Refugee Welfare Councils as Spaces of Local Citizenship Production: The Case of Adjumani District, Uganda

Abstract

Recent literature on refugees’ agency has shed light on refugees’ capacity to claim political subjectivity and to creatively engage with their condition of vulnerability. Drawing on this literature, this article shows how refugees manage to reinvent spaces of participation created from the top down in refugee settlements, turning them from invited spaces to something more akin to invented spaces of participation. It does so through the analysis of Refugee Welfare Councils, local governance institutions created by the Ugandan government and UNHCR in refugee settlements, and drawing on field research conducted in April–June 2018 in Adjumani District, Uganda. The article argues that Refugee Welfare Councils (RWCs) are turned into invented spaces of participation, through which refugees undertake actions that produce a form of local citizenship based on claiming rights to food and services, the reorganization of society through the emergence of new leadership structures, and the production of new forms of identity and belonging. These all contribute to the emergence of a new imagined community which is based on geographical proximity and on the shared experience of exile, distancing itself from prevalent traditional forms of identification and belonging in South Sudanese society.