Journal of Eastern African Studies

ISSN: 1753-1055 (Print) 1753-1063 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjea20

Congolese refugees’ ‘right to the city’ and urban

(in)security in Kampala, Uganda

Eveliina Lyytinen

To cite this article: Eveliina Lyytinen (2015) Congolese refugees’ ‘right to the city’ and urban
(in)security in Kampala, Uganda, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 9:4, 593-611, DOI:
10.1080/17531055.2015.1116142

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2015.1116142

Published online: 07 Dec 2015.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 958

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 5 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjea20
Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2015
Vol. 9, No. 4, 593–611, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2015.1116142

Congolese refugees’ ‘right to the city’ and urban (in)security in Kampala,

Uganda
Eveliina Lyytinen*

Department of Geography and Geology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

(Received 8 August 2015; accepted 24 September 2015)

The concept of the ‘right to the city’ (RTC), originally developed by Lefebvre,
refers to the idea that justice is embedded in social and spatial processes, and
accordingly cities are spaces of inequality and resistance. In this paper,
Congolese refugees’ RTC is examined with regard to their city of exile,
Kampala, Uganda. The analysis is based on extensive qualitative research
conducted during 2010–2011. The notion of RTC is understood to signify
refugees’ right to access and occupy urban space. This study also acknowledges
and reinterprets the essentially Lefebvrian elements of appropriation and
participation. Appropriation of space is featured in refugees’ discourses on how
to transform insecure urban areas into protective spaces. Refugees’ participation
in decision-making regarding their formal protection is analysed as a collective,
community-based right argued for in different forms of resistance.
Keywords: Congolese; urban refugees; Uganda; right to the city (RTC); protection;
insecurity

This article examines Congolese refugees’ everyday life in the capital city of Uganda,
Kampala. Its aim is to demonstrate the applicability of the idea of ‘right to the city’
(RTC) regarding the investigation of refugee protection in an urban context of
Eastern Africa – a theoretical approach so far lacking in the studies on urban refugees.
In order to contextualise my analysis, it sets the scene by briefly discussing the city of
Kampala and the refugee governance implemented there. Following this, it deliberates
on the original idea of the RTC and present my application of it.
Kampala is both the administrative and commercial capital city of Uganda. The
city was initially established on seven hills, but later on expanded to 24 hills that
have developed largely without planning.1 Overall, the rapid and uncontrolled
urban growth has led to worsening living conditions in the city.2 Uganda’s population
has continued to grow rapidly over recent decades and was approximately 34.8 million
in 2014.3 In August 2014, there were 197 urban centres in the country and these
included one city (i.e. Kampala), 22 municipalities, and 174 town councils. According
to the preliminary census results from 2014, Kampala City had 1.5 million
inhabitants.4
Refugees coming to Uganda have largely followed the general migration and
population trends and, consequently, they are increasingly found in urban areas.

*Email: eveliina.lyytinen@utu.fi

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

594 E. Lyytinen

The number of refugees in Kampala expanded rapidly towards the end of the 2000s. In
July 2008, the number of recognised refugees and asylum seekers in Kampala was
around 20,000; by 2011 the number had nearly doubled. In addition, an estimated
50,000 unrecognised refugees were living in the city.5 In July 2011, of the 150,000
recognised refugees and asylum seekers in Uganda, more than 26% – that is 39,921
– lived in Kampala.6 The majority of them were from the Democratic Republic of
the Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
Uganda is a party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees7 and
its 1967 Protocol, and is also a signatory to the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the
Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa.8 Uganda replaced its heavily criticised
1960 Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA)9 with the 2006 Refugee Act,10 which is
more in line with international laws governing refugee protection. In 1998, the Gov-
ernment launched the self-reliance strategy which emphasised placing refugees in
rural settlements, not fenced camps, where they may become self-sufficient though
agriculture. This strategy has, however, largely been proven unsustainable.11
Even though the 2006 Refugee Act has been praised for its progressive nature by
the Ugandan Government and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), it has some shortcomings,12 in particular, regarding freedom of movement
and residence, freedom of association and expression, and the right to work.13 In
addition, even though the Refugee Act entered into force in 2008, the regulations
necessary for it to become operative were only finalised in 2010. Despite the overall
positive developments in refugee law in Uganda, and the adoption of the 2009
UNHCR urban refugee policy14 by the UNHCR country office, both of which recog-
nise cities as legitimate places for refugees to reside: ‘what exists today – and for the
foreseeable future – is a policy that focuses assistance and protection on refugees
living in settlements, and not those refugees who chose, for various reasons, to live
outside such restrictive spaces’.15 Subsequently, refugees in Kampala are expected
to be self-sufficient and there exists only minimal protection.
In 2011, a total of 80,221 registered Congolese refugees and asylum seekers lived in
Uganda, with 23% living in Kampala.16 The number of Congolese refugees was con-
stantly increasing due to ongoing violence in the DRC, particularly in the eastern
parts. The DRC has experienced two decades of armed conflict and consequent
internal and external forced migration. The intertwined armed conflicts since the
early 1990s have caused the deaths of nearly four million people and displaced
around the same number.17 Some of the Congolese refugees living in Uganda fled
the DRC during the First (1996–1997) and the Second (1998–2003) Congo Wars.
The majority of my informants were Eastern Congolese, who had also fled due to mili-
tary operations since 2008 and the post-election violence in 2011. On 29 October 2010,
the Governments of Uganda and the DRC signed a tripartite agreement with the
UNHCR to preside over the voluntary repatriation of Congolese refugees.18
However, since security in eastern Congo was highly unstable, repatriation there
remained unlikely.

The idea of the ‘RTC’

The concept of the RTC, originally developed by Lefebvre,19 has been a focus of much
academic scholarship20 and it has been increasingly used by the United Nations, gov-
ernments, non-governmental organisation, and social movements alike.21 Often the
attempts to use the concept in advocacy have, however, lacked the radical meaning
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 595

that was its original characteristic.22 My aim in this article is to demonstrate the rel-
evance of the RTC in studies on urban refugee protection.
For Lefebvre,23 the RTC has a radical meaning, developed as it was alongside his
utopian thinking which highlighted ‘the purposeful anticipatory striving for new
futures, based on the transformation of existing social tendencies’.24 Given this back-
ground of utopian thinking and the distinct understanding of the urban as ‘a type of
society’,25 Lefebvre refers to the RTC in different but mutually reinforcing ways that
are discussed below.
In its most basic form, the RTC is a right not to be expelled from the city centre,
and it furthermore rejects urban segregation. This ‘transformed and renewed right to
urban life’, which is ‘like a cry and a demand’,26 refers to the freedom to physically
access, occupy and use urban space. Moreover, the issue of exclusion is central to
Lefebvre’s writings as he refers to the RTC as

the right to information, the rights to use of multiple services, the right of users to make
known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in urban areas; it would also
cover the right to the use of the centre.27

