011, according to Security Assistance Monitor, n.d.).

However, Kenya’s camps are not inadvertently caught in a geopolitical crossfire. Instead, there is a deeper historical and geographical continuity that has positioned camps at the regional frontlines of counterterrorism. Northern Kenya has historically been a frontier region, located at the margins of state control—perennially subject to security concerns, emergency laws, counterinsurgency, and various “state spatial strategies” (Benner, 2004; Glück, 2017a) that seek to render its population “tractable” to state governance (Lind, 2017; Weitzberg, 2017; Whittaker, 2015). Bachman (2012a, 2012b) argues that Kenya’s participation in regional security and global counterterrorism strategies has played a defining role in a “stabilization of ‘stateness’” domestically. This is especially salient in Northern Kenya where the camps are situated, and where the Kenyan state’s presence has been historically elusive. The current prominence of Kenyan camps as linchpins in a fight against terrorism is therefore no coincidence. Camps and counterterrorism historically co-articulate in the governance of spaces and populations resistant to successive imperialist and state-making projects in Kenya.

Situating the camps: Geographies of counterinsurgency in Northern Kenya

The entanglements of camps and counterterrorism can be seen powerfully in counterinsurgencies waged in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s. During the “Kenya Emergency” (1952–1960), British colonial troops staged military operations against the Land and Freedom Army, an anti-colonial and majority-Kikuyu uprising known popularly as the “Mau Rebellion.” British authorities set up a country-wide system of detention camps known as the “Pipeline” in which suspects were screened, tortured, and color-coded according to their alleged degree of (dis)loyalty: labelled as “clear or rehabilitated” (White), “heavily infected” (Grey), or “unrepentant hard-core” (Black) (Elkins, 2005; Kariuki, 1963: 61). Kenyan camp infrastructures have always blurred lines between protective custody, counterterror and ideas of “rehabilitation,” with the latter forming a humanitarian justification for encampment during the Emergency. Alongside detention camps, the British also forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu civilians in militarized and fenced-in “villages” with the aim of controlling mobility. Indeed, Khalili (2013: 25–26) reminds us that counterinsurgency theorists have long viewed such techniques of confining both would-be militants and entire populations as a form of “armed social work.” According to her, experiments with militarized mass encampment in Kenya, Malaya, Algeria and elsewhere in the 1950s were pivotal for developing counterinsurgency theory and practice globally. While we are wary of any false equivalence between colonial carcerality and contemporary humanitarianism, this history illustrates that Kenyan camps have long been biopolitical technologies that capture people not always “for what they have done, but for who they are and what they represent as a ‘population’” (Martin et al., 2020: 759).

Encampment as a form of state violence never subsided in the country as the post-independence Jomo Kenyatta regime soon waged a new counterinsurgency against ethnic Somalis in Northern Kenya during the “Shifta War” (1963–1967). Mirroring the British colonial administration’s violence, the newly independent Kenyan state deployed brutal tactics of enclosure to contain the secessionist demands of the majority Somali inhabitants of the country’s Northeast—including encampment and forced villagization of pastoralists and district-specific emergency laws—and periodic massacres (Sheik, 2007; Whittaker, 2015). Throughout its recent history, Northern Kenya has often been treated as a somewhat exceptional region. British colonists demarcated the Northern Frontier District (NFD) as a “buffer zone” between imagined “Arab” and “African” worlds (Turton, 1974). The NFD was declared a “closed district” that prohibited Somali, Oromo, Turkana and other nomadic communities from moving south into Kenya’s fertile agricultural heartlands—creating an ethno-political divide and logic of domestic containment that still structures North–South relations today (Lind, 2017). Following the Shifta War, much of Northern Kenya remained under emergency laws until 1990, with Kenyan security forces continuing to engage in low-grade military operations. For Kenya’s police force, the 12 Northernmost counties continue to be officially categorized as “operational areas” in which heavy-handed paramilitary policing is the norm (Brankamp, 2019).

One of the most enduring colonial legacies in Northern Kenya is the continuing marginalization and securitization of its denizens. This manifests in chronic economic underdevelopment and hurdles to citizenship that make it difficult for many Northerners (particularly ethnic Somalis) to access identity cards—a fact that renders them vulnerable to policing, dispossession and displacement. The War on Terror has further aggravated this divide. Dozens of checkpoints between refugee camps and Nairobi signal Northern Kenya’s territorial alterity and constitute a network of de facto domestic borders. The historical casting of the North as a “buffer zone” has since been rediscovered, with Kenya’s occupation of Somalia legitimized as creating a buffer between Kenyan and Al-Shabaab-held territory (Anderson and McKnight, 2015; Mukinda, 2011). On the Northern coast, low-grade warfare and counterinsurgency operations are routinely carried out by Kenya’s military against “Al-Shabaab hideouts” in Boni Forest. After the Garissa University attack in 2015, inhabitants of several Northern counties found themselves once again under military-enforced curfews. One young Kenyan Somali lawyer memorably recounted that “they are treating us like we are all Shiftas again.”³ It is these historically-charged geographies of counterinsurgency in which the more recent expansion of refugee camps in Northern Kenya are situated.

