Abstract
This book explores relationships between war, displacement and city-making. Focusing on people seeking refuge in Somali cities after being forced to migrate by violence, environmental shocks or economic pressures, it highlights how in-migrants are actively transforming urban space. Using first-hand testimonies and participatory photography, the book documents and analyses the micropolitics of urban camp management and infrastructure, evictions and nascent gentrification, and the networked labour of displaced populations that underpins growing urban economies. Central throughout is an emphasis on the political economy in which urbanization processes at the global margins are embedded. The book sheds light on this through, for example, analysing the commercialization of services and embedded forms of rentierism – all of which are contributing to the further financialization of poverty. Critical analysis is also provided of how the discursive figure of the ‘internally displaced person’ (IDP) is co-produced by various actors, including those involved in international interventions that problematize and attempt to find ‘durable solutions’ for displacement. The book argues that the IDP label exerts significant power in structuring socio-economic inequalities and the politics of group belonging within different Somali cities connected through protracted histories of conflict-related migration.