In the same vain, Mitchell28 suggests that the RTC is related to the issue of what
cities decide to do with undesirables in relation to the centre. In his later writings,
Lefebvre perceives the RTC more as a ‘right to space’, thus opening up the discus-
sion regarding the scale of these rights.29 In this regard, Parnell and Pieterse30 argue
for the necessity of conceptualising the RTC through different scales31 ranging from
the individual, household, neighbourhood, or city to the freedom from external
risks.
The RTC, for Lefebvre, also refers to the perhaps more radical and creative ‘twin
elements’32 of the right to appropriate urban space, on the one hand, and right to par-
ticipate in the spatial production of that city on the other. Appropriation is presented
by him as a means of counteracting oppression, ‘concerned with the production of
urban space as a creative and fulfilling aesthetic experience which encompasses the
full and complete usage of space by its inhabitants in their daily routines, work prac-
tices and forms of play’.33 For Lefebvre, appropriation refers to the collective attempts
to produce city space as a creative activity,34 or ‘oeuvre’. The main objectives of oeuvre
are ‘to overcome division and restore to totality’ and to re-establish use value of the
city space.35 In this article, I largely interpret appropriation of space as imagination
of urban refugees and as their attempts to transform the insecure spaces into places
of protection. Subsequently, I argue that, particularly in the context of urban refugees,
it is necessary to conceive refugees’ right to use space not only in physical terms but
also psychosocially and emotionally as ‘clearly, our emotions matter’.36
Inhabitance in urban areas, for Lefebvre, is characterised by participation in
decision-making over the production of urban space at all levels, and effective partici-
pation, in its essence, is based on mechanisms that are controlled by the urban inhabi-
tants themselves. Thus, participation does not fulfil its ultimate function if it is
imposed from above on the inhabitants; rather, it requires self-management (autoges-
tion). This line of thinking has impelled the theorisation of citizenship towards the idea
of a political community based on urban inhabitance in the city rather than national-
ity.37 In this paper, refugees’ participation in decision-making as regards their formal
protection is analysed as a collective right argued for in community settings and
pursued through various methods of resistance to counteract exclusion.
596 E. Lyytinen

This paper presents one of the very few refugee-focused38 sub-Saharan-located39

analyses of the RTC. The term is interpreted here in an open manner as suggested
by Iveson40 who argues that ‘what “RTC” means simply cannot, indeed should not,
be answered in the same way in different times and places’. In brief, what I attempt
by the application of the RTC is to bring the urban into the examination of the key
concept of this study – (in)security. The analysis that follows focuses on refugees’
RTC as rights to physically and legally inhabit the city, to physically and psychoso-
cially access its different places, to appropriate and transform urban space into some-
thing safe and familiar to them, and, finally, to participate in the decision-making
regarding their formal protection and ability to use different forms of resistance to
counteract exclusion. Thus, the RTC includes multiple, interrelated rights that form
a collectivity of rights.41
Finally, my answer to the important questions of ‘whose right?’ in this paper is in
line with Marcuse’s interpretation.42 For him, it is important to distinguish between
the demand of the RTC by those deprived of basic material and existing legal
rights,43 and the aspiration for the future by those discontented with life and the limit-
ations it imposes for growth and creativity. Subsequently, the RTC belongs, according
to Marcuse, to:

those deprived of basic material and existing legal rights, … those discontented with life
… and those directly in want, directly oppressed, those for whom even their immediate
needs are not fulfilled: the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned and the persecuted on
gender, religious, racial grounds.44

Moreover, Marcuse clearly states that it is important to remember that the RTC is not
everyone’s right but rather there are conflicts among rights that need to be resolved.
Hence, ‘where choices must be made, the demands of the deprived are entitled to pri-
ority over the fulfilment of the aspirations of the alienated’.45 Thus, even if many
Ugandan inhabitants of the city, tightly governed under existing political regime of
Museveni, experience similar challenges in their everyday life to many of the refugees,
my focus is on those Congolese refugees who I interviewed; Congolese refugees who
are deprived of and/or discontented with their exilic life given their particular charac-
ter as the persecuted.

Methodological approach
The primary data used in this paper were collected during eight months of fieldwork in
2010–2011 from individual Congolese refugees, refugee communities, and officers of
the protection institutions. The data utilised in this paper include a combination of
semi-structured interviews (N = 74 individual refugees, 18 refugee community
leaders, 16 Ugandan authorities, and 22 officers of protection institutions), obser-
vation in various refugee communities and protection institutions, and focus group
discussions mostly with members of different refugee communities (N = 13). I did
not officially interview Ugandan inhabitants living in Kampala. Therefore, my analy-
sis of the Ugandan citizens’ perceptions of refugees is based mostly on the refugees’
own accounts, but also on the accounts of the interviewed Ugandan authorities and
officers.
I applied a maximum variation sampling with the refugees, which is a form of pur-
poseful sampling. Hence, generalisations about Congolese refugees in Kampala
cannot be made. This sampling method aims at documenting ‘unique and diverse
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 597

variations that have emerged through adaptation to different conditions and identifies
important common patterns that cut across variations’.46 As I understand that refu-
gees’ individual characteristics may have an impact on the everyday experiences of
their RTC, analysing both unique and shared accounts is seen as central to the analy-
sis, my focus being on the latter. Accordingly, I selected participants who comply with
the broad definitions of deprived and/or discontented, while also including a
maximum variation of refugees with different characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity,
bodily abilities etc.). I do not, however, examine one characteristic more than any
other, but rather focused on the intersections of these characteristics. Finally, to
avoid a possible selection bias, I recruited a diverse sample of participants from a
number of places, such as the Refugee Law Project (RLP)47 and different refugee com-
munities48 by utilising both snowball techniques and community gatekeepers.
The 74 Congolese refugees individually interviewed for this study had left the DRC
between 2000 and 2011. The majority of the informants (95%) were from the eastern
parts of the country, namely the Kivu provinces. Most of them had an urban back-
ground and were relatively well educated. The majority of the informants were
married (45%) or single (43%). Some were also widowed or unaccompanied minors
(5.5% each). Sixty-eight per cent of the individuals interviewed were men and 32%
women.49 Overall, the refugees I interviewed were between 15 and 64 years old, the
average age being 32 years. Sixty-two per cent had refugee status, 28% were asylum-
seekers, and 10% were not registered with the authorities. Seventy-seven per cent of
the refugees had never been in the rural refugee settlements. Most of those who ident-
ified themselves as a member of a particular ethnic group were Bashi (23%), Banyamu-
lenge (17%), Barega (10%), Nande (10%), or Bembe (10%). The overwhelming
majority of my participants identified themselves as Christians (97%) but they rep-
resented different denominations, mostly Pentecostal or denominational, but also
Catholic. The research also makes use of discourse analysis, a particularly appropriate
data analysis method in studies on marginalised or excluded people.50

