Guuleed's testimony shows how displacement – along with discursive and material responses to this phenomenon – are shaping dominant understandings of belonging and citizenship across Somalia's fragmented political landscape (Figure 6.1). Building on previous analyses of improvised and iterative responses to precarity in the urban everyday, this chapter explores how people understand their place and future in the city. It is analytically inspired by the Foucauldian concept of problematization (Rabinow, 2009) and analyses ‘durable solutions’ initiatives to show how the challenges of displacement and urban in-migration are designated as interlinked ensembles of problems and become areas of interventions that promise remedies. This politics of problematization, we argue, has various impacts on people at the urban margins and shapes their sense and experiences of socio-political belonging.

Many urban in-migrants see their future in the cities they have moved to and are unlikely to return to the places they have fled from. The Federal Government of Somalia has, therefore, agreed with the United Nations to develop longer-term responses for displacement that move beyond humanitarian aid (Del Ministro, 2021, 26). At the time of our research, international organizations had been collaborating with municipal authorities in Bosaso and Hargeisa to move significant numbers of people from innercity settlements into designated areas and newly established settlements on the urban periphery. These initiatives, which were also starting in Baidoa (IOM, 2021) are framed as ‘durable solutions’ within a global policy discourse on (forced) migration. The durable solutions vocabulary was developed by organizations dealing with refugees and from here migrated (as it were) into the reports and policy documents of institutions engaging with displacement and migration within countries.

Across the Horn of Africa, the durable solutions framework and programmes exert a significant influence on the management of urban space and contribute to the ordering of urban populations. We show that resettlement schemes designed through this framework can increase tenure security.