Political conflicts and war across the region led to unprecedented displacements in the 1990s. Thousands of Sudanese, Ethiopians, Somalis, Rwandans, Burundians, Congolese, and Eritreans arrived in Kenya and were settled in Kakuma camp in what is now Turkana county. Larger numbers still sought refuge in camps around the town of Dadaab in Kenya’s North-eastern Garissa district (now county). At its apogee in 2011, Dadaab formed the largest camp complex in the world. Today, the four camps—Dagahaley, Hagadera, Ifo and Ifo II—that comprise the Dadaab operation collectively host 224,462 people while Kakuma camp, including the new Kalobeyei settlement, hosts 200,500 refugees. Over 84% of refugees in Kenya reside in such institutional camps while another 86,607 live in urban areas, with unofficial numbers likely higher ( UNHCR, 2021). While humanitarianism is an assemblage of logics, practices, and systems of governance aimed at alleviating human suffering based on idealized images of a “common humanity” (Feldman and Ticktin, 2011), security has long been inextricably bound-up with such efforts. In fact, Watson (2011) views humanitarianism itself as a form of securitization that uses figure of “the human” in need of protection as a justification for enacting emergency measures, such as encampment. Bulley (2014) notes that refugee camps are “spatial security technologies” premised on the biopolitical production of a subject population to be registered, housed, cared for, monitored and spatially controlled (see Agier, 2011; Dillon, 2007; Hyndman, 2000), while this production itself rests on racializing assumptions about the universality of “humanity” (Brankamp and Weima, 2021; Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019). Humanitarian securitization privileges state and organizational power over people, giving authorities significant leeway to re-frame their actions as attempts “to protect state security in the name of human security” (Hyndman and Mountz, 2006: 79). During Daniel arap Moi’s presidency, refugees were regularly labelled as security threats and—following the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as well as the 2002 attacks on a passenger jet and hotel in Mombasa by Al Qaeda—refugees faced recurrent round-ups, surveillance, and deportations. In 1999, Moi held refugees responsible for cross-border insecurity, arms smuggling, militia activities and decided to close Kenya’s borders with Somalia, a step that was repeated multiple times in the ensuing years, even after the election of new president Mwai Kibaki in 2002 (Mogire, 2009; Mwangi, 2019). By the early 2010s the scapegoating of refugees for Kenya’s security woes had become a scripted part of Kenya’s political mainstream, setting the stage for intermittent demands to close the camps in years to come. At the 2012 London Conference on Somalia, Kibaki uttered his desire to send refugees back, telling delegates that “overcrowded camps” and Somali displacement were “posing growing and serious security threats to Kenya and the region” (GoK, 2012).

This illustrated the fundamental paradox of camps in Kenya and beyond as devices of “care and control” (Malkki, 2002: 353) and spatial technologies where the seemingly opposing logics of protection, custody, aid, eviction, and security had become indistinguishable (Minca, 2015: 8; see Newhouse, 2015). The risk of camp closures elicited political responses from international actors who quickly urged Kenya to abide by its legal obligation to protect refugees while promising increased funding for aid and military expenditures. Besteman (2020) has argued that such geopolitical manoeuvres from predominantly Global North states directed at Kenya and other refugee-hosting countries in the South operate within a logic of “militarized global apartheid”—a system of militarized borders, camps, and security infrastructures which regionally contain populations displaced by war, climate change, and the systemic violence of racial capitalism and keep them out of “core” capitalist countries. International assistance to keep the camps open operated in the diplomatic register of “humanitarian protection” while effectively expanding the militarized security capacities of the Kenyan state. Although camps have officially been recognized as an undesirable stop-gap solution by aid workers, advocates and donors, the lack of political will to realize more radical alternatives continues to perpetuate their default position as the backbone of a global “carceral humanitarianism” (Brankamp, 2022). Kenya’s national security concerns about refugee camps became progressively imbricated with Euro-American funded policies that merged counterterrorism with “humanitarian” containment of migration at the global margins.

Despite delivering aid, camps operate as “enclaves” under military-style occupation on Kenya’s own soil (Brankamp, 2019). They demonstrate “the hidden violence” of refuge (Espiritu, 2014: 18) and embody a deepening confluence of aid and counterterror logics and logistics (Howell and Lind, 2009). This duplicity of alleviating suffering through aid programs, while ultimately strengthening the hold of political powers and tolerating militarized violence is for many the hallmark of a “humanitarian present” (Lopez et al., 2015; Weizman, 2011). Technologies of security and carceral care converge most strikingly in refugee camps. Enfolded in geopolitics of counterterrorism, state-building and security governance, Dadaab and Kakuma fulfil multiple contradictory roles as political condensation points that amplify and materialize security politics, as spaces of conditional hospitality, as well as catchment areas for people displaced by military operations in Somalia. On the one hand, Kenya’s government continues to portray camps as vectors of terrorism in which insurgents supposedly find safe havens from which to carry out attacks. The abduction of MSF workers from Dadaab consolidated this belief. On the other, as security infrastructures, camps function as spaces of sorting and control that buttress Kenyan state capacities in a region historically beyond the reach of its sovereign control. This double-sidedness of camps represents a significant spatial strategy for governing non-citizens not through their outright exclusion but their conditional, and always precarious, inclusion that can be revoked—for instance through camp closures—at will. Like counterinsurgency, encampment is a recursive instrument of security and spatial control. Kenyan camps thus conflate humanitarianism, migration control and population triage at the intersection of the Global War on Terror and the slow emergency of displacement.