Refugees’ right to inhabit the city

To physically access and occupy urban space is the most basic element of the RTC.51
Nevertheless, the majority of the deprived and discontented52 refugees in this study
questioned whether or not they were in practice allowed to inhabit the city. Many of
the participants perceived that protection institutions and authorities held particularly
negative attitudes towards the presence of refugees in the city. The majority of the refu-
gees suggested that despite the flexible laws and policies that allowed them to settle in
cities, most authorities and UNHCR officers did not want increasing numbers of them
in urban areas. This was because of the intensified pressure on the infrastructure of the
city, and the potential for deterioration in host–refugee relationships. What some of
the refugees claimed was that the officers told them to go back to the rural refugee
settlements. This again widened the gap between those refugees who wanted or felt
compelled to stay in Kampala and the institutions. Thus, it could be argued that refu-
gees’ RTC as the right to occupy the city, to use its multiple services, and to use the
centre53 were somewhat limited in their understanding due to the attitudes of the insti-
tutions and the authorities.
In Uganda, as shown in previous studies, officers have traditionally perceived the
refusal to relocate to a settlement as proof that refugees were in no real need of protec-
tion.54 During the research period, the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM), UNHCR
598 E. Lyytinen

and its only implementing partner InterAidUganda (IAU) all admitted55 that they
encouraged refugees to go to the rural settlements if they were not able to take care
of themselves in Kampala. This account implies that those refugees, who may have
fitted into at least the category of the deprived, if not the discontented, were automati-
cally advised not to even attempt inhabitance56 in the city. In order to stay in Kampala
a person had to be self-reliant and physical protection was not guaranteed in the city.
Therefore, as suggested by an OPM officer, ‘if you decide that you are going to move to
Kampala, there are definitely conditions to meet’.57 The main reason for this, accord-
ing to the OPM, was that: ‘if we are to provide the same provisions in the settlement
and in Kampala, I do not think that we would have settlements. Everybody would be
in Kampala’.58 As indicated by this statement, the authorities often perceived that the
right to occupy the city could not, in practice, be given to all refugees; in particular not to
those deprived refugees lacking material necessities in order to look after themselves.
The discussion of whether refugees should be contained in the rural settlements or
allowed to reside in urban areas was debated during the International Association for
the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) conference, held in Kampala in July 2011.59
At that time, the Ugandan Minister for Disaster Preparedness, Management, and
Refugees, Stephen Malinga, had ‘called for an immediate end to the policy of encamp-
ment of refugees’ because according to him ‘camps did not work’.60 The Minister
suggested that all forced migrants, not only refugees, should be allowed to integrate
locally in Ugandan towns and cities. This was a welcome idea that was critically
assessed during one of the meetings of the ‘Congolese Refugee Community in
Uganda’ (CRCU). During this meeting,61 the community members took the Minis-
ter’s suggestion as an unreliable promise, at least partly because the OPM had, accord-
ing to some of the refugees, refused to implement the Minister’s suggestion. Clearly
then, these refugees and protection institutions held conflicting ideas about the basic
right to inhabit the city. This, again, amplified the refugees mistrust of institutions,
and made them argue that their RTC in its most basic form of being allowed access
and inhabit the city was if not denied, at least discouraged.

Refugees’ sense of urban (in)security

A significant proportion of the deprived and discontent refugees engaged in this study
highlighted that their RTC was mostly limited due to their sense of insecurity in the
urban context. Subsequently, their RTC as the ability to use urban space was
limited due to psychosocial reasons. Nonetheless, not all of the refugee informants
felt similar levels of insecurity in the city. There were also locations with specific
characteristics within the city that made refugees feel particularly safe and in
general their aim was to appropriate the spaces of fear and change them into places
of protection. Moreover, security and insecurity were highly related and at times inse-
parable issues; hence my reference to ‘(in)security’ combining both the elements of
safety and fear. Subsequently, the refugees’ sense of their RTC as urban imaginations
and emotions was particularly diverse and characterised by multiplicity. Finally, in
analytical terms, even though some of the causes of (in)security may generally affected
any city inhabitant, refugees often suggested that they were targeted for specific
reasons because of their status as refugees. My analysis here emphasises these
refugee-specific causes of (in)security.
At the city level, some of my refugee informants suggested that their RTC as urban
imaginations and emotions was associated with the relative physical security found in
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 599

Kampala compared to their experiences in neighbouring countries. For instance, a 27-

year-old unregistered male refugee argued for the relative safety of the city due the free
manner in which Ugandans conducted their business and everyday life compared to
Rwandan society where he had lived after growing up in the DRC: ‘Kampala gives
own people all liberty, freedom to do anything you want’.62 According to a 22-year-
old female asylum seeker, Kampala was safer than the DRC because ‘people do not
enter houses, kill and take things’.63 However, the feeling of security was, indeed, rela-
tive. Many pointed out that they were more secure in Kampala than in the DRC, but
that they would feel safer if located outside Kampala – elsewhere in Uganda, in
Eastern Africa or resettled in a Western third country. This was mostly due to the
fact that many of my informants expressed a sense of fear because of the ease with
which their persecutors could cross the border from the DRC into Uganda and take
revenge on them in Kampala.
Subsequently, the presence of known and unfamiliar Congolese was seen to have a
protective or a fearful effect on different refugees largely depending on their reasons
for leaving the DRC. In particular, in the Nsambya and Katwe parishes of the city,
where the majority of the Kivutian Congolese refugees lived, the aspect of having
other Congolese around was understood by many as making these neighbourhoods
safe. For these refugees, the everyday encounters with essentially Congolese elements
or events in the city were reassuring; this has been stated in other research as well.64
For instance, locations where Congolese women prepared cassava leaves in a tra-
ditional way, were perceived as secure due to their familiarity, as suggested by a
refugee woman: ‘when I eat cassava leaves I feel like I am in the DRC’.65 Moreover,
the visual presence of traditional Congolese occupations, such as tailoring, bitenge
(traditional fabric) selling, and crafting, made many refugees appreciate certain neigh-
bourhoods of Kampala. Consequently, refugees often wished to change urban space
into the more familiar and subsequently safer – after their ‘heart’s desire’.66 Others,
however, perceived the presence of Congolese people and Congolese traditions as
unsafe. The fear of the ‘Other’ Congolese was often expressed by those persons who
had fled the DRC due to community violence or other forms of personal persecution.
For instance, a 31-year-old man,67 who was attacked in 2004 by Congolese coming to
Kampala because of the assistance given by his father to particular rebel groups,
explained:

I did not befriend with Congolese. I was getting feared that if, for example, I befriend with
a Congolese who is coming from the area that I come from, who can at one time inform
the people there that the son of so is here, it can be bad for me. So I had to hide my iden-
tity. Before when I came, I made sure that I should not show any Congolese my identity.
But to others I could tell my identity. But to Congolese people, refugee or none refugee,
but who is from Congo, I could not tell my identity.

