Community Infrastructures: Ethnicity, Self-Reliance, and Refugee Governance in Cairo.

Over the last two decades, community-based interventions have become an important tool of migration and refugee governance at a global level, thus attracting increasing academic attention. Governmentality approaches have argued that, through the notions of ‘community’ and ‘self-reliance’, the same liberal rationalities of government applied to advanced liberal societies are being translated into technologies of governance for displaced populations. Other accounts have highlighted the potentially emancipatory character of migrant and refugees’ self-organization, focusing on the productive and liberating effects of ‘community’, as always pre-existing and exceeding attempts at governing it. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Cairo, Egypt, among Sudanese and Ethiopian organizations, this article theorizes community as a socio-material infrastructure encompassing both human and non-human elements such as ethnic identity, relations of care, and material and financial aid. In Cairo, it is shown, community and ethnicity-based infrastructures are mobilized by refugee leaders not only in the professionalized provision of basic services coordinated by international humanitarian agencies, but also in collective protests in which the work of those very organizations is contested. The analysis contributes to two emerging debates in critical migration scholarship. First, it adds to the understanding of the role ethnicity, identity, and self-reliance play in contemporary governance assemblages in which humanitarianism intersects with the government of global mobility, and which can be identified as local arrangements of the global migration industry in the developing world.  Second, highlighting how the relation between refugees and governance agencies encompasses elements of both dependence and autonomy, it resonates with recent literature that theorizes border and migrant struggles as sites of political ambiguity.