II. Remaking refuge in the image of counterterrorism

Although we refer to the “Kenyan state” in our analysis of the overlapping regimes of counterterrorism and encampment, our use of the term is qualified by an approach to states which understands them to be internally contradictory, unfinished projects, whose social and spatial articulations are sites of contention and composed of antagonistic interests (Glück and Low, 2017; Lefebvre, 1976; Poulantzas, 2000). States are often given an artificial and imagined unity through ideological or cultural constructions (Aretxaga, 2003; Mitchell, 2006). However, as ethnographers, we appreciate how even large state bureaucracies are comprised of people, practices and social relations that can be disaggregated from the abstract notion of “the state” (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 2014; Gupta, 2012; Maharawal, 2017; Painter, 2006). Nonetheless, both the idea of the state and the material spatial scale of the national territory remain central for projects of security. In much of Africa, and Kenya in particular, the nation-state has been the main organizing institution of capital accumulation enabling the centralization of political and economic power in the hands of elites (Bayart, 1993; Lonsdale and Berman, 1992). Since the era of formal decolonization, the Kenyan state has been structured by external security partnerships—first with the British military and later with the US—that have protected national-scale capital accumulation (and dispossession) by strengthening repressive capacities of state “security” agencies. In this way state power and capital accumulation in post-independence Kenya have always been tied to geopolitical security arrangements.

We understand Kenya’s “counterterror state” (Glück, 2017) as both a present-day articulation of security practices and a historical process of state formation that coalesced through the mid-century counterinsurgencies which produced post-independence Kenyan state security. The logics and state spatial strategies of encampment, domination of ethnic minorities, and racialized triage continue to structure the Kenyan state’s approach to security today (Berman, 1990; Mamdani, 1996). And yet, even in the domain of security the state is not monolithic. Discrepancies between different institutions abound, and sometimes come to the fore in spectacular chain-of-command disputes between military and police over anti-terrorism operations. However, the rise of counterterrorism as a hegemonic logic that is essentially transforming refugee governance and humanitarian praxis should not be seen as a pre-determined fait accompli. Rather, analyzing the bureaucratic reorganization of camp governance in the image of counterterrorism reveals inherent rifts and contradictions within the Kenyan state itself. Peeling back the layers of this ongoing transformation in humanitarian management reveals the complex and granular processes through which security and the state actually work in the twin domains of counterterrorism and refugee encampment.

Kenya’s entry into the Global War on Terror expedited a series of changes in its institutional treatment of refugees. Between the 1990s and 2006, UNHCR played a disproportionately large role in the country’s humanitarian response, controlling processes of international legal protection like Refugee Status Determination, which meant Kenya effectively ceded its prerogative to decide who was recognized as a refugee. With the passing of its first refugee legislation in 2006, Kenya established a specialized Department of Refugee Affairs (DRA) to partly claim back these sovereign responsibilities from the UNHCR.⁴ Despite formalizing refugee hosting, the Refugees Act was passed at a time of rising securitization in the region that curtailed meaningful implementation, leading to a de facto continuation of long-standing encampment policies (Kagwanja and Juma, 2008; Milner, 2009).

The year 2011 was a watershed moment for aligning the Kenyan state bureaucracy with counterterrorism. The abduction of the two MSF aid workers in Dadaab emboldened those in the government who were already skeptical of DRA as a department they deemed too focused on refugee welfare and on pleasing international agencies and their donors than safeguarding Kenya’s own security. Since its occupation of Somalia, Kenya had suffered from a number of grenade attacks in Nairobi, only to be overshadowed in coming years by more spectacular assaults. Securitization of refugees intensified especially after Uhuru Kenyatta assumed the presidency in April 2013. In December 2014, the parliament passed a contentious Security Laws (Amendment) Bill 2014 that strengthened surveillance and policing powers and which, Kenyatta claimed, would give “security actors a firm institutional framework for coherent cooperation and synergy” (Lind et al., 2017: 132). The Bill also enshrined mandatory encampment in law and sought to cap the number of refugees permitted in Kenya. The attacks on Garissa University College in 2015 further raised political temperatures and within days Vice-President William Ruto demanded the closure of the Dadaab camps and promised that “Kenya is going to change for good after Garissa” (cited in Cooper-Knock, 2015). One of the ways in which this has been articulated is through counterterrorism-driven institutional changes. In Garissa itself, this was most visible in the university, which was closed down in the aftermath of the attack. As the only college facility in all of Northeastern Kenya at the time, the university’s closure was seen as an act of state negligence and violence by locals who protested for it to be reopened (Glück, 2019).⁵ Although the protests were successful, and the campus eventually reopened in early 2016, the university is now saturated with policing infrastructures, including biometric checkpoints, hidden cameras, and a new police post constructed within the campus itself.⁶ For a local population historically victimized by state security institutions, such transformations were dramatic and, indeed, emblematic of the new counterterror dispensation.