Additionally, the national and regional economic decline has had its effect on refu-
gees’ sense of insecurity in Kampala. Whereas most of the deprived refugees felt that
they were unable to sustain their basic needs, they suggested that the Ugandans often
believed refugees, particularly Congolese, to be financially better off and subsequently
causing the high inflation. Ugandans reacted strongly to the increasing price of living
in Kampala as manifested in the regular demonstrations, which often led to riots. The
demonstrations started as ‘walk-to-work’ protests led by the opposition leader Kizza
Besigye. Soon these peaceful demonstrations against the increased cost of urban
600 E. Lyytinen

living, however, became violent in parts of the city. Thus, the political struggles of
Ugandans have had an impact on refugees’ RTC, interpreted here as increased insecur-
ity and limited freedom of movement.
Prior to the riots, Uganda had presidential and parliamentary elections in Febru-
ary 2011, and local elections in March 2011, and these elections had an impact on
many refugees’ general sense of protection in the city. Refugees, both men/women
and young/old, typically feared the election time because they received threats from
some Ugandans. These threats were mostly verbal and were centred on the idea that
if President Yoweri Museveni lost the elections, the Ugandan opposition would
either evict the refugees from the country or kill them. Refugees’ argued that they
were generally seen by the Ugandans as supporting Museveni and his National Resist-
ance Movement (NRM) party, which had been in power since 1986. Furthermore,
areas of the city, such as Nateete, where the Ugandan opposition were known to be
active in recruiting people, including Congolese into politics and voting around the
election time, were perceived as dangerous. For instance by a 39-year-old undocumen-
ted Congolese man who had fled the eastern DRC due to his business-related problems
with the government.68
Refugees perceived the visible presence of the police in different ways largely
depending on the nature of their previous experiences with the police both in the
DRC and in Uganda. On the one hand, the town centre was recognised as unsafe
by a few of the informants without an official refugee status because the police were
perceived as being able to arrest asylum seekers and undocumented Congolese in
these crowded areas more easily than in other locations. Certain central locations
were, on the other hand, seen as benign by others because of the close presence of
the police. Thus, whereas some sensed that the presence of the police caused insecurity,
others perceived it to contribute to their sense of protection.
Moreover, even though some of the refugees perceived the neighbourhood of
Kololo as secure, because of the socioeconomic affluence and cleanliness of this
area, others feared it due to the location of the Congolese embassy in this area. In par-
ticular, people who had fled the DRC due to government-related political persecution
avoided Kololo. For instance, a 39-year old male refugee69 who had worked as a pastor
reporting on human rights violations in the DRC feared the embassy area:

To move is not a problem but you have to ask yourself ‘to move to do what, for what, and
where?’ Yes, in Kampala there is no shooting and there is no war, but despite of that, we
are in insecurity because we do not have that psychological stability. But there are also
some areas where I cannot go. Like that area of the Congolese embassy. There are
some diplomats who come from the DRC and they move around and when they see
you, they say that ‘we saw someone’ and they can plan something bad. That is the
reason I cannot move to wherever I want to go.

The Congolese refugee population experienced increasing numbers of abductions over

the course of 2010–2011.70 These abductions targeted mostly children and women, but
some men had also been kidnapped. The abduction of children was, in particular,
associated with witchcraft. The fear of being kidnapped and killed for witchcraft
was expressed by a 15-year-old Munyamulenge asylum seeker boy:

I do not feel safe in Kampala because of witchcraft. It also makes me not to move at night
because that would risk me to get my head to cut off. And I also avoid going far because
then I risk coming back home late and that is also a risk. I walk everywhere.71
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 601

In addition, an undocumented man72 told me about how his daughter was kidnapped
by Ugandans for child sacrifice to be used by witch doctors. The child would have been
killed had they not found her before it was too late. The refugee man was convinced
that the abduction had taken place particularly because they were refugees:

I do not feel safe. I think that this has happened to me because I am a refugee; because the
citizens of Uganda wonder why we ran away from our home country and sought refuge in
Uganda. That shows clearly that it was because we are refugees.

Refugees thus had an idea of insecurity not solely as something physical or social but
also as spiritual. Besides abductions and associated poisonings, a repeated cause of
fear among the refugees I interviewed was that of sexual violence, in particular,
rape. Some Congolese men and women had been raped in Kampala by Ugandans
and by other Congolese. There were also occasions when the informants had been
raped both in the DRC and in Kampala. There was a general trend that the women
who sold products, such as bitenge on the streets of Kampala or door-to-door, experi-
enced sexual harassment and violence. This was because they spent a significant
amount of their time in public spaces, sometimes visiting potential clients’ houses,
often unaccompanied. Work on the streets of Kampala involved risks, as explained
by a 44-year-old refugee woman:73

When you go to another place to sell, someone can call you and you find that you come
across many problems. A man can call you and you think that he wants to buy your items,
but he will rape you and assault you. Or just that he will engage in sex with you, or he will
say that you have stolen something so that he can take your property.

Even though many women perceived that their mobile livelihoods enabled them to
utilise their physical RTC extensively, some of them considered it limited due to the
associated insecurity. In summary, refugees’ right to their exilic city cannot be under-
stood fully unless their discourses of (in)security and appropriation of urban space are
examined.

Refugees’ rights to the micro-spaces of the city

Given the essentially multi-scalar approach74 to the RTC, refugees’ access to75 differ-
ent public and semi-public micro-spaces was examined. In this section, I discuss, first,
refugees’ physical right to informally occupy an alleyway and, second, their access to
formal spaces of protection, namely the offices of the protection institutions.
When refugees could not rent a house or find a church to sleep in, they had to find
alternative places to stay in the city. Sometimes the last solution was to stay tempor-
arily outside a police station or IAU office76 or to sleep in an abandoned bus.77
Another informal shelter option during my fieldwork was found in an alleyway
located behind the RLP offices in the Old Kampala parish. This short stretch of
street, known as the ‘Struggle’, had been occupied by homeless refugees of different
nationalities for several years. Many of them were Congolese. Some of them were
families with children and others single men. A few of them had been banned from
entering the RLP office building because of their violent behaviour due to substance
abuse. Thus, the RLP staff perceived a few of them as a security risk.
At the beginning of my fieldwork, around 20 people lived in this alleyway where
refugees had built their small shelters from any materials they could get hold of. On
602 E. Lyytinen

2 July 2011, however, everything they had built was demolished and the inhabitants of
the ‘Struggle’ were evicted.78 The land was technically owned by the city and in 2011,
the Kampala Capital City Authorities (KCCA) commenced a widespread clearance of
places such as the ‘Struggle’ throughout the city (Daily Monitor, December 14, 2011).
The KCCA also evicted extensive numbers of street vendors (Daily Monitor, Decem-
ber 9, 2011). The initiative to clear the ‘Struggle’ had apparently come from the local
Member of Parliament (MP), who had bought a house in the same street where the
RLP offices were located. The MP had arranged for the police and the military to
come and clear the area of the ‘unwanted neighbours’ these refugees represented.
Thus, in this case, the lack of refugees RTC was very much in line with Mitchell’s79
interpretation of it as an issue of what cities and city authorities do with undesirables.
Often physical relocation is enacted upon different groups of undesirables. After
the eviction on a Saturday afternoon, the alleyway was empty. Yet the ‘unwanted
neighbours’ of the MP had not moved very far: some of the inhabitants of the
‘Struggle’, in particular the women and the children, had moved under a tree next
to the RLP office. They slept there under the open sky without any shelter. One girl
had built a shelter around her from a broken umbrella.80 The case study of the
‘Struggle’ shows how refugees lacked their physical right to the informal public
spaces, and thus their right to the essential form of inhabitance81 can be questioned.
Regarding other more formal micro-spaces of the city, Congolese refugees
involved in this study generally agreed that they did not have an easy access to the insti-
tutional spaces of protection. In this section, I analyse refugees’ struggles to access the
physical offices of the UNHCR and its implementing partner IAU as examples of the
limitations to their RTC.
As already discussed, the Congolese refugees involved in this study perceived
UNHCR as not delivering meaningful protection for them. This was partly due to
the fact that refugees were not allowed to enter the UNHCR country office, which
was located in an upper-class residential area of Kololo parish. Sandvik82 has provided
a detailed analysis on the history of exclusion of the UNHCR office in Kampala.
According to her, in 2004 UNHCR ‘embarked on “a strategy of disengagement” by
moving its Kampala branch office from the relative outskirts of Kololo to deep
within the interior of that affluent neighbourhood’.
At the time as my fieldwork, refugees met UNHCR officers primarily at the IAU.83
The IAU’s office was located in the Mengo parish and, like the UNHCR office, it was
highly guarded and refugees’ access to the office was controlled. Congolese refugees,
comprising more or less half of the refugees in the city, could only access the IAU
office on Mondays, which was the designated day for their nationality. Thus, their
right to access this particular place was limited not only in space (i.e. guards and
fences) but also in time. Despite these spatial and temporal restrictions, IAU officer
that I interviewed considered the office as forming an important protective community
space for the refugees in Kampala.84 Refugees participating in this study, however, cat-
egorically argued that they had to sleep outside the IAU office in order to maximise
their chance of getting an appointment with an UNHCR officer. Refugee men,
women and young people had various personal reasons, ranging from their distinct
ethnic appearance, disability, sickness, or high-level of political insecurity, for why
they saw sleeping outside the office as a risk to their security.
Refugees’ limited access to this formal ‘protection space’ needs to be examined
with regard to the official UNHCR urban refugee policy.85 In this policy, which was
gradually being implemented by the UNHCR Kampala office, but hardly known to
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 603

