Abdirahman Edle’s research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

The Dadaab camps of Kenya have ‘warehoused’ refugees from Somalia and elsewhere since 1991, providing their inhabitants with little hope to (re)gain the legal rights, participation, and membership that citizenship provides. Refugee youth in Dadaab hope that education can enable their access to citizenship rights—in particular, physical mobility and the right to work. Drawing on ethnographic research, semi-structured interviews, and life history interviews conducted in Dadaab and Mogadishu, this article discusses how refugee youth from Dadaab attempt to challenge their status as non-citizens through secondary education. Our study underscores that achieving citizenship rights, as well as civic participation and belonging, are key aspirations for these young people independent of whether they remain in Dadaab or (re)turn to Mogadishu. Yet, their ideas about what these key aspects of citizenship are and how to achieve them shift with their geographical location and in the presence or absence of citizenship rights.

As debates on the colonial legacies in SouthNorth academic collaboration continue, there is a persistent need to address the structures of inequality in research partnerships from both sides. In September 2021, researchers from Kenya, Ghana and Denmark, working together in three multi-year collaborative research programs funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, met to discuss the inequality inherent in their collaborations. Following from this conversation, this brief explores the nature and implications of inequality in North-South collaborations while also suggesting some immediate steps that could be taken to address inequalities.