Refuge and Security Panics

Abstract

The discourse of humanitarianism presumes that the resettlement of refugees into a space of permanent refuge by humanitarian organizations and host country governments represents the end of their experience of loss, displacement, and forced mobility. But many Black Muslim refugees in the u.s. inhabit a prism in which they are targets of misinformation, scrutiny, surveillance, and suspicion that refract gender, race, and faith through security panics. The refuge of resettlement, for the Black Muslim refugees discussed in this paper, is not something given; it is something made, by them, in difficult and even dangerous circumstances. Through a series of vignettes that illustrate the felt and lived effects of racism and surveillance at the gender/race/faith-security nexus on Somali refugees in Maine, the paper explores one context in which refuge is made.