the refugees, it is stated that ‘no refugee or asylum seeker will be prevented from having
direct access to UNHCR offices and staff members, although such access will, of
course, have to be carefully regulated and supervised and take full account of security
considerations’.86 Despite this assertion, the lack of direct access to the UNHCR office
in Kampala was well known among the refugee population in the city. Nevertheless,
particularly the newcomers sometimes tried to access the office, and they could be
seen waiting outside the barricaded compound. Rejecting refugees’ physical access
to the office was partly due to the fact that some of the officers87 at UNHCR still per-
ceived refugees as a potential security threat and as troublemakers who were perceived
to act in a deceptive manner. Moreover, refugees were accused by some of the officers88
of using ‘the wrong’ UNHCR services (i.e. protection; not counselling) to an excessive
degree. This perception of urban refugees as troublemakers is dangerous because ‘if
UNHCR staff members regard and treat all urban refugees as potential trouble-
makers, then they are all the more likely to act in such a manner’.89 Therefore, it
could be argued that UNHCR’s restrictions on refugees’ physical access to them
may have stirred some of refugees’ criticism and forms of resistance in relation to
the UNHCR.
In sum, what the above analyses revealed was a common discourse among the
Congolese refugees participating this study, centred on their understanding that
their physical right to access the informal urban areas and the formal protection insti-
tutions had been denied both by the city authorities and by the UNHCR and IAU offi-
cers. As a result, this enhanced the refugees’ institutional mistrust of the entire
protection architecture,90 and made them rely on community-based protection
arrangements.

Refugees’ collective forms of participation

In Kampala, given the heavy constraints in terms of finances and staffing, some of the
UNHCR officers acknowledged that they were not working with the different refugee
communities as much as they had hoped.91 The increasing focus on communities was
seen as imperative, given the clear community-based approach in the 2009 UNHCR
urban refugee policy. In order to understand refugees’ struggles over their RTC, it is
important to analyse the different collective forms of resistance which they used or
planned using. The objective of this resistance was, firstly, to increase their partici-
pation in the production of formal spaces of protection together with the protection
institutions, and if denied that, secondly, as ways of gaining independence from
these institutions. Thus, the idea of self-managed participation, ‘autogestion’,92 was
apparent in their collective attempts to gain their RTC.
During one of their Saturday meetings, the members of the CRCU discussed how
to be heard by the protection institutions and gain freedom from them, if not listened
to.93 The CRCU, like the other nationality-based refugee communities in Kampala,
was initially established in 2008 after an election initiated by the UNHCR. The com-
munity was built around the unrealised ideal of uniting the Congolese refugees in the
city. Seven different forms of resistance were suggested and vigorously debated during
this and other meetings. Some of these methods were also used by other refugee com-
munities. My analysis here is limited to the five types of communities94 refugees ident-
ified during the individual interviews: the CRCU, the Banyamulenge Tutsi community,
Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs), Christian churches, and peer-support
groups associated with the RLP for refugees with disabilities, sexual minorities and
604 E. Lyytinen

sex workers, torture survivors, women, and youth. However, the focus of my analysis is
on the seven collective forms of resistance that the CRCU discussed during their com-
munity meeting.
First, the CRCU was at variance regarding prayer as a form of resistance. Some of
the members wished to spend extensive time in prayer during their meetings. Others,
however, suggested that they were tired of relying on prayer after not seeing any tan-
gible results. The pastors of the community, however, argued for the power of prayer.
They believed that since God had helped others in their struggles against injustice,
such as Nelson Mandela, He would also help them if they kept on praying. The
members, who supported prayer as a tool of resistance also suggested that it should
not be ‘passive prayer’, but rather an active ‘platform where we meet other pastors
and community members together. We will preach and talk about our own responsi-
bility’.95 Overall, prayer was used in the different refugee communities for the over-
whelming majority of my informants identified themselves as being Christians. The
church communities were centred on the act of prayer, and many of the RCOs that
ran various activities had prayer included in them. Moreover, the Banyamulenge com-
munity that had its meetings in a Methodist church was highly focused on their shared
Christian faith.
Second, members of the CRCU proposed writing letters to the protection insti-
tutions explaining the real needs of refugees and asking for permission to participate
in the formal actions to tackle these challenges. They also asked that the management
level of the institutions would come and visit the community to discuss issues affecting
the lives of the Congolese refugees. Others who had been members of the community
longer, however, reminded them that: ‘every six months we write letters but there is no
change’.96 Therefore, writing letters was mostly seen as an ineffective method. This
was also the experience of most of the other refugees’ communities, such as some of
the RCOs and peer-support groups.
Third, a radical form of collective action, namely a peaceful demonstration, was
debated. This was only discussed within the CRCU. This discussion referred to the
idea of having a small-scale protest to draw public attention to the plight of the refu-
gees in the city. Organising demonstrations had become increasingly popular in
Kampala, especially since the 2006 elections. Urban dwellers, in general, perceived
that ‘the government would respond to their marginalisation only when they
rioted’.97 Thus, it was no surprise that the refugees were tempted to try the potential
power of demonstrations in their effort to extend their RTC as a form of participation.
Some of the members of the CRCU were, however, cautious about this method, given
the recent experiences of demonstrations turning violent in Kampala.98 Some of the
refugees also expressed their concern about the protection institutions sending
‘spies’ (i.e. refugees from other communities) to ruin the peaceful nature of the dem-
onstration in order to lay the blame on the CRCU for breaking the law.99 Conse-
quently, this form of resistance was perceived as risky because of both inter-
community and institutional mistrust.
Fourth, the CRCU and other communities, such as some of the RCOs, churches,
and peer-support groups, strongly believed that to boycott the protection institutions,
especially IAU, was necessary in order to enhance their collective RTC. For instance,
during the World-Refugee-Day celebrations on 20th June 2011 a number of refugee
communities purposefully decided to boycott the celebrations organised by the
OPM, IAU, and UNHCR. Again, as the level of institutional mistrust in Kampala
was reaching the point of ‘culture of disbelief’,100 boycotting seemed like a rational
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 605