At the national level, counterterrorism-driven institutional transformations were on display with the reshaping of refugee governance. Prior to the Garissa attack, DRA was already caught in the midst of political infighting that divided the state apparatus. Walkey interviewed a former DRA official who remembers that then Cabinet Secretary for the Interior, Joseph Ole Lenku, claimed in 2014 that the department had “developed a life of its own” and therefore had to be urgently brought back into line. Ole Lenku transferred three senior DRA staffers, who had good relations with UNHCR and significant expertise in refugee protection, substituting them with security officers more attuned to the cabinet’s wishes (Walkey, 2019: 137). In May 2016, Kenya’s government once again announced that owing to the “immense security challenges such as threats of Al-Shabaab and other related terror groups” the country would no longer be able to host refugees and had decided to close all camps (GoK, 2016). As opposed to earlier threats of camp closure, however, the government emphasized its determination by disbanding DRA entirely, signaling a clear break with policies of humanitarian goodwill. However, weeks later the department experienced a revival and was re-established as the Refugee Affairs Secretariat (RAS).

The establishing of RAS was a major shift in Kenyan refugee governance, realigning the state’s activities in this area around security imperatives. DRA officials who were thought too “humanitarian-minded” were flushed out of the department and replaced by officers who had built their careers in the military or other security branches of the Kenyan state (Brankamp, 2019: 71). Security concerns about terrorism among refugees were a driving factor for this realignment. As one high-ranking RAS official put it:

[Refugees pose] many many security threats. You just need to go to the camps and see. There is organized crime. There is terrorism. It is a huge problem. Small arms are smuggled through the camps, as well as other contraband. There are credit card fraud operations … The police have been targeted, MSF clinics have been targeted. You will go and see the cars that were bombed, and the police station that was attacked. … Dadaab camp is not safe. It is also a big problem that a big percentage of refugees support Al-Shabaab in the camps—and it is difficult to tell who is Al-Shabaab and who is not. … It is for these reasons that the Kenyan government wants to close down the Dadaab Camp.⁷

When asked whether there were tensions between protecting refugees and Kenya’s security, the new RAS commissioner responded:

We know the majority of people there are genuine refugees, but there are a few elements who use the camps. They know it’s a humanitarian operation, which means they know that the government cannot conduct any major [policing] operation like they would in a Nairobi estate. There could be a few who are pretending to be refugees, those are the bad elements.⁸

The invocation of “bad elements” hiding among “legitimate” refugees had become widespread in public discourse and seemingly justified the government’s resolve to streamline refugee administration with the country’s wider counterterror strategies. Concerns about the implementation of these policies in the camps steered the government’s attention towards its own bureaucratic machinery. The geopolitics of counterterrorism thus not on securitized refugees in the camps but also targeted Kenyan bureaucrats and officials whose “loyalty” or “effectiveness” was in doubt.

Cleaning house: De-humanitarianizing camp management

Camp management became a key arena in which the Kenyatta administration sought to assert sovereign control and wrest some authority from international aid agencies (Cannon and Fujibayashi, 2018). The new Deputy Camp Manager of Dadaab, a former military man who doubled as intelligence officer, recounted his sudden entry into the humanitarian field:

There was a lot of corruption within DRA, so they wanted to clean up so that we—the government refugee agency—do what we are supposed to be doing instead of encouraging fraud within and misuse of the funds. […] Having come from a very different organisation [the army], with different roles in security—and now here you have to be a humanitarian [laughs] … it’s a big transformation, actually it’s the opposite.⁹

His narrative portrays the re-making of DRA into RAS as a bold re-assertion of legitimate state control over supposedly disloyal and corrupt officials operating at the margins.¹⁰ However, the recruitment of ex-army personnel into RAS was not simply a result of the state’s aspiration for “good governance”. Rather, it was accompanied by a number of further institutional and spatial changes that sought to de-humanitarianize camp management and refashion the refugee camps more explicitly as frontlines in the production of a new kind of “security space” (Glück, 2015) in Northern Kenya. While humanitarian aid is already a securitizing project, this de-humanitarianization meant refugee management was moving from calculated risk and liberal economized governance to more heavy-handed state control. RAS was an apt institutional vehicle through which the counterterror state could insert itself more firmly into an arena previously dominated by aid workers and refugee rights advocates.

Since their inception in the 1990s, the camps had already become militarized enclaves that projected Nairobi’s power into the periphery (Brankamp, 2019). Humanitarian funding and externally operated aid infrastructures were key in slowly driving this northward expansion of the state and even increased its capability for organized violence. Until 1998, Northern Kenya and the coast hosted 15 refugee camps which were gradually disbanded or consolidated into larger humanitarian complexes over the following decade, eventually only leaving the Dadaab and Kakuma camps (Mwangi, 2005). Police and paramilitary forces like the notorious Administration Police and General Service Unit were indispensable for governing agglomerations of refugees, effectively grounding humanitarian aid in a regime of spatial control through road checkpoints, police posts, motorized patrols, and armed raids.

