As infrastructures mushroom across Africa, this article investigates narratives accompanying infrastructural investments in East African cities, Djibouti-city (Djibouti) and Berbera (Somaliland). While cities in the Global North move towards a post-industrial future, the Horn of Africa depicts other endpoints, breaking with experiences of colonisation while hoping to diminish asymmetries in a Western-dominated global system. Inspired by models that condense idealized experiences of urban success elsewhere, Djibouti and Somaliland rework historical narratives while envisioning their future as urban nodes interlinking different places and cultures. We build on Koselleck's theory of historical time and link it to notions of 'elsewhere' to show how different actors rework past experiences and future expectations through port modernizations. On the one hand, port operators and logistics companies use city labels and propagate developmental trajectories that assimilate East African cities to Dubai or Shekou models. On the other hand, political elites and city residents search in these projects for their own path, creatively combining elements of similarity and distinctiveness while developing the city's specific brand. Through qualitative interviews substantiated with secondary sources, this article shows how infrastructure becomes a driver of identity promoting spatial imaginaries, re-invigorating (shared) memories, and formulating aspirations drawing on different times and places.

In this forum, we employ infrastructures as an analytical lens to explore contemporary world ordering, which we root in the dynamics of capitalism. Beyond enabling mobility and facilitating capital’s expansionist transgression of social and geographical barriers, we show how the current densification and expansion of infrastructures are actively undermining the imaginary of a world ordered through spatially bounded, internally unified entities. Infrastructures, as we demonstrate through four case studies, become complicit in the production and reification of social abstractions, key among them abstract time, space, nature, and subjectivity. Infrastructures, therefore, contribute to the flattening of lived experiences, inserting capital’s calculative logic onto social lives while providing it with a material form. Building on the examination of port, agro-industrial, financial and urban infrastructures, we explore how capital's general drive toward accelerating mobilities leads to the pluralization and modularization of spaces, transforms practices of statehood, destroys ecosystems, builds on speculative exclusionary practices, and obfuscates violence intrinsic to abstractions by rendering them technical. Infrastructures, we conclude, lend themselves to a nonschematic and nonsedentary understanding of the social, transcending scalar fixes and highlighting the (violent) relational materialities that are structuring social relations at different scales.

Abstract In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of “the international,” this article emphasizes the centrality of materials and mobilities in thinking about the international and calls for a novel infrastructural lens in the IR discipline. We argue that infrastructures provide crucial mechanisms for forging the distinctions between units that constitute the international as a separate realm. We outline how infrastructures continuously transform this realm through re-scaling and re-ordering spaces, polities, and people. In the meantime, infrastructures are at the heart of social processes, which generate knowledge practices that constitute the international. They inscribe themselves in discourses, produce meaning, and shape identities, and they are thus part of the ideational underpinning of the international. We conclude by advocating a shift in the analytical weight of materials in IR, premised on an interdisciplinary dialogue, and suggest a theoretical and methodological recalibration of the discipline’s treatment of infrastructures.

This chapter examines patterns of physical mobility and virtual circuits that connect people in urban camps to resources and interlocutors throughout the wider city. Focusing on the labour relations and forms of petty entrepreneurship that emerge within and from these marginalized settlements, it emphasizes their gendered character and the ways in which they constitute and sustain economic precarity. Mobile phone infrastructure enables many of these labour practices, and the chapter considers the significance of the burgeoning Somali telecommunications sector within the wider displacement urbanization nexus. The chapter highlights various uses and risks of virtual connectivity for urban in-migrants, and the impacts of ICT-enabled information and resource flows on mobility and settlement patterns. Examining the linkages between labour, livelihood strategies and digital connectivity, it discusses the role of mobile money in the working lives of urban in-migrants. Interrogating linked discourses of digital inclusion and entrepreneurial innovation in refugee policymaking, the chapter emphasizes the ambiguous impacts of connectivity on the social and economic lives of people in marginalized urban settlements. Technologies do not work outside of existing layers of gendered, raced and classed inequalities, and, as a consequence, can exacerbate unequal social and spatial distributions of hardship and immiseration in the city.

Despite occupying a subordinate position in the urban context, displaced people influence how cities are evolving, and shape their morphologies and patterns of growth. Their agency here is embedded in a political economy of rent-seeking that is intertwined with international aid. This chapter outlines the multiple facets and ambiguities of the clientelistic networks that underpin these rent-seeking practices and demonstrates how urban newcomers act within and through these networks to secure their survival. The creation of settlements associated with displacement can increase the value ascribed to land. The chapter links these processes to wider insights on the development of real estate markets for domestic urban capital, which are often driven by local and diasporic investors, and which accompany the infrastructural focus of global capital penetration in contemporary African cities. Comparatively highlighting distinctive aspects of camp urbanization in Somali cities, the chapter shows how the combination of protracted violence, urban reconstruction and mass in-migration has been accompanied by cycles of forced evictions that initiate nascent forms of urban gentrification.

This introductory chapter frames the wider book as a critical engagement with the discursive figure of the ‘internally displaced person’ and the use of this label by various actors in the context of conflict-linked migration and urbanization. The chapter presents the methodology that underpinned the research on which its findings are based. It explains and reflects upon the use of narrative interviews, participatory photography and public exhibitions/discussions to generate insight on the nexus of displacement and urbanization from the perspectives and everyday experiences of marginalized populations living in conditions of extreme socio-economic precarity. The concept of precarious urbanism is introduced as the process by which mobile, constantly shifting patterns of arrival, settlement, camp transformation, eviction and resettlement manifest in the morphologies of the four cities under focus and shape trajectories of urban development and ways of living. The chapter explains the thematic structure of the book and the different aspects of this precarious urbanism that are analysed in each.

