Spectral self-reliance: an analysis of South Sudanese self-settlement in Northwestern Uganda

Abstract

This thesis responds to two key trends in humanitarian response: one is the ongoing search for durable solutions amid dwindling humanitarian funds, the other is the growing recognition of practices of self-settlement in smaller towns and cities undertaken by displaced populations worldwide. Drawing on the accounts of self-settled South Sudanese refugees, policy documents, observations, and archival research, this thesis contributes multi-scalar empirical material to examine the overlooked ways South Sudanese people navigate the liminal spaces of humanitarian policy in West Nile, Uganda. It attends specifically to the interplay between institutional logics and the everyday survival practices of refugees. The research, which took place at successive intervals between May 2022 and March 2024, relies on the lived accounts and everyday experiences of South Sudanese people living within and beyond formal structures of international refuge, focusing on Arua City and Rhino Camp Refugee Settlement. The thesis makes three main contributions to debates about mobility, humanitarianism, and displacement. Firstly, it offers rich empirical evidence concerning refugee experiences in a secondary city, spaces which are often overlooked in forced displacement scholarship. In doing so, the thesis provides an in-depth account of the overlooked ways refugees navigate settlement and urban spaces in Uganda, in conversation with the ever-changing landscape of formal humanitarian protection. Contrary to the approach of much policy scholarship, these findings reveal dynamic connections between formally recognised spaces of refuge and self-settlement and draw attention to the complex web of actors that shape South Sudanese experiences in northwestern Uganda, including staff of local and national government, (I)NGOs, international institutions, teachers, landlords, neighbours, and fellow refugees. Taking people’s lived realities as a starting point, the thesis can be read as a counter commentary on refuge in Uganda, offering new empirical insights and a reframing of how refuge is produced beyond the well-studied poles of camps and capital cities. In foregrounding this, I argue for a more spatially attentive refugee scholarship that recognises secondary cities and towns as critical sites in the evolving landscape of displacement and protection.