Kenya’s deepening War on Terror compounded this creeping militarization of refugee spaces and enabled the government to tap new resources from Euro-American donors earmarked for counterterrorism in the region. As early as 2003, the US funded the establishment of a new Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) under the guise of preventing, surveilling, and disrupting “terrorist” activities. During research trips to Garissa, we regularly witnessed ATPU’s white Toyota trucks patrolling the highway, stopping crowded buses heading towards Nairobi and detaining people without proper documentation. Such dragnet work ultimately blurred the lines between counterterrorism and refugee management, as many of those detained were simply refugees without official passes which would allow them to leave the camps. In this respect, the ATPU vehicles acted as mobile security screening units patrolling (and producing) security space, bolstering the plethora of formal checkpoints along the roads. Unlike regular checkpoints, however, residents actively feared the ATPU. Since its inception, ATPU has been embroiled in several extrajudicial killings, notably of prominent Muslim clerics at Kenya’s coast—nonetheless the unit remains the largest annual recipients of US “anti-terrorism law enforcement” funding in sub-Saharan African (HRW, 2016: 74).

Although relief corridors in Northern Kenya had always been made possible by militarized state control, humanitarian priorities guided the way in which this was achieved, creating an “asymmetrical dependency” between militarized and aid interventions (Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010: 15; Garelli and Tazzioli, 2019). Humanitarianism represented a convenient source of income that Kenyan authorities could utilize but not always direct. Emerging concerns with counterterrorism shifted this balance and furnished Kenya’s government with parallel opportunities for rent-seeking outside the remit of refugee assistance. While DRA had been associated with international humanitarian agencies, the department’s change into RAS expedited a dual process of securitization and de-humanitarianization. Not only were refugee populations securitized as potential threats, but the ultimate rationality of humanitarian protection was gradually giving way to that of counterterrorism (Mogire, 2011). A senior UNHCR official in Nairobi complained about the government “tak[ing] decisions that are absolutely not in line with you know, what the policy or the [humanitarian] approach should be,”¹¹ and was thereby contradicting previous humanitarian justifications for ostensibly necessary security measures. President Kenyatta’s warning about the erosion of the Dadaab camps’ “humanitarian character” set the tone that administrators and government officials could readily adopt in their work. Rather than challenging this rhetoric, UNHCR itself increasingly appropriated this securitizing language and even demanded decisive action from Kenya to ensure the “civilian and humanitarian character” of the camps (UNHCR, 2017). Since 2011, UNHCR had already collaborated with the state on a Security Partnership Project which provided funding for police in Kakuma and Dadaab (UNHCR, 2011). This scheme disbursed monthly allowances of $50–$140 to police officers in those camps, distributed police vehicles, and enabled an architectural built-up of police stations.¹² In addition to such direct support for police, UNHCR has also began its own programs to “prevent radicalization” and “counter violent extremism” in the camps,¹³ adopting a language and set of program goals that emerged directly out of US counterterrorism policy (Glück et al., forthcoming).

Humanitarian organizations needed little convincing to be mobilized in the interest of Kenya’s counterterror state. As Hoffmann observed in Jordan, simultaneous claims to protecting humanitarians, the state, and refugees produced a dilemma in which the displaced were, problematically, classified as both “at risk” and “a risk” (Hoffmann, 2017: 108). The latest bout of remaking refuge at the level of Kenyan camp management therefore brought to the fore the most exclusionary logics of ethno-racialized state security. These had been partially inhibited since the heydays of humanitarian operations in the 1990s and were now again falling onto fertile soil with the surge of global counterterrorism. This illustrates the insidious nature of European and US support for humanitarianism across the region whose stated aims and principles are being progressively jeopardized by parallel moves towards militarization. The blurring of supposedly conflicting aims—protecting refugees and protecting the nation—became the basis for imposing selective states of exception on Somalis as moving subjects of military and humanitarian government. In this way, Kenya’s counterterror state and global security policies effectively converged to “follow migrant bodies” (Mountz, 2020: 58).

III. Racialized triage

While the realignment of camp management with the fight against terror played out in the impassable realm of Kenyan state bureaucracy, more intimate and embodied changes were taking place in the treatment of refugees themselves. The charge of “terrorism” was institutionally inscribed on the bodies of those deemed most suspicious, especially people ethno-racialized as “Somalis” who became not only subject to state surveillance but increasingly everyday resentments and fear among ordinary non-Somali Kenyans. Anti-Somali discrimination in Kenya is regularly articulated through forms of ethno-religious phobias and “othering” (Jaji, 2014). Public representations and affective politics of ethnicity that invoke (in)security are thus hallmarks of the displacement of concrete notions of harm into the amorphous, and unknowable, terrain of “terror” (Rana, 2016: 114). Racialization plays a key role in this displacement as it denotes historically situated social, political, and cultural processes that perpetually make and unmake ethno-racial identities, ascriptions, and meanings within particular postcolonial¹⁴ relations of power (Omi and Winant, 2014; Pierre, 2013; Weheliye, 2014). Although the War on Terror marked an escalation of these processes, Somalis in Kenya have a long prehistory of racialization which perennially challenges their status, visibility, and citizenship.

