Ottoman History Podcast - Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

with Sophia Balakian hosted by Brittany White and Chris Gratien | The word "refugee" might conjure images of families devastated by war fleeing their homeland. But what happens when those who seek asylum abroad do not conform to that image? As Sophia Balakian argues in her new book Unsettled Families: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship, the question is one that shapes the case of every refugee seeking a new home abroad in the United States. The Somali and Congolese migrants in her study face an intense vetting process that includes DNA testing to confirm that a refugee family forms a biological unit, creating numerous reasons by which people who have survived war and displacement may be judged "fraudulent" family units. In this episode, Balakian is back on the podcast to share an anthropologist's perspective on the history of migration and the politics of kinship in refugee resettlement.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. In this episode, anthropologist Sophia Balakian is back to take us behind the scenes of her new book, Unsettled Families, Refugees, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Kinship, which was recognized this year as a winner of the 2025 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice. Unsettled Families investigates the parameters that governments and international humanitarian organization, used to classify most displaced families more than 99% globally as ineligible for resettlement, and often as fraudulent. Based on long-term fieldwork between Kenya and Ohio, Balakian

examines how Somali and Congolese refugees navigate humanitarian organizations, immigration bureaucracies, and national security agencies as they seek permanent new homes. Unsettled families reveals how the categories like fraud and family are far less straightforward than they appear. Practices that resettlement organizations deem fraudulent are often understood by people living as refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world. About five years ago, we chatted with Sophia Bilacchian about this subject in a podcast titled Refugee Families in the Era of Global Security. We focused on the role of genetic testing as a tool for evaluating what American authorities

described as family composition fraud. Genetic tests are used to certify that refugee families form a biological unit. But as Balochian explained, this practice is rife with problems, stemming from the fact that migrant families, especially those impacted by war, do not always conform to a narrow definition of the nuclear family. This episode follows up on our previous conversation, which was assigned as part of a weekly module in my undergraduate history major seminar, migration, displacement, in diaspora in the Middle East. Professor Balakian visited the class to share an anthropologist's perspective on issues concerning migration, law, and the family that were integral to our exploration of the

past over the course of the semester. The interview was led by Brittany White, a PhD student at University of Virginia. All right. Thank you, Sophia, for joining us today in class and to talk about your work. First, can you just tell us how you came to study the topic? I had a sort of longstanding interest in issues of migration, diaspora, histories of violence that give birth to diaspora communities, how they remember the past, so on and so forth. But this particular project that became my first research project and my first book project really was born out of a course I took as a graduate student, sort of very traditional topic in anthropology, kinship. and kinship in anthropology went through this sort of revival in the sort of 90s.

So the old days of, you know, the sort of structural anthropologists were drawing these charts. And it was very sort of, they were trying to develop a science of societies and culture. But the 90s and so forth brought a very, you know, new takes on the study of family and study of kinship and anthropology. So I was taking this course with someone who worked in West Africa specifically. So I'm learning about ways in which family is configured in many different ways across societies. You know, when refugees in particular are coming to the United States or reunifying with family, how does policy define the family? That question sort of compelled me to start doing some digging.

And one of the first things I learned about was the introduction of this DNA testing program, which was quite new at that time. So this was probably in 2010. And this DNA testing pilot program that I talk about in the podcast episode happened in 2008. So that sort of launched my interest in this question about how do the real life configuration, social configurations of people who have. have fled civil and international conflicts, specifically, how do they interact with the programs that are in name designed to help them reunite or to resettle, right?

They're meant to be humanitarian programs. And yet, as I describe, they don't always capture or comprehend the complexity of people's lives. I think, too, you mentioned in the podcast that there's like a personal component. Some of my family came to the U.S. as Armenian genocide survivors, and my father's family came from Diarbuquer, and, well, actually, my father's mother's family, and went those routes and ended up in Aleppo. So I grew up in this milieu of hearing these stories, and when I found anthropology as a student, I was really captivated by the ways in which anthropologists were, you know,

were grappling with questions about displaced communities, diaspora communities. And that sort of set me off on this path as well. Awesome. Can I ask just out of curiosity how you settled on studying, I think it was Kenyan refugees and Somali refugees in Kenya. Yes. So by the time I finished college, I had spent time in, a number of places and had sort of been in contact with different displaced communities.

I had spent time in Armenia in a village where that had been an Azeri village that had been sort of a, there had been a population swap during the Karabaw War. And I had studied abroad in Nepal and done research in a Tibetan community. So I was sort of wandering. But at the time I was applying to graduate school, East Africa was really this, you know, major location of displacement. And so I ended up applying to graduate school to work in East Africa broadly. I started, you know, I got a foreign language and area studies fellowship to study

Swahili. My Swahili study took me to Kenya and my project was sort of born for. from that. Awesome. So you're an anthropologist by trade. And one of the interesting things about being an anthropologist is that you end up becoming a historian too. And what I mean by that is that things are constantly changing and developing as you're doing your field work. It's not uncommon for a study to last more than a decade. And so you become witness to historical change in real time. What are some historical developments you witnessed in the course of your project and how have they influenced it. So indeed, my project has lasted more than a decade. On the U.S. side,

I began this project while Obama was in office. And I think that afforded me and actually other people that I was in graduate school with sort of one way to put it would be sort of a luxury to sort of critique certain kinds of policies that weren't under threat. So the U.S. refugee admissions program at that time was just kind of like, okay, refugee resettlement has long enjoyed bipartisan support. It's sort of flown under the radar of more contentious debates about immigration because it's couched as a humanitarian program. writing critical things about how this program is run didn't feel risky. And I returned to the United States to write my dissertation. And, you know, Trump enters the scene.

