Abstract
Rapid urbanisation in Somalia, as in many other war-torn countries, is driven by in-migration of displaced people who are often amassed in camps. Although such camps become institutionalised sites of exclusion where ‘bare life’ is generated and disposed, they are also characterised by socially messy and continuously evolving relations of space, power, violence and displacement. The article draws on fieldwork with displaced people in Somali cities to analyse claims to property and (often violent) competition to uphold them in contestation for sovereignty. Comparing two cities, Mogadishu and Bosaaso, we show how a broad range of international and local actors, including displaced people themselves, negotiate (urban) property and establish relations that guide and foster political authority, while rendering the lives and livelihoods of displaced people precarious and insecure. In property, politics and the economy intersect, and property relations are therefore subject to struggles for both power and profit. We underscore how sovereign power produces spaces of indistinction, but emphasise that property as an analytical category contributes to understandings of sovereignty. Furthermore, propertying as social practice draws attention to the way sovereignty emerges and is connected to the market. This enables the differentiations of forms of sovereignty and draws attention to how it is negotiated, openly challenged or silently undermined.
Highlights
Rapid urbanisation in Somalia, as in many other war-torn countries, is driven by in-migration of displaced people who are often amassed in camps
The focus is on urban camps, as they have evolved into a prevailing mode of conflict-induced urbanisation
This exploration of camp urbanisation builds theoretically on Agamben’s (1998) conceptualisation of the camp as spatial enclosure characterised by a permanent ‘state of exception’ and used to dispose of ‘bare life’ - that is, life reduced to its mere biological functions
Summary
Agamben’s (1998, p. 12) self-declared correction/completion of Foucault's works on biopolitics is often applied in research on displacement and camps (Bauman, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Martin, 2015; Minca, 2015; Turner, 2005). Surveys, statistics and maps, territorial property establishes boundaries that constitute an ‘inside’ order of politics based on shared norms, and separates this from an ‘outside’, delineated as a potential threat to the former. These technologies produce land in particular ways and eventually naturalise this process. The following sections explore practices, relations, technologies and (emergent) regimes of property in Somali cities through the experiences of displaced people This approach reveals how actors enforce claims towards sovereignty, how these claims are intrinsically linked to displacement and contribute to the creation of disposable life. It shows that bare life exists with many nuances and variations, and that it is, at least in these Somali cases, not without agency
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