reaction to the breach of trust directed towards autogestion. As a response to the boy-
cotting of the formal protection architecture, communities tried to support their
members both physically and psychosocially, so that they would be able to reject
the minimal institutional protection. This was seen as a way to both unite the commu-
nities and to avoid provoking further arguments with the institutions.
Fifth, all of the communities argued for an attitude change as a form of resistance
either explicitly or implicitly. This included putting the community first, and only then
thinking about personal needs and gain. This most invisible method was also, accord-
ing to the CRCU leadership, intended to have an impact on the negative impression
that the protection institutions had of Congolese refugees. Refugees generally
claimed that institutions viewed them as egoistic, selfish, and unable to unite, and
thus refugees wanted to prove the officers wrong by changing their attitude from con-
flict to ‘tolerance and love’101 and self-management.
Sixth, some of the members of the CRCU and the Banyamulenge community
argued in favour of using the media as a resistance and advocacy tool. RLP also
helped the peer-support groups to utilise both research and videos to promote their
causes. Nevertheless, the media was also used as a tool to compete with other
refugee communities as demonstrated by the struggle between the CRCU and the
Banyamulenge Tutsi community.102 Banyamulenge Tutsis systematically argued that
they had not been welcomed into the CRCU and thus many of them had created a
strong sense of belonging and participation only towards their own community
based on their shared ethnicity. At the time of my fieldwork, some Banyamulenge
Tutsis had been on Ugandan radio and had detailed how they were persecuted and
discriminated against by other Congolese; the CRCU therefore wished to use the
same method to present to the public their understanding of the situation: ‘Since
they [the Banyamulenge] went to the media without telling us, we should write a
letter which should be read in the media [i.e. radio]’.103 The inter-community mistrust
and attempts to be publically vocal shaped the methods of resistance used by the
different communities.
Lastly, the CRCU, in particular, felt that they should recruit impartial mediators to
solve the external conflicts with other refugee communities and with the protection
institutions. A few other communities, such as the women’s peer-support group, the
Banyamulenge community, and some of the RCOs agreed on this to some extent.
Several communities also wanted to develop a system of retribution to report on the
misbehaviour of the institutions at the highest possible level. The system that was in
place at the time did not allow refugees to raise complaints further than the leaders
of these institutions, who, in most cases, were the ones accused by the refugees of mis-
representation and mismanagement. This situation reflected what Holzer104 has called
‘compassionate authoritarianism’ – a term that characterises a protection system in
which refugees have ‘little or no access to grievance procedures and authorities face
little or no accountability for political failures’. In Kampala, the CRCU most
vocally called for the Ugandan police to act as a mediator between them and the pro-
tection institutions: ‘We need a police which is the voice for the voiceless by making
sure that powers are fairly balanced and available resources are equally shared and
refugees are involved in the decision making process’.105 Thus, refugees were some-
times willing to rely on the police in order to extend their RTC in participation with
the protection institutions.
In summary, refugee communities often shared the same initial interest in coop-
erating with the protection institutions regarding the production of protective urban
606 E. Lyytinen

spaces. However, if this wish did not materialise or if the cooperation was perceived by
the communities as imposed on them, they wished not to pursue it. Rather, they aimed
to establish a position independent of the institutions through various means of resist-
ance, which would ensure their self-management regarding obtaining their collective
RTC in their city of exile.

Conclusions
The idea of the RTC was examined in this paper by using a case study of Congolese
refugees living in the city of Kampala, Uganda. The notion of RTC was interpreted
here as a right to inhabit the city and access its different places both physically and
psychosocially, and as the refugees’ right to appropriate urban space and participate
in the production of its protective spaces.
Analysing the refugees’ RTC as their physical access to and right to inhabit the city
in the first place106 required an understanding of refugees’ right of inhabitance in
Kampala, which was governed by the Ugandan 2006 Refugee Act and UNHCR’s
urban refugee policy from 2009. According to the Ugandan policies refugees were
legally allowed to reside in cities and towns. Nonetheless, in reality, many of the auth-
orities and officers suggested that refugees ought to live in the rural settlements instead
of urban areas. Moreover, according to the refugees, their access to both the formal
protection architecture and informal spaces of the city, such as the alleyway, had
failed due to the restrictions and evictions imposed by the city authorities and the pro-
tection institutions. Subsequently, their ‘cry and the demand’107 for self-management
and community forms of protection had become a central element of refugees’ every-
day life in their city of exile.
Even though the official policies and legal framework in Uganda ensured refugees’
a physical right to inhabit the city, refugees often argued that in practice their RTC was
limited due to their sense of urban insecurity. Thus, I argue that particularly when
RTC is examined in relation to the deprived and discontent108 refugees or other mar-
ginalised groups, the psychosocial and emotional aspects of the realisation of their
RTC, or the lack therefore, has to be reflected. Additionally, as demonstrated, the refu-
gees’ discourses concerning safety and insecurity were largely intertwined. For some,
certain elements such as the presence of the police or other Congolese were perceived
as a threat, whereas for others these same elements had a protective effect. Appropria-
tion of space109 was also examined in relation to the refugees’ discourses of how to
transform the insecure spaces of the city into meaningful, fulfilling, and safe places
– or as a work of art – oeuvre.
Lastly, in addition to appropriation, it was also necessary to analyse the other
‘twin element’110 of the RTC, namely participation. Most of the methods of resist-
ance analysed in this paper were shared and tested by different refugee communities,
and they aimed first at gaining a collective right to participate in decision-making
regarding their formal protection, and if this failed, then to gain independence
from the protection institutions. Thus, refugee communities often suggested that
their participation was not genuine unless it was based on their self-management,
autogestion.111 Overall, the refugees argued for the urgency of their need to be
able to meaningfully take part in the production of the spaces of protection by
calling for their collective RTC – as a psychosocial sense of protection, a physical
access to space, and an appropriation and participation in the production of that
urban space.
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 607

Acknowledgements
This paper was originally produced as part of my unpublished doctoral thesis at the University
of Oxford. Thus I would like to thank my supervisors Associate Prof. Patricia Daley, Emeritus
Prof. Roger Zetter and my colleagues. I am also grateful for the research permission granted by
the Uganda National Council of Science and Technology, and for the support received from my
colleagues at the Refugee Law Project, Uganda and Department of Geography and Geology,
University of Turku, Finland. My special gratitude goes to the peer-reviewers, editors and to
all of those who were willing to participate in my study.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research received financial support of the Oskari Huttunen Foundation, Finnish Cultural
Foundation, Emil Aaltonen Foundation and Alfred Kordelin Foundation