In colonial Kenya, Somalis were paradoxcially codified as “native aliens”: native because of their racialization as black African subjects, but also aliens due to their imagined ethnic non-belonging to the territorial polity. Weitzberg argues that Somalis thus remained in an ambiguous in-between space within the white-dominated settler colonial order that could at times either enhance or destabilize their rights (Weitzberg, 2017: 41–42). Postcolonial struggles over the inclusion of the NFD into a Kenyan or Somali state, and the uncertain loyalty of its ethnic Somali inhabitants, further entrenched a rigid “ethnic territoriality” (Schlee, 2013) which constructed some groups as “indigenous” and others as perennially “alien” border-crossers. Racial hierarchies thus extend beyond linear timelines of colonial domination into the present and continue to infuse the ways in which contemporary Kenyan society is organized around “ethnicity” and exclusionary politics of belonging (Lynch, 2006; Mbembe, 2017). This “vernacularization of alienation,” as Mbembe (2017: 45) puts it, visibly continued with the bureaucratic transmutation of Kenya’s colonial kipande system, that required African adult men to carry identity cards detailing their employment history, ethnicity, and place of residency, into newer forms of identity verification, most notably the state-orchestrated screening of Somali Kenyans to “authenticate” their claims to citizenship (Lochery, 2012) as well as the recent roll-out of digital biometrics (Weitzberg, 2020) and the refugee “verification exercises” co-run by RAS and UNHCR in 2017.

In the 1990s, displacement from Somalia complicated this fragile domestic order. Somalis with Kenyan citizenship were doubly stigmatized as “outsiders” by association with hundreds of thousands of non-citizen Somalis fleeing civil war. Meanwhile, humanitarian operations in Northern Kenya inadvertently became “racial infrastructures” (Rana, 2016) in which ethno-racialized power relations and dominance were mapped onto particular spaces and bodies primed for intervention. While aid agencies governed camps in Dadaab and Kakuma, presupposing the legitimacy of refugee suffering, the Kenyan state maintained its suspicions towards what it perceived as essentially “illegitimate” bodies (see Fassin, 2001). Benton further notes “the racialized valuations of human life and the racial distribution of risk in times of crisis is a pre-condition, and not simply an effect or by-product, of humanitarian engagements” (Benton, 2016: 191, italics in original). Ironically, the advent of Kenya’s invasion of Somalia prompted inverted fears of infiltration of the country itself by “terrorists.” Racial infrastructures thus underwrote both global counterterrorism and Kenya’s own counterterror policies and worked busily “to frame bodies as potentials of domination and control to mobilize racial schemas while [simultaneously] denying that race is at work” (Rana, 2016: 122). Kenya’s camps became at once entangled in the geopolitics of the terror-industrial-complex, postcolonial hauntings of ethno-racialized belonging and humanitarian categories of vulnerability and needs.

Humanitarianism typically relies on evaluating differential needs of large subject populations, sorting them into hierarchies of care through a screening process known as “triage” (Mitchell, 2008). Finding its roots in military medical science, triage is one of the determining processes in the minimal biopolitics of aid, determining the relationship between resources and individual needs. Humanitarian triage, as Redfield notes, thus “assigns value on the basis of immediate bodily states” (Redfield, 2013: 168). Through triage—the prioritizing of those in most need of aid—humanitarianism is able to make operational decisions about whose suffering is worth alleviating first before attending to others (Pallister-Wilkins, 2019: 375). With the rise of counterterrorism in Kenya, humanitarian categorizations were joined by an overtly security-driven—and increasingly racialized—triage of encamped populations by state authorities into “risky” Somali subjects and a burdensome but generally unsuspicious majority.

While we recognize that biopolitics is always already racialized and underpinned by a false equivalence of white liberal subjects with “the human” (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019), “racialized triage” is a specific operationalization of this screening logic in aid spaces. Rather than hierarchizing the bodies of those most in need of assistance, racialized triage enacts security-centred screenings of populations according to ethno-racial and cultural differences that establish graduated levels of “threat.”

Racialized triage manifests simultaneously in fixed locations and discursive spaces in which notions of racial, ethnic, and cultural belonging are assembled and put to work. In Kenya’s refugee camps, humanitarian triage is institutionalized to facilitate aid while the logics of counterterrorism impose a competing process of embodied sorting. The sorting of refugees at exit and entry points into the camps, as well as through the government-run system of movement passes, enables state agents to systematize and apply particular logics of exclusion in the everyday. Pathologized ideas of terrorist threat, suspicion and cultural difference are thereby directly tied to certain refugee bodies. The racialized securitization of a particular subset of camp-dwellers as potential terrorists or enemies of the state has inaugurated an overlapping hierarchy of inclusion/exclusion which further diffuses the protection of the displaced. Moreover, racialized triage has expanded well beyond the spaces of the camps themselves.

Ethnic profiling by law enforcement and racial discrimination against those who are “Somali-looking” is increasingly widespread in Kenya’s cities, not least the capital Nairobi (HRW, 2013). Media reports popularized images of Somalis as terrorists, pirates, arms smugglers, and cultural aliens (Pavanello et al., 2010: 27), legitimizing the policing of Somalis who are perpetually asked for their “papers.” A more spectacular instances of this triage was Operation Usalama Watch in 2014, during which security forces round up thousands of “Somalis” in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighborhood regardless of whether they were Kenyan or foreign-born (IPOA, 2014). Carried out in the wake of the Westgate Mall attack, the operation was seen by many community members as kind of state retribution for Westgate. During Uslama Watch, people were profiled on grounds of their physiognomy and religion, contributing to a distinctively Kenyan “Somali-phobia” (Jaji, 2014: 638); whole crowds were swept up off the street in dragnet operations and thousands were detained in the infamous Kasarani Stadium, which many still refer to as “Kasarani concentration camp.”¹⁵ One UNHCR representative estimated that between 6000 and 9000 people were thereby forcibly relocated to the refugee camps, with hundreds more summarily deported to Somalia.¹⁶ It is telling that Usalama Watch was a counterterrorism operation aimed at “flushing out” terrorists from Eastleigh, but quickly turned into a kind of vetting exercise, racially triaging the Somali population of Eastleigh, sorting refugees for relocation back to the camps. Most notably, the operation’s temporary urban “concentration camp” at Kasarani embodied the rematerialization of colonial counterinsurgency and “screening” coupled with securitized humanitarian governance that organizes people by status and eligibility for belonging: releasing citizens, relocating refugees, and deporting the undocumented.

