This dissertation examines the intersection of humanitarian aid and African states in constructing citizens from refugees. This dissertation contrasts two perspectives: first, how the Tanzanian government and humanitarian aid apparatus planned to deliver rights and construct new citizens through intra-African refugee resettlement; and second, the spaces and practices through which refugees sought and accessed the rights when the official resettlement plan failed. It illustrates how humanitarian aid becomes a refuge from, while ultimately co-constructing, neoliberal citizenship in Tanzania. Most studies of forced migration assume that legal citizenship produces social citizenship; that is, with resettlement comes the benefits of state belonging, or what Hannah Arendt referred to as "the right to have rights." By mapping the social and geographic locations where refugees have sought rights, I illustrate how spaces of humanitarian aid like Kenyan refugee camps and warzones in Somalia provide rights that the Tanzanian state cannot or did not. The social locations in which individuals searched for or found rights varied greatly. Widows and young women with children often returned to refugee camps with gender mainstreaming programs that provided services and support. Young men's language skills and ethnic designation as "safe Somalis" turned a warzone they had fled as children into a space of social mobility via work with humanitarian aid organizations and the Kenyan military. Others, who did not meet the criteria for labor in Somalia or preferential status in refugee camps, remained in Tanzania where they struggled to access rights via the market, but without the social and human capital connections necessary for finding work in the informal labor sector. By conflating legal and social citizenship, the humanitarian aid apparatus and the Tanzanian state failed to produce a long-term solution to refugee warehousing, one of the most central concerns to regional stability. In this manner, this dissertation explains why refugees-turned-citizens would choose life in refugee camps or warzones over resettlement and citizenship in Tanzania and calls into question current resettlement policy.
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