Notes
1. UN-HABITAT, Cities without Slums.
2. UN-HABITAT, Uganda.
3. UBS, National Population.
4. Ibid.
5. Bernstein and Okello, “To Be.”
6. UNHCR only kept statistics of registered urban refugees and asylum seekers in Kampala
and not in other cities or towns of Uganda.
7. UN General Assembly, Convention Relating.
8. Organization of African Unity, Convention Governing.
9. Uganda, 1960 Control.
10. Uganda, The Refugee Act 2006.
11. Kaiser, “Participating in Development?”
12. RLP, Refugee Act 2006.
13. Sharpe and Namusobya, Refugee Status.
14. UNHCR, UNHCR Policy.
15. Bernstein and Okello, “To Be,” 47.
16. UNHCR, Uganda Statistics.
17. Clark, “Ethnicity, Leadership.”
18. UNHCR, UNHCR D.R. Congo.
19. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities.
20. Butler, Henri Lefebvre; Purcell, “Excavating Lefebvre”; Purcell, “Citizenship”; Attoh,
“What Kind?”; Merrifield, “Right to the City”; and Marcuse, “From Critical.”
21. Kuymulu, “The Vortex.”
22. Butler, Henri Lefebvre; De Souza, “Which Right”; Kuymulu, “The Vortex”; Purcell,
“Excavating Lefebvre”; Purcell, “Citizenship.”
23. See note 19 above.
24. Butler, Henri Lefebvre, 135.
25. De Souza, “Which Right?,” 323.
26. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 158.
27. Lefebvre, 1991, cited in Marcuse, “From Critical,” 189.
28. Mitchell, Right to the City.
29. Brenner, 2000, cited in Butler, Henri Lefebvre, 139.
30. Parnell and Pieterse, “‘Right to the City’,” 149.
31. For an explicitly scalar and spatial examination of Congolese refugees’ conceptualizations
of “protection space”, see Lyytinen, “Refugees’ Sense.”
32. Butler, Henri Lefebvre, 142.
33. Ibid., 141.
34. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 147.
608 E. Lyytinen

35. Kofman and Lebas, “Introduction,” 20.

36. Bondi, Davidson and Smith, “Introduction,” 1.
37. Purcell, “Citizenship.”
38. There is a clear lack of studies on (urban) refugees that use the concept of RTC in a sub-
stantial manner. Grbac, Civitas, Polis, and Urbs has applied this concept in his examin-
ation of the refugee camp as he argues that it is useful to conceptualize the camp as
urban. Sanyal’s, Urbanizing Refuge recent article on “urbanizing refuge” also touches
some of the aspects of refugees’ rights to the city, however, again in camp settings.
39. For the work in sub-Saharan Africa, see, for instance, Simone, “Right to the City”, Parnell
and Pieterse, “‘Right to the City’” and Huchzermeyer, “Invoking Lefebvre’s ‘Right.
40. Iveson, “Social Or Spatial Justice?,” 258.
41. Marcuse, “From Critical,” 193.
42. Marcuse, “From Critical”, 190 highlights the fact that his analysis on “whose right” is con-
sistent with Lefebvre’s thinking.
43. Regarding the discussion on the legal aspect of the RTC, Marcuse, “From Critical,” 192)
writes that RTC is a right based on ethics, justice and morality; this right is “not meant as a
legal claim enforceable through a judicial process today (although that may be part of the
claim as a step in the direction of realizing the “Right to the City).”
44. Marcuse, “From Critical ,” 190 (emphasis added).
45. Ibid., 190.
46. Bradshaw and Stratford, “Qualitative Research,” 74.
47. RLP (School of Law, Makerere University) was established in 1999 to provide legal aid to
asylum seekers and refugees in Uganda.
48. See a list of the communities I worked with under the section of “Refugees’ collective forms
of participation”.
49. My home visits and some FGDs targeted women.
50. Waitt, “Doing Discourse.”
51. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities.
52. Marcuse, “From Critical.”
53. See note 51 above.
54. Sandvik, “Negotiating the Humanitarian Past.”
55. Interviews at OPM 7.1.2011, UNHCR 18.1.2011, 20.6.2011, 20.9.2011, and IAU
12.1.2011.
56. See note 51 above.
57. Interview, OPM officer, 7.1.2011.
58. Interview, OPM officer, 7.1.2011.
59. Observation, IASFM conference, 3.-5.7.2011.
60. Oola, “Overhauling Migration.”
61. Observation, 4 CRCU, 9.7.2011.
62. Interview, M36, 10.8.2011.
63. Interview, F9, 2.12.2010.
64. Russell, “Home, Music.”
65. Interview. F2, 24.11.2010.
66. Harvey, “Right to the City.”
67. Interview, M1, 27.10.2010.
68. Interview, M7, 24.6.2011.
69. Interview, M12, 28.6.2011.
70. General discussions with the RLP officers and with the Congolese refugees and their
leaders.
71. Interview, M33, 4.8.2011.
72. Interview, M11, 28.6.2011.
73. Interview, F24, 16.9.2011.
74. Parnell and Pieterse, “‘Right to the City.”
75. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities; Mitchell, Right to the City.
76. HRW, Hidden in Plain View.
77. See note 54 above.
78. Observation, RLP backyard, 2.7.2011.
79. See note 28 above.
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 609

80. Observation, street by the RLP, 14.7.2011.

81. See note 51 above.
82. Sandvik, “Negotiating the Humanitarian Past,” 115–116.
83. At the time, UNHCR also had an extension office at the Department of Refugees/OPM
where they could meet refugees.
84. Interview, IAU officer, 12.1.2011.
85. UNHCR, UNHCR Policy.
86. Ibid., 30 (emphasis added).
87. Interviews, UNHCR officers, 18.1.2011, 20.6.2011, 20.9.2011.
88. Interview, UNHCR officer, 20.9.2011.
89. Obi and Crisp, UNHCR Policy, 8.
90. Lyytinen, The Politics.
91. Interview, UNHCR officer, 20.9.2011.
92. See note 51 above.
93. Observation, 5 CRCU, 23.7.2011.
94. My analysis focuses on these five categories of communities and draws examples from the
12 different communities I worked with. The characteristics of and relations between these
communities, including their significance at the scale of Kampala, are discussed in more
detail in Lyytinen, Spaces of Trust.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. Goodfellow, “The Institutionalisation,” 8.
98. Throughout my fieldwork there were “walk-to-work” demonstrations held in the city by
the Ugandan opposition. For a summary of the events, see Goodfellow, “The Institutio-
nalisation,” 7–10.
99. Observation, 5 CRCU, 23.7.2011.
100. Griffiths, “Vile Liars.”
101. Observation, 5 CRCU, 23.7.2011.
102. In South Kivu, Tutsi are known locally as Banyamulenge. Banyamulenge refers to “those
living in the hills of Mulenge”. Banyamulenge Tutsis are believed to have started to move
from Rwanda to the DRC in the seventeenth century onwards (Autesserre, The Trouble,
138). The Banyamulenge Tutsis of Kampala (who were mostly from Uvira) referred to
themselves using this term and presented themselves as a very tight community within
the Congolese refugee population. Their collective identity was largely based on their
shared belief of being discriminated against by other Congolese.
103. Observation, 5 CRCU, 23.7.2011.
104. Holzer, “I Am Only Looking,” 1–2.
105. Observation, 5 CRCU, 23.7.2011.
106. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities; Mitchell, Right to the City.
107. See note 51 above.
108. See note 52 above.
109. See note 51 above.
110. See note 24 above.
111. See note 51 above.