“Somali-looking” bodies are the virtual stage on which spectacles of counterterrorism are being enacted in the everyday. At police checkpoints along the roads in and out of the refugee camps, officers pay particular attention to phenotypical appearance of passengers whose ethnicity is used to justify further inspection or questioning (Brankamp, 2019: 71; Lochery, 2012: 636). These checkpoints are spaces in which the security state is “made material” in the everyday life of subjects (Sharma and Gupta, 2006), screening people and vehicles for weapons, explosives and “terrorists.” In doing so, checkpoints operate at the level of the body, scanning and interpellating individuals as part of a racialized “suspect” population, but they also demarcate and reproduce the territorial alterity of the region. Samara, a Kenyan Somali law student who had recently returned from Garissa to Nairobi, explained it like this:

When you are going north no one will stop you because you are not part of Kenya. It is the Northern frontier counties, so no one bothers. No one stops your bus. When you are returning to Nairobi, this is now where Kenya begins. So, you will be frisked seven or eight times. The bus will be stopped, you guys all have to come down, show your IDs, they will check your finger prints so that they can substantiate that this is really yours and you are the Kenyan you purport to be. Sometimes they don’t even have the gadgets, so they just look at your fingers like this comparing them with the ID. It is so barbaric. I went to Uganda in 2011. As I was coming to Kenya, there is only one border point check. From there no one bothers to check your documents. So why is it so different within the country? No, the Northern frontier is still not part of Kenya.¹⁷

For Samara, who grew up in Garissa, the connections between being frisked and bodily profiled with the longer histories of colonial and postcolonial repression in Northern Kenya were brutally apparent. She continues:

I told the bus driver, ‘I am waiting and praying for the day that Kenya will be liberated from its own neocolonialism.’ And he told me, ‘Kweli utangoja sana’ [you will wait a long time]. Because you cannot see the change. The routine is the same from the KANU regime, to the Kibaki regime, to Kenyatta regime to the next regime.

In this way, police checkpoints which form part of the restrictive mobility regime of encampment always spill over into surrounding areas.

Upon arrival in Dadaab, a RAS official welcomed one of us jovially over Whatsapp with the announcement “you are now in Al-Shabaab County.”¹⁸ Fears of terrorism were routinely collapsed with notions of territorial disintegration and peril emanating from what was understood as an entire group’s ethno-cultural predilections towards “violence” and “disorder.” A Kenyan police officer stationed in the Dagahaley camp near Dadaab outright questioned Somalis’ ability to live in peace and “civilization”, arguing that in “their place there are no such things. There’s none. There are no laws, there is nothing.”¹⁹ The colonial echoes of such statements hardly need to be explained—yet it is worth noting that such racist tropes legitimated the patronizing securitization of Somalis “for their own protection.” A Kenyan government official in Kakuma explained at a public gathering that filtering travellers at these bottlenecks in fact serves to “protect” refugees themselves, while making sure they “don’t get involved in any funny business.” Speaking to a majority South Sudanese audience, the official left little doubt as to whose movements were considered threatening: “The Somalis always ask for travel passes for medical treatment, for business, or visits”, he announced and continued, “you don’t do that. Kenyans love you South Sudanese very much. You are good people, unlike the Somalis.” (Public meeting, 18 August 2016). Meanwhile, another Kenyan official in Kakuma had recruited “Somali-passing” refugees to collect intelligence on the camp’s Somali community during religious sermons or public events.

Within a wider racialized economy of global mobility and security, in which black or otherwise racialized migrants are associated with threat (Besteman, 2020; Tesfahuney, 1998), those identified as Somalis have become local embodiments of a terrorist menace in Kenya. As camps are not merely spaces of humanitarian care, refugees are perpetually suspect and subjected to intelligence gathering, triage and policing. Through such operations the Kenyan state (re)produces a “security threat” in the figure of its ethno-racialized Somali population. Rather than simply marking the imposition of externally received policy in a globally unfolding War on Terror, these counterterrorism measures have become a pervasive modality of population management and postcolonial state-building in Kenya’s Northern areas. In fact, this racial hierarchization and the reinscription of colonial modes of governing the mobility of populations is not unique to Kenya but are reflected in wider geographies of ethnic and racial exclusion across the African continent (Brankamp and Daley, 2020; Tewolde, 2020). Thus, refugee camps are also not just recepticles for imported counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally specific state-making processes in which Kenya’s counterterror state is being (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment that is, increasingly, indistinguishable from “militarized global apartheid” (Besteman, 2020). We should hence understand racialized triage—geared towards screening Somali bodies—as operating simultaneously on multiple scales: violence and dehumanization enacted of individual bodies, buttressing of security measures for vetting and sorting inside camps, the regional proliferation of checkpoints and territorial stigmatization, the consolidation of the security state at the national scale and, finally, the embeddedness of such process within the global racialized mobility control of populations displaced by war, climate change and the violences of racial capitalism.