And suddenly, and I don't know if, you know, students will recall this, but at that time, suddenly refugee resettlement becomes this sort of hot button issue. you have the terror attacks in Paris in 2015 that were that sort of shined a spotlight on Syrian migration to Europe. You know, Trump kept using this phrase, extreme vetting. We need extreme vetting. And this seemed so predictable, but also bizarre because in fact, the vetting that existed in the refugee resettlement program at that time was already very extreme.

It was very, very hard and a very long process for someone, particularly a Somali person to come to the United States through that program. So all of a sudden, writing about refugee resettlement, I couldn't take for granted some of the things that I had before. And I, you know, I worry a lot more about how certain things I write will be received. on the East African side, many things were shifting during the course of my research as well. And a lot of the things that were happening were both new and old, right? You know, the first year I arrived to do any kind of work in Kenya was 2011. That was also the year that Kenya embarked on a military intervention in Somalia and this change dynamics in the region.

I want to even go back to 2006, you know, the U.S. So this is a little bit prior to me beginning my work, but the U.S. backs an Ethiopian intervention in Somalia that really destabilizes the first sort of hope for a legitimate government. And Somalia is increasingly sort of spotlighted in a global war on terror, in, you know, sort of U.S. concern about the Horn of Africa. and the result of that intervention was in part the rise of the militant group al-Shabaab. The Somali community in Kenya has been scapegoated and made suspect repeatedly since the end of the colonial period because of border conflicts. But this is sort of a new iteration of that in an age of global war on terror. And so life for my interlocutors changed, you know, fairly dramatically in 2014, Kenya launches this operation to remove refugees from the city. And this becomes a campaign of not only sort of deportation and removal, but also of extortion by police and paramilitary.

This has major repercussions for people who are trying to leave Kenya. through the refugee resettlement program because, for example, the U.S. State Department stops sending people to interview. The U.N. stops, you know, stops operating in the city for a period of time because technically refugees shouldn't be in the city. There are all these sort of bureaucratic changes.

And so I really started writing about that because that was what was going on at the time. It helped me understand in a very in-your-face kind of way what it means in the 21st century to be a person of suspicion and surveillance on the basis of race and ethnicity and nationality, trying to move, trying to move across borders. So perfect segue. In the last podcast, we focused on the theme of family, but race is also an important category to consider for your topic. How have race and racialization played a role in the experiences of refugee families in your study?

One of the things I've been trying to write about and trying to think about just over the past couple of months, you know, more systematically, is the ways in which the nuclear family. And again, you know, if you listen to the podcast, you know this construct of the nuclear family, the way that is in itself a raced construct and the ways in which families that have deviated from a nuclear family norm historically in the United States, at least in the 20th. 20th century, black families, families of color, queer kinship, so on and so forth, has really been stigmatized and blamed for poverty, for instability, and a lot of U.S. policy has tried to sort of promote the nuclear family as a, you know, as a salve to various ills, social ills. So one of the things I've been trying to think about, because, you know, using DNA testing, using the nuclear family model as the model for a case composition in refugee resettlement or the model for, you know, reunifying families. It's motivated by many things,

but it has it has interested me, and I'm continuing to try to think this through. It has interested me how the non-nuclear family has been a racialized and stigmatized formation in the United States and how that's been imported in this context in a sort of interesting way. But of course, folks that I work with who are from Somalia are, you know, they are racialized in Kenya. My colleague Samar al-Balushi, for example, has, you know, written about the racialization of Muslims in Kenya more generally. And of course, they have been, you know,

the Somali community in Columbus, the Somali community in Minneapolis. These communities have been objects of FBI surveillance and have been, have been, you know, racialized as Muslims and as black Muslims in a U.S. context. I think that that's one place where history of all this is really important.

Just to emphasize for students who remember some earlier lectures, when we talked about sort of the origins of the American immigration restriction regime and deportation regime during the 1920s and 30s. And it was something maybe we talked about in a sentence that one of the things you could be deported for was being a single woman in a household without a breadwinner

if you were a foreign born. And this was tied up with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a national movement, aiming to curtail immigration, for reasons based in a racialized discourse, but always also using this moralizing discourse that, you know, it's not just people's color, but that they bring family norms, social norms that will corrupt American society.

This rhetoric was very, was one of the reasons why such a, you know, maybe un-American idea of limiting people and their migration resonant, resonated with voters across both parties during that moment. And to see that genealogy going back 100 years up into our presence really sharpens some of what we hear people talking about today. If we think about that as somehow descended from that history. Yeah, yeah. You know, eligibility for welfare was also tied up in adhering to certain kinds of family norms.

