The best books about urban refugees

We can learn a lot about urban refugees from works of fiction. This short story is a tragic tale of Boniface Louis R. Kuseremane, a Rwandese prince, who finds himself in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The story does well to remind us that refugees come from all backgrounds and how quickly support and wealth can disappear. Nairobi initially exists as a stop-off on route to continued comforts in Europe, but the protagonist finds himself trapped on a downward spiral as his social and material privileges slip away.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is most well known for her beautifully written novels Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, but long before these, her short story Weight of Whispers won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing.

This book is one of the first full-length books devoted to the specific topic of urban refugees. It was published in 2001, years before the pronouncement that most refugees live in towns and cities.

The book provides an intimate and detailed account of the promises and hardships refugees face in cities–in this case, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

An engrossing and accessible ethnography, the book shows the way that a variety of factors–age, religion, language, memory–intersect to shape refugees’ experiences in urban space.

A rich historical account of the experiences of Afghans living in urban Pakistan from the 1970s to the post-2001 ‘War on Terror’ period, this book provides a fascinating discussion of urban informality, what it means to belong, the role of citizenship, and the engagement and absence of the state in cities.

The book utilises ethnographic observations and interviews but also valuable archival data–raising important considerations of who gets remembered, as well as underscoring that urban refugees are not a new phenomenon. 

This book is a fascinating and well-written book on ‘gender refugees’ –people who make their claim for asylum based on their gender identity.

The book illuminates these refugees’ unique and challenging journeys as gender refugees, from their reasons for leaving their countries, the various violences in the asylum system, the South Africa they imagined, and the South Africa they experienced.

The book de facto deals with urban refugees. South Africa does not practice a system of encampment, while nearly all the participants in the research reside in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

This book is set in the small city of Ithaca in Upstate New York and provides an engaging account of people living there before and during the anti-migrant policies of Donald Trump’s Presidency.

Despite the overwhelming majority of refugees being hosted in the Global South, some do receive third-country resettlement to countries such as the United States. As Hartman’s book shows us, challenges and issues don’t stop upon resettlement, and often, resettled refugees face new obstacles.

The book is also an important reminder that while most studies of urban refugees tend to focus on mega- and other large cities like Istanbul, Bangkok, and Beirut, smaller urban areas–like Ithaca, with a population of little over 30,000–are also key sites of refuge.