When Stars Are Scattered. By Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed.

Abstract

When we hear stories about refugees, we tend to hear first about numbers. Big numbers. We hear that there are now more than 100 million forced migrants in the world. And while we have long known that there are problems with numbers (Crisp 1999; Krause 2022), we can still get lost in them. It can be especially hard for younger readers as numbers tend to obscure the actual experiences of refugees. This is also true when we think of individual situations, such as the Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya. Since its establishment in the early 1990s, Dadaab has been one of the most researched refugee situations in the world. While this work has brought us important new understandings of the politics of humanitarian practice (Hyndman 2000) and the coping strategies of refugees (Horst 2007), most of this research is not produced by people who live in Dadaab. We tend to only hear about Dadaab in fleeting moments, such as when the Government of Kenya threatens to close the camps or at times of acute need or crisis in the camps. What happens between these moments of attention? How can a younger reader begin to understand daily life for someone their own age in Dadaab?