Invisible refugees: Sense of self and agency in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement (Uganda)

Liisa H. Malkki investigated how media and humanitarian organisations represented refugees and how this impacted their sense of self and agency in her acclaimed work "Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization". According to Malkki, these depictions helped dehistoricize refugees so that they were viewed as helpless victims of the crisis rather than as people with their own histories and potential for change. The issues Malkki noted in the 1990s are still present in the lives of the refugees seeking self-determination in Uganda's Nakivale settlement, one of the oldest refugee settlements in the world. Based on repeated fieldwork conducted in Nakivale since 2019 and using the concept of 'co-presence', the researcher concluded that one of the important variables influencing refugees' sense of self is the specific implication of 'refugee' status present in their perception. In this context, being a refugee means having to deal with a variety of exploitative practises, such as corruption, sexual exploitation, a lack of educational opportunities, and general injustice that Nakivale residents experience, which makes it harder for them to integrate into host society. Refugees believe that these practises exist, whether they have personally experienced them or have heard about them from a member of the community. Because of this particular perception, residents of Nakivale gradually distance themselves from the institutions and international organisations based there. As a result, the number of refugees who go unnoticed by aid organisations grows over time, contributing to deepening the specific state of protraction and limbo.