E-Books →Unsettled Families Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship

Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian organizations, immigration bureaucracies, and national security agencies as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of "fraud" and "family" from different vantage points in this context, Balakian shows how the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Practices that resettlement organizations deem fraudulent are often understood by people living as refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world. Such practices allow them to fulfill obligations to kin-kin defined expansively, in ways that at times exceed the boundaries of normative, US frameworks.
Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates "the family" as a crucial category in processes of producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states in the 21st century.