Over the last two decades, the ‘internally displaced person’ (IDP) has become an increasingly central figure in policy, humanitarian and media reporting on violent conflicts and wars. The United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, defines IDPs as:

Based on estimates that globally ‘80 percent of all IDPs are living in urban areas’ (Muggah and Abdenur, 2018, 1), internal displacement is increasingly discussed in the context of urban studies and the intersection of violence, mobility and urbanization (Beall et al, 2011; Bartlett et al, 2012; Potvin, 2013; Sanyal, 2016; Darling, 2017; Büscher, 2018; Büscher et al, 2018; Pech et al, 2018; Muggah and Abdenur, 2018; Şimşek-Çağlar and Glick Schiller, 2018; Bakonyi et al, 2021). We aim to contribute to this literature with an empirical focus on the Somali Horn of Africa, a region characterized by its relatively low levels of urbanization (in global comparison) but very high rates of urban growth (Massy-Beresford, 2015), which UN Habitat has recently estimated at approximately 4.23 per cent (UN Habitat, 2020).

Somali cities constitute near exemplary cases for studying the nexus of displacement and urbanization. Over 30 years have passed since the collapse of the central government in Somalia, and these three decades have been characterized by recurrent armed conflicts and waves of mass displacement, involving different actors and levels of violence. The four cities focused on in this book – Baidoa, Bosaso and Mogadishu in Somalia, and Hargeisa1 in the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland – have, over the years, been characterized by both phases of mass in- and out-migration. At the time of our research (2017– 19), large numbers of displaced people were living within and at the outskirts of these four cities.

Neither displacement nor urbanization are abstract or universalizable phenomena. We aim to present and analyse perspectives from the urban margins, foregrounding the views of people who escaped violence and environmental shocks and sought refuge in cities where they now live in conditions of acute precarity.