Governing 'lost boys': Sudanese refugees in a UNHCR Camp

My dissertation, Governing "Lost Boys ": Sudanese Refugees in a UNHCR Camp, is an ethnographic study of transnational, humanitarian governance on young, Dinka and Nuer men's masculinity, personhood, and subjectivities. It is based on one year of qualitative research among a body of unaccompanied minors, publicized by the media and refugee advocates as "The Lost Boys of Sudan," in the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees' (UNHCR) Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya. At the outbreak of civil war in Ethiopia in 1991, these child wards/conscripts of the Sudanese Peoples' Liberation Movement (SPLM) were forced to flee SPLM administrated camps in Ethiopia to Kenya, where they have since been maintained under the auspices of the UNHCR and its implementing partners. My dissertation thus explores how formerly unaccompanied minors have been produced as self-avowed "modern" persons and "global" citizens through their insertion into the disciplinary regime of a protracted refugee camp. It begins with a review of how refugees transform themselves from nutritionally deprived subjects to "modern" agents by developing a habitus of educational activity, as exemplified in their pursuit of secondary school degrees in the camp. Applying notions of governmentality, in which rules from above are replaced by norms from within through citizen's active self-regulation, I then examine how humanitarian social programs (i.e., Peace Education, Gender Promotion, Peer Counseling, and Child Rights Clubs) empower young men to produce a new moral order based on neo-liberal and gendered, universal human rights discourses. While programs coalesce around a "profeminist" imperative, young men's involvement perpetuates men's control of symbolic and material resources. In addition, "Lost Boys" resettled to the United States fuel a transnational economy of violence through remittances earmarked for arranged marriages; ensuing bidding wars often deteriorate into sexual and gender based violence in the camp. I suggest that their insertion into a humanitarian moral order and global political economy animates and fractures normative masculinities. Whereas many young men reproduce ethno-national and institutional discourses, others craft subjectivities through a countemodernity associated with criminality, hip-hop, and transnational Blackness. Nevertheless, all attempt to transmute their subjection as refugees into freedom through the assumption of alternative modernities and moralities.