Ethnographic Reflection on Exilic Narratives Outside Closed Camps: The Case of Residual Liberian Refugees in Nigeria

Tosin Durodola

The University of Edinburgh

Abstract

What happens when refugees’ status are terminated and camps are officially shut down? How do residual refugees construct home and space outside closed camps? How do their narratives of the journey to exile intersect with the agency deployed to transcend their location of dispossession within a shared space of marginality? This paper offers an ethnographic reflection on the post-refugee experience of residual Liberian refugees living outside the closed Oru Refugee Camp, Ogun State, Nigeria. This paper reflects on how their exilic narratives have given rise to the audacious desire to contest their position of dislocation following their eviction from Oru refugee camp to a nearby uninhabitable bushland area in 2012. In their exilic narratives, residual Liberian refugees are inclined to attribute their resistance, resilience and transformative agency in exile to both their experience of war and their exilic journey from Liberia, which has influenced their condition of arrival in Nigeria, their subsequent adjustment and integration, and their ambulant perception of home.

Table of Contents

Letter from the Editors

Andrea Ortiz & Domiziana Turcatti 

iv

ARTISTIC & CREATIVE SECTION

All Along the Watchtower

Jussi Jaakola

2

Mother Cry!

Yohana Tekeste

3

Home Rides in Backpack

Abdul Samad Haidari

4

ACADEMIC SECTION

‘It’s a Choice Between no Life and a Good Life’ - Navigating Youth across

Borders: Young Afghans’ Search for Safety and a Future in Europe

Maria Wardale 

8

Experiences of Nicaraguan Political Refugees in Costa Rica

Gracia Silva

22 

Do Ezidi Women Need Saving? An Analysis of the Politics of Victim- and

Saviourhood in Baden-Württemberg’s ‘Special Quota’ Humanitarian

Admissions Programme for Ezidi Women and Children

Andrea Theresa Haefner

36 

Turning Asylum Seekers’ Smartphones into Control Devices: The

Introduction of the Data Extraction Policy in Austria

Ivan Josipovic  

54 

Confronting the US Immigration Detention System in the Biden Era

Zoe Martens

64 

Ethnographic Reflection on Exilic Narratives Outside Closed Camps: The

Case of Residual Liberian Refugees in Nigeria 

Tosin Samuel Durodola

79 

The Impact of COVID-19 on ex-Gazan Palestinian Refugees in Jerash Camp,

Jordan Cevdet Acu