This conclusion ties together the analyses of the preceding chapters and further elaborates on how the findings speak to research undertaken in other global contexts where the displacement–urbanization nexus is prominent. It explains how moving back and forth between the urban settings and the wider relations in which emergent urban environments are entangled contributes to the analytical ‘worlding’ of cities at the global margins. The conclusion also reflects on how the book’s discussion of precarious urbanism could be interpreted in ongoing narrative contests around post-war urban reconstruction, and highlights how the issue of displacement connects contrasting discourses around both the violence and economic growth that underpin contemporary forms of camp urbanization in Somalia, Somaliland and beyond. It also reflects on limitations of the study and marks out important areas for future research, particularly in relation to the role of internationally supported state-building, the rise of new political actors and their influence on processes of camp urbanization.

This chapter foregrounds the intersection of social and material aspects of urban lives and examines how infrastructures mediate and differentiate urban practices. People improvise to create or fill gaps in basic infrastructure. In doing so they produce the socio-materiality of places and configure urban morphologies, which, in turn, shape their everyday bodily experiences in and of the city. Focusing on the urban margins, the chapter uses examples of sanitation, water, health and education as analytical entry points to highlight socio-ecological dynamics that produce spaces of privilege and exclusion in the city. The chapter further expands on the previous analyses of the political economy of urban in-migration and humanitarian entrepreneurship by demonstrating how infrastructural struggles are conditioned through relations of property that intersect with arrangements for security. It is again emphasized that people at the margins are active agents of urbanization, even if they themselves do not usually benefit from these contributions to city-making.

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 these populations are actively transforming urban space.

This chapter explores how people displaced to cities understand their longer- and shorter-term prospects and the impacts of internationally backed ‘durable solutions’ interventions. The chapter discusses how in-migrants think about their (new) urban lives and the potential for ‘return’ mobility. It then focuses on how local resettlement schemes in Bosaso and Hargeisa have created new clusters of peripheral settlements with varying connections to the main cities. This section analyses resettled residents’ different experiences of land tenure and material opportunities or constraints in these new liminal urban spaces, which themselves have significant effects on wider dynamics of city growth. The chapter argues that categorizations of displacement are spatialized in these initiatives and structure relations between people who have newly settled in the city and those who consider themselves indigenous residents. Tensions exist between co-produced narratives of pan-Somali solidarity and experiences of belonging and discrimination aligned with place, race, clan, caste and ethnicity. The chapter shows that the discursive and spatial reordering of urban populations, in the context of the durable solutions framework, relies on and reproduces reductive labels of displacement, which fold themselves into local contestations over citizenship and belonging.

This chapter examines the concept of displacement through a historical overview of the relationship between forced mobility and different phases and locations of violent conflict in Somalia. It outlines the historical and political context of the four cities under focus through the lens of personal experiences shared by research participants. The memories of research participants of the unfolding political fragmentation, and periods of instability in Somalia since the 1980s detail multiple reasons for flight and show how people were moving to – or back to, or between – the cities of Baidoa, Bosaso, Hargeisa and Mogadishu. Research participants describe experiences of forced mobility, how people found and negotiated places to settle in cities on arrival and their attempts to rebuild their lives in the urban environment. Although experiences of displacement and dynamics of urbanization across the four cities are diverse, the chapter shows how each city has been shaped by interrelated legacies of conflict and displacement. After a brief overview of political dynamics that have underpinned the construction, break-up and attempted reconstruction of the Somali state, the chapter focuses each of the four cities’ historical experiences of conflict-linked in-migration and the development of camp-like settlements in urban and peri-urban space.

The article studies the everyday of violent conflicts and wars. It uses Somalia as a case study to explore how ordinary people experience and legitimize actors of violence. Building on biographic interviews, I show how violence became a normalized aspect of daily lives and was integrated in the habitus of people who developed the ability to routinely respond to it. However, I also show, that the specific temporality of violence impedes its full routinization and normalization. Legitimation processes in Somalia are marked by the tension of the routinized extraordinariness that protracted violence generates. Unsurprisingly, therefore, legitimation was mainly driven by experiences of security. These experiences were closely tied to four factors: clan membership, mobility, justice, and patriarchal conventions. These findings demonstrate the need to further develop a relational and processual understanding of legitimation that takes account of the everyday, as it is here that the actions of violent groups are felt, discussed, agreed-upon, rejected, or contested.

This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.

Displacement and mass migration have contributed to extremely rapid urbanization in the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa. Often displaced from rural areas, newcomers to cities hope to find safety and the means to rebuild their lives. However, displaced people often find themselves stranded in dilapidated settlements and entangled in exploitative labour relations or exhausting forms of petty entrepreneurship in order to survive. This article builds on photographic and testimonial accounts from urban in-migrants to provide a snapshot of the ways in which these labour relations perpetuate socio-economic precarity while also underpinning the dynamic (re)construction of modern Somali cities.

Displaced people settling at the margins of Somali cities live in conditions of extreme precarity. They are also active users of information and communications technology (ICTs), employing mobile phones to maintain social networks, obtain information, navigate urban space and labour markets, transfer and store money, and receive aid. This article explores mobile connectivity from the perspective of displaced people, analysing how they experience mobile phones, and the connections they enable in the context of conflict and urban reconstruction in Somalia. The findings caution against techno-optimist developmental discourses, and provide a nuanced picture of the benefits, constraints, challenges and risks entailed in the engagement of marginalised urban populations with ICTs. Although providing various beneficial affordances, increased mobile connectivity does not by itself diminish inequalities. ICTs can reinforce power differentials between urban labourers and employers, become instruments of exploitation, and increase the distance between receivers of aid and the transnational regimes that govern precarity in Somali cities.