References
Attoh, K. A. “What Kind of Right is the Right to the City?” Progress in Human Geography 35,
no. 5 (2011): 669–685.
Autesserre, S. The Trouble with the Congo. Local Violence and the Failure of International
Peacebuilding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Bernstein, J., and M. C. Okello. “To Be or Not to Be: Urban Refugees in Kampala.” Refuge 24,
no. 1 (2007): 46–56.
Bondi, L., J. Davidson, and M. Smith. “Introduction.” In Emotional Geographies, edited by J.
Davidson, L. Bondi, and M. Smith, 1–18. Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005.
Bradshaw, M., and E. Stratford. “Qualitative Research Design and Rigour.” In Qualitative
Research Methods in Human Geography, edited by I. Hay, 69–80. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
610 E. Lyytinen

Butler, C. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City. Abington:
Routledge, 2012.
Clark, P. “Ethnicity, Leadership and Conflict Resolution in Eastern Democratic Republic of
Congo: The Case of the Barza Inter-Communautaire.” Journal of Eastern African Studies
2, no. 1 (2008): 1–17.
De Souza, M. L. “Which Right to Which City? In Defence of Political-strategic Clarity.”
Interface 2, no. 1 (2010): 315–333.
Goodfellow, T. “The Institutionalisation of ‘Noise’ and ‘Silence’ in Urban Politics: Ritos
and Compliance in Uganda and Rwanda.” Oxford Development Studies 41, no. 4
(2013): 1–19.
Grbac, P. Civitas, Polis, and Urbs. Reimagining the Refugee Camp as the City. (Working Paper
Series No. 96). Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, 2013.
Griffiths, M. “Vile Liars and Truth Distorters. Truth, Trust, and the Asylum System.”
Anthropology Today 28, no. 5 (2012): 8–12.
Harvey, D. “The Right to the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27,
no. 4 (2003): 939–941.
Holzer, E. “I Am Only Looking Up to God: Protest, Repressions and Homecoming in a West
African Refugee Camp.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010.
HRW. Hidden in Plain View. Refugees Living Without Protection in Nairobi and Kampala.
New York: HRW, 2002. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/11/21/hidden-plain-view
Huchzermeyer, M. “Invoking Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ in South Africa Today. A Response
to Walsh.” City 18, no. 1 (2014): 41–49.
Iveson, K. “Social or Spatial Justice? Marcuse and Soja on the Right to the City.” City 15, no. 2
(2011): 250–259.
Kaiser, T. “Participating in Development? Refugee Protection, Politics and Developmental
Approaches to Refugee Management in Uganda.” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2005):
351–367.
Kofman, E., and E. Lebas. “Introduction.” In Writings on Cities, edited by H. Lefebvre, 3–60.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996.
Kuymulu, M. B. “The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads.” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 3 (2013): 923–940.
Lefebvre, H. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth
Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1974/1996.
Lyytinen, E. “The Politics of Mistrust Amongst and between Congolese Refugees and the
Institutions Providing Refugee Protection in Kampala, Uganda.” In Urban Refugees
Challenges in Protection, Service and Policy, edited by K. Koizumi and G. Hoffstaedter,
76–97. London: Routledge, 2015.
Lyytinen, E. “Refugees’ Sense of Place in Uganda: Geographical Scales of Urban Protection
and Host-Refugee Relations.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2015): 45–77.
Lyytinen, E. “Spaces of Trust and Mistrust: Congolese Refugees, Institutions and Protection in
Kampala, Uganda.” Unpublished DPhil thesis, School of Geography, University of Oxford,
2013.
Marcuse, P. “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City.” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009):
185–197.
Merrifield, A. “The Right to the City and Beyond. Notes on a Lefebvrian Re-conceptualiz-
ation.” City 15, no. 3 (2011): 473–481.
Mitchell, D. The Right to the City. Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. London: The
Guilford Press, 2003.
Obi, N., and J. Crisp. UNHCR Policy on Refugees in Urban Areas. Report of a UNHCR/NGO
Workshop. Geneva: UNHCR, 2002.
Oola, S. “Overhauling Migration Governance to Promote Human Rights and Justice.”
Pambazuka News 541 (2011).
Organization of African Unity. Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems
in Africa (“OAU Convention”), 10 September 1969, 1001 U.N.T.S. 45. Accessed March 30,
2015. http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b36018.html
Parnell, S., and E. Pieterse. “The ‘Right to the City’: Institutional Imperatives of a
Developmental State.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 1
(2010): 146–162.
 Journal of Eastern African Studies 611

Purcell, M. “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World
Order.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 3 (2003): 564–590.
Purcell, M. “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and its Urban Politics of the
Inhabitant.” GeoJournal 58 (2002): 99–108.
RLP. Critique of the Refugee Act 2006. Kampala: Refugee Law Project, undated.
Russell, A. “Home, Music and Memory for the Congolese in Kampala.” Journal of Eastern
African Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 294–312.
Sandvik, K. B. “Negotiating the Humanitarian Past: History, Memory, and Unstable
Cityscapes in Kampala, Uganda.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2012): 108–122.
Sanyal, R. “Urbanizing Refuge: Interrogating Spaces of Displacement.” International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 2 (2014): 558–572.
Sharpe, M., and S. Namusobya. “Refugee Status Determination and the Rights of Recognised
Refugees under Uganda’s New Refugees Act.” Paper prepared for refugee studies centre
workshop: refugee status determination and rights in sub-Saharan Africa, Kampala,
November 16–17, 2010.
Simone, A. “The Right to the City.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
7, no. 3 (2006): 321–325.
UBS. National Population and Housing Census 2014. Provisional Results. Kampala: UBS, 2014.
Accessed May 15, 2015. http://www.ubos.org/onlinefiles/uploads/ubos/NPHC/NPHC2020
1420PROVISIONAL20RESULTS20REPORT.pdf
Uganda. 1960 Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA). Accessed March 30, 2015. http://
refugeelawproject.org/files/legal_resources/cara.pdf
Uganda. The Refugee Act 2006. Act 21, 24 May 2006. Accessed March 30, 2015. http://www.
refworld.org/docid/4b7baba52.html
UN General Assembly. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. 28 July 1951, United
Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 189, p. 137. Accessed March 30, 2015. http://www.refworld.
org/docid/3be01b964.html
UN-HABITAT. Cities without Slums. Situation Analysis of Informal Settlements in Kampala.
Sub-regional Programme for Eastern and Southern Africa. Nairobi: UN-HABITAT, 2007.
UN-HABITAT. Uganda. Country Programme Document 2008–2009. Nairobi: UN-HABITAT,
2008.
UNHCR. Uganda Statistics as of July 01, 2011. Kampala: UNHCR, 2011.
UNHCR. UNHCR D.R. Congo. Fact Sheet, 31 October 2010. Geneva: UNHCR, 2010.
UNHCR. UNHCR Policy on Refugee Protection and Solutions in Urban Areas. Geneva:
UNHCR, 2009.
Waitt, G. “Doing Discourse Analysis.” In Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography,
edited by I. Hay, 163–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.