| Based on fieldwork conducted in a Mozambican refugee camp in the district of Mwanza in Malawi, and integrating refugee and agrarian studies, this dissertation explores the interplay between structure and agency through a comparative analysis of refugees' and local farmers' strategies of access to resources (including food, land, labour and trade) and a focus on market and non-market relations, power structures and structural factors in terms of shaping these strategies and their outcomes.;At a micro-economic level, the dissertation shows that a priori negative structural and policy factors, including the shortcomings of the refugees' food basked, diversion of food relief, and a local economy dominated by the subsistence sector gave rise to a flourishing trading system which especially benefited refugee men with the longest duration of stay in Malawi, local women and villagers with access to wet land. Within the villages, the presence of refugees resulted into the erosion of non-market ties as they used to be embedded in labour relations and trading transactions, an evolution that tended to victimise some junior males. Within the refugee camp, power structures had been imposed by the state and by international actors. Refugees' access to food, labour and trading opportunities remained very much determined by horizontal and vertical ties. In further contrast with the villages, economic transformations within the camp occurred at the expense of refugee women and especially through their expulsion of the food sphere and a restructuring of the gender division of labour.;From a structure and agency perspective, the dissertation further demonstrates that refugees and locals' mediation of structural forces (in the first place the subsistence-security orientation of the international programme of assistance and the subsistence-based local economy), as highlighted by the increased commoditization and internal differentiation processes, cannot be adequately accounted for by either a resistance framework or a rational actor model. Instead, it stresses the centrality of the time-knowledge intersection, entrepreneurial activities and social networks as a way of comprehending and assessing the prospects for locally produced changes and locally constituted struggles. |
