Unsettled Families

Against the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, Unsettled Families. investigates the parameters that Global North governments and international humanitarian organizations use to deem certain displaced families worthy of resettlement-fewer than 1% globally-and a vast majority as fraudulent and ineligible. The book shows that "fraud" as a category is not as self-evident as it may at first appear. Nor is "the family. " Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian agencies, governmental immigration bureaucracies, and national security regimes as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of "fraud" and "family" from different vantage points in this context, the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Balakian argues that the very practices deemed "fraudulent" are often understood by refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world, fulfilling familial obligations to kin and community outside normative, Western frameworks. Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates "family" as a crucial category in producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states, and of the nature of securitized humanitarianism in the 21st century.