Conclusion

On 24 March 2021, Kenya’s Interior Minister, Fred Matiang’i, announced that the government intended to close down its refugee camps and issued UNHCR with a two-week ultimatum to draw up a closure plan. The announcement echoed similar statements by Kenyan authorities in 2015, 2016, and 2019—a perennial threat cloaked in a language of “national security concerns” that naturalizes the link between camps and terrorism. Although previous decisions to close the camps were struck down by Kenya’s own supreme court in 2017—which ruled the move “unconstitutional” and found that “blanket labelling of refugees of Somali origins as terrorists is discriminatory and violates the principle of ‘individual criminality’”²⁰—these exercises are nonetheless economically lucrative and politically expedient. In the wake of the 2015 closure decision, the US government pledged $45 million to assist Kenya manage its “refugee crisis,” noting that funds would be withheld if Kenya actually closed the camps. The recurrent threats of camp closure are performative assertions of sovereign power (Weima and Minca, 2022)—albeit with violent consequences for refugees caught in limbo—whose audiences reveal much about the intersecting scales of counterterror governance within which Kenyan camps function. Inside the camps, the risk of closure fuels embodied anxieties, uncertainties and “ontological insecurity” among refugees (Hyndman and Giles, 2016). On a national level, closure threats have become part of populist nationalist discourses on “foreign” terrorism that stoke xenophobic ire at opportune political moments in pursuit of exclusionary nation-building. Globally, such announcements remind the “international community” of the pivotal role camps play as catchment areas for those displaced by warfare, militarization, crisis and socio-ecological devastation, illustrating that Kenya’s camps are tied into a system of militarized global apartheid that keeps refugees immobile and away from the Global North (Besteman, 2020).

However, the intermittent remaking of refuge in Kenya in the image of counterterrorism signals also the fragility of this prevailing geopolitical arrangement. Kenya is increasingly questioning its dual role as both humanitarian safe haven and regional first responder in a fight against terrorism. The ribbon which has topologically linked camps with counterterrorism throughout the country’s turbulent colonial and postcolonial history further indicates that protection of and protection from ethno-racialized, mobile, insubordinate, and undesirable populations usually appear as part of the same governing logic. Kenya’s camps are firmly nested within global circuits of violence that continuously displace not only people but also the responsibility for their care. Encampment in the Turkana and Garissa counties is an imperfect geographical buffer against unchecked refugee movements into southern “downcountry” Kenya as well as against their onwards migration to Europe, although this is increasingly difficult to police. The rise of counterterrorism as a hegemonic securitizing logic and network of material infrastructure has introduced overlapping donor pressures to secure East Africa’s “frontline” in the global War on Terror and thereby, once again, enabled Kenya’s institutional proclivity for dispensing state violence and counterinsurgency against ethno-racialized minorities. Camps and counterterrorism both rely on the discursive and material production of “states of exception” in which carceral care and racialized triage of bodies become acts of simultaneously protecting rights-bearing citizens, territorialized belonging, the postcolonial state, and a non-negotiable liberal global order.

Ultimately, refugee encampment and counterterrorism are intertwined as military interventions across sub-Saharan Africa and the Global South more widely both contribute to forced displacement and retaliatory “terror” attacks which, in turn, further legitimate new investments in militarized borders, walls, security technologies and expansion of carceral spaces (Mountz, 2020; Walia, 2021). The material presence of camps is but one way in which security space is perpetually produced and reworked, but as spatial nodes of global humanitarian governance they also represent peculiar moral geographies which blur the neat lines between fighting and enacting “terror”. In this way, counterterrorism’s in-built need for racialized policing, surveillance, and containment marks the contemporary use of camps in Kenya’s growing terror-industrial-complex as both a new development and a troubling return to the past.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Zoltán Glück would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies,the Social Science Research Council,Fulbright,and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their generous support of this project. Hanno Brankamp would firstly like to thank all interlocutors in Kenya for their time,generosity,and openness in sharing their thoughts on topics that are difficult to discuss. Secondly,he expresses his gratitude for funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).

Authors’ contribution

Hanno Brankamp and Zoltán Glück have contributed equally to this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC—Award No.: ES/J500112/1),the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes),the Wenner-Gren Foundation,Social Science Research Council Mellon IDRF,and the Fulbright IIE.

ORCID iD

Hanno Brankamp

Notes

Hanno Brankamp is Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration at the Refugee Studies Centre,University of Oxford,UK. His research focuses on geographies of im/mobility,humanitarianism,camps and carceral geographies,police and state violence,and abolitionism in East Africa.

Zoltán Glück is Assistant Professor of Sociology,Anthropology and International Affairs at American University,USA. His research focuses on issues of security,development,cities,capitalism and activism in East Africa.

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