Regardless of where refugees are hosted, they require political knowledge of rights, restrictions, responsibilities, and the governance actors and processes who decide and uphold these. This knowledge enables refugees to comply with national laws, benefit from rights and protections, avoid rights-based exploitations and harms, and pursue life with dignity in exile. Yet, do refugees have this knowledge? Further, what determines variation in knowledge outcomes and what are the barriers for knowledge obtainment? Finally, are there effects of having or lacking this knowledge? I answer these questions by analyzing variation in refugees’ political knowledge in Uganda—a nation that UNHCR, scholars, legal experts, and humanitarian providers praise as a model nation for hosting refugees. Specifically, they commend that Uganda permits recognized refugees the rights to free movement, to formal and informal economic opportunities, and to basic social services of healthcare and education on par with citizens. Moreover, Uganda allows refugees the choice to reside in rural refugee settlements where they receive humanitarian provision, or to forego formal provision and self-settle in urban areas. Through original ethnographic and survey data, I find that despite Uganda’s generosity, refugees are unevenly aware of their rights and opportunities. Refugees in different urban areas and of different urban status have statistically significant differences both in the number of rights they enumerate, as well as the content of these rights. Refugees additionally demonstrate inconsistent understandings of which governance actors provide for their rights. This dissertation argues that refugees’ rights-based expectations vary because of their experiences with material provision and support that is given to refugees in settlements but denied to refugees in cities. Variation also occurs due to the unequal presence of state and non-state actors to promote rights knowledge. This significantly includes the presence or absence of refugee-led organizations (RLOs) to promote refugee rights. Finally, I theorize that regardless of one’s location or urban status, refugees’ ability to acquire political knowledge is impeded by an inability to determine what role politics or political knowledge holds in their daily lives. The data suggests many refugees hold an enduring and negative conceptualization of politics, with the result that even concepts of rights or governance become taboo and off limits. This dissertation also analyzes newspaper and archival datasets to document the effects of political knowledge, or lack thereof, on critical outcomes in refugee daily life. Specifically, this dissertation addresses outcomes of how refugees with different knowledge levels express their rights-based grievances and seek redress for violated rights, as well as how knowledge engenders broader outcomes of refugee precarity or resilience. Analysis identifies distinct trends in each outcome among refugees with lower and higher rights-based political knowledge. In general, refugees are better able to articulate and address their grievance demands to stakeholders able to help when they have more political knowledge. Likewise, refugees with higher political knowledge were on average more able to secure more resilient outcomes after a shock or exploitation.

Creator

• Kuntzelman, Christa

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3gyj-7q22

Subject

• Political science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_897615
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16002

Keyword

• Refugee rights
• Urban refugees
• Uganda
• Political knowledge

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright