My thesis examines dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within Somali social networks in East Africa. It focuses on Somali mobility patterns and financial practices to draw insights on the maintenance, reproduction, and transformation of both solidarity ties and inequalities. By examining Somali communities in Kenya, host of the largest Somali refugee population outside of Somalia, and Uganda, an increasingly important recipient of Somali refugees and migrants, this thesis seeks to understand how mechanisms of social stratification rooted in Somali socio-cultural structures are reproduced in mixed migration flows encompassing both forced and voluntary migrants. It analyses sets of relationships whose continuity and changes are regulated by the interaction of structure, agency, and institutions, and argues, on the one hand, that networks are dominated by groups who hold sway over economic and political resources, precluding others from accessing key assets that may help challenge relations of subordination. On the other, that pre-existing inequalities hinder on the capability to move across both physical and institutional categories. These inequalities can be traced back to asymmetric clan relationships shaped by Somali historical trajectories before and after the implosion of the state. However, this thesis suggests also that kin relationships only partially explain why and how bonds are sustained and forged. Instead, by observing the mechanisms that animate networks, reproducing both solidarity and marginalisation, this thesis teases out how new linkages are created and how Somalis communities accommodate to specific institutional settings, either adapting to narrowing windows of opportunity or maximising the benefits that may be yielded from their widening. The thread running throughout this thesis is the argument that mobility contributes not only to accessing and mobilising strategic resources but also to shaping processes of social stratification. By using ethnographic methods of data collection, this thesis seeks to shed light on rifts in Somali social networks often masked by the veneer of trust.

No description available.

This thesis is a study of attitudes to regional and national identity in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in northeast Algeria, and among Kabyle migrants in Paris. I illustrate how Kabyles nurture a fragile balance of nationalism and regional particularism through a primarily moral notion of local community, and extend it to an alternative vision for an Algerian nation which they believe has been debased by a corrupt state regime and Arabo-Islamic ideology since national independence. The thesis is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork divided between two places – Paris and a large village in Kabylia – and reflects my interest in how people ‘imagine’ national community through their experience as members of smaller social groups. Many Kabyle activists today formulate an alternative vision of Algerian national politics as a federation of several regionally based affective communities, each maintaining internal solidarity. This echoes a tendency in French colonial writings on Kabylia, discussed in the opening chapter, to conceive of the region as an island, intensively connected yet defensive of its autonomy. As citizens of the existing Algerian state, many Kabyles contest assimilation by claiming to represent Algeria’s ‘true past’, and investing contemporary governance initiatives with its values. They represent the radical difference that this implies with metaphors of the Kabyle community as a family within ‘public’ national life, and accuse the state regime of reversing this relationship by adopting a language of coercive authority appropriate only within the family. The transmission of Kabyle values today relies heavily on music, and especially political song, which I demonstrate – beyond its role in disseminating dissident ideas – acts as a vehicle for a type of secular revealed knowledge widely seen as the purest embodiment of Kabyle morality. Beyond the hollow rhetoric of Western liberalism that some see in Kabyle activism, I set out to demonstrate that the particular narrative of identity that I examine, in stressing regional uniqueness at the expense of recognition from a centralized state, also reflects anomalies inherent in the concept of ‘nationalism’ itself as a compromise between the requirements of external co-operation and internal allegiance.