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"CAWO M. ABDI"
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Elusive Jannah
As a Somali working since high school in the United Arab Emirates, Osman considers himself \"blessed\" to be in a Muslim country, though citizenship, with the security it offers, remains elusive. For Ardo, smuggled out of Somalia to join her husband in South Africa, insecurities are of a more immediate, physical kind, and her economic prospects and legal status are more uncertain. Adam, in the United States-a destination often imagined as an earthly Eden, orjannah, by so many of his compatriots-now sees heaven in a return to Somalia.
The stories of these three people are among the many that emerge from mass migration triggered by the political turmoil and civil war plaguing Somalia since 1988. And they are among the diverse collection presented in eloquent detail inElusive Jannah, a remarkable portrait of the very different experiences of Somali migrants in the UAE, South Africa, and the United States. Somalis in the UAE, a relatively closed Muslim nation, are a minority within a large South Asian population of labor migrants. In South Africa, they are part of a highly racialized and segregated postapartheid society. In the United States they find themselves in a welfare state with its own racial, socioeconomic, and political tensions. A comparison of Somali settlements in these three locations clearly reveals the importance of immigration policies in the migrant experience.
Cawo M. Abdi's nuanced analysis demonstrates that a full understanding of successful migration and integration must go beyond legal, economic, and physical security to encompass a sense of religious, cultural, and social belonging. Her timely book underscores the sociopolitical forces shaping the Somali diaspora, as well as the roles of the nation-state, the war on terror, and globalization in both constraining and enabling their search for citizenship and security.
eBook
The New Age of Security: Implications for refugees and internally displaced persons in the Horn of Africa
Cawo M. Abdi looks at the Somali crisis as the most recent conflict being fought in the name of ‘war against terrorism’. She argues that it entails major implications for migration in general and for migrant women in particular. Her central concerns are to track the new realities in the various forms of migration across the world and to better understand at a policy level how migration and development nexus encourages south–north, south–south social and economic relations with more open and accountable development paths. She tracks how the migration and development nexus challenges concepts of citizenship, trans-national borders, diversity, social protection and security.
Journal Article
South Africa
Chapter Three focuses on Somalis in South Africa and their ambiguous position within this racially segregated society. The analysis shows how Somalis leverage their Muslim faith to cement ties with Indian Muslim, but distinguish themselves from the majority Black population. Despite economic success, the legacy of violence and communal crisis in post apartheid South Africa leaves these Somalis vulnerable to violence. The violence is gendered, as it is exclusively Somali men who enter poor black neighborhoods, whereas women work in more racially mixed urban centers. As in the UAE, Somali gender dynamics are rarely undermined here, where Somalis reside and socialize within the minority Indian Muslim community. In some aspects, then, Somalis’ racial, religious, and gender identities remain stable and secure within the Indian enclaves where they settle, thus in line with the original sense of migration as leading to an earthly jannah. The pervasive violence and the lack of travel documents fuel Somalis’ desire for further migrations, towards Europe or North America.
Book Chapter
CONCLUSION
The diasporic condition reveals much about migration today and its complex contours of opportunity and challenge, of hope and loss. “To be diasporic, at least in the present, is to be uprooted from one’s place, detached from one’s nation, and searching for both. A prime subject for historical inquiry is how the diasporic sensibilities of a given migrant people vary according to the places where they reside. In the end, diaspora and comparison are inseparable elements of migration history.”¹ Historian Kevin Kenny’s assessment of how uprootedness and detachment are concurrent with a search for home, or at least for the
Book Chapter
The Genesis of Contemporary Somali Migrations
Chapter One provides background analysis for understanding the emergence of the Somali diaspora around the world. It looks closely at the Somali civil war. This chapter also provides an overview of the postcolonial Somali regimes and the regional and international political dynamics that continue to shape the country’s ongoing crisis. It discusses how this crisis produced physical and material insecurity, forcing millions from their homes since the late 1980s, with hundreds of thousands crossing international borders in search of safe haven, which is viewed today as Western citizenship. It also details the role their former lives in refugee camps and urban areas in neighboring countries (primarily Kenya) play in their subsequent border crossings in search of social and economic security.
Book Chapter
South Africa
Migrants’ and refugees’ continual search for conditions that fulfill their material, physical, and emotional needs complicates our neat categorizations of these populations, as we highlighted in the introduction. While refugees conjure forced displacement and persecution, migrants often bring to the fore the economic rationales for cross-border movements.¹ The case of South Africa further blurs these distinctions. We see how Somalis’ initial forced displacement and refugee status in Kenya continue with subsequent crossings of four, five, and even six international borders.
The chapter also underscores two concurrent forces that shape Somalis’ material and psychological well-being in South Africa: strong religious networks
Book Chapter
United Arab Emirates
We know that the state—with its ability to grant, deny, or regulate immigration status—shapes migrants’ and refugees’ sense of economic, political, and emotional well-being.¹ But state policies are only one of the forces that shape migration experiences. One’s religion, citizenship, gender, and other axes of power can ameliorate or deepen constraints or privileges that migrant groups experience. This chapter reveals how Somalia’s position in today’s geopolitics shapes the migration options of Somalis as they cross multiple borders.
I outline how Somalis in the UAE are subject to two overlapping but contradictory forces that shape their everyday lives and
Book Chapter