And, you know, the notion of family or rather welfare fraud. has been tied up in who are your dependents? And, you know, do you have a partner? Do you work? Do you work? You know, in what ways do those cultural logics also operate in international aid-giving programs? So our class is dedicated to the history of migration, displacement, and diaspora in the Middle East over the past two centuries.

We've been approaching that subject, mostly through the historiography, in primary sources, using methods of the historian to think about a contemporary problem. Anthropology is a field with different methods, questions, possibilities. What are some insights from your work that might be valuable for us as historians or aspiring historians? I know you all want to go to grad school thinking about the history of migration. I think there is like a kind of experience near quality to anthropological methods. and what anthropologists sometimes call deep hanging out. And, you know, what do you learn about migration from deep hanging out?

I worked in a number of different neighborhoods in Nairobi. One of them is called East Lee. And it's sort of, it's a historically very interesting neighborhood. It was built during the colonial period, and it became, it was built for white settlers, but white people didn't want to live there. So it became an Indian neighborhood, but some of the first Somali migrants from British Somaliland ended up settling there.

And today it's a major Somali neighborhood and a very multi-ethnic neighborhood, but sort of the center of Somali life in Nairobi and really a hub for the Somali diaspora globally. But, you know, you sit in a cafe with someone for four hours or you accompany them across town to an NGO, office or you know a lot of the apartments there are like five bedroom apartments but each bedroom is occupied by a different family and they share a kitchen and so you you occupy these

spaces and you see what is the sort of day in and day out um you see the ways in which dreams of of migration shape people's consciousness um there was a there's an anthropologist Cindy Horst who wrote in the 1990s. She was doing research in one of Kenya's refugee camps. And she came across this term, Boofis. And it was a term that she realized later that her Somali interlocutors in Europe had never heard, or they had never heard it used this way.

And it's this term that sort of emerged in one of the camps in the 90s to describe the sort of, obsession with migrating, dreams of resettlement and the kind of despair that can overtake someone when those dreams don't work out, right? So you start to see the ways in which other people's migration, possibilities of migration, the foreclosure of those possibilities, the way they shape people's consciousness on a collective level. You know, you see the ways in which, and I know historians find many different things in many different sources and in the archive. So, you know, I know historians have many ways to access consciousness and how people think and feel.

But for the anthropologists, you sort of see this unfold in a different way. And you see how people orient their lives around trying to find ways across what often become impermeable borders. You know, so the person who sends the text message to UNHCR every Friday or who takes the bus across town to a certain office to check on their case, you know, every week or whenever they have money to do so. So I think anthropologists can be privy to those kinds of everyday rituals and routines. When you're in the field, how are you taking your needs?

notes when you when you come back from the field and you're in your you're reviewing your notes how are you sitting down to to write these things are there is there a particular type of way anthropologists are taught to write about their field experiences that might be different from a historian so I'll start with my own practices which would be I would some of my interviews are recorded but a lot of my interviews were not recorded and my informal conversations would not be. And so I would come home at night and I would, you know, I would often take handwritten notes during conversations or interviews and I would come home at night and I would type everything. You know, I would type from my handwritten notes and type from memory and I would type, I would

often type some description of, you know, places and people. And although I wish I had done more of that, I would, you know, how do you say that? Well, now that I'm, now that I'm, now that, I'm working on my book, I find those places in my notes where I've given texture to, you know, what something looked like or smelled like or sounded like or how someone, the tone of their voice or, you know, I find that really valuable in trying to, you know, narrate, you know, these stories. So for my second book, I will do more of that. So, yeah. And then, you know, I think I was quite disorganized in a lot of ways.

I find it hard to find some, you know, I have thousands of typed pages, well, well over a thousand typed pages of notes for my long-term fieldwork. And I find it sometimes challenging to find the things I'm looking for. I have like a calendar that helps me find dates and then I go to the dates and the notes. and you know, it's, but I think in terms of, and then I will say this, there are certain stories and experiences that just lingered with me. I mean, I did about two years of field work. And one thing that I was advised by my PhD advisor was start writing about those things, those things that stuck with you, that you remember, that you want to write about,

there's a reason that you feel that way. They were significant moments. They're important for the story that you're trying to tell. So I think a lot of anthropologists get that kind of advice. Yeah. And can I ask you about subjectivity? Yeah. And maybe you can explain to us what you think subjectivity is as part of an academic study.

Because we talk about it sometimes in class, like the subjectivity of an author, their vantage point matters. but historians don't actually usually write about their own subjectivity in their books or their articles and some of them I think probably don't think about it either. But anthropologists are trained to do that as part and parcel of the work they do. So maybe you could talk to us about how you understand that process of dealing with the anthropologist subjectivity and the role plays in your work. You know, this is really a narration, this is a writing question as well as an identity question. and the politics of that.

But I think there are people who, there's a style of ethnographic writing in which the author is located in the text. We're sort of walking with them. They tell us about what they think. They give us insight into how they are sort of perceiving what's going on around them. and there are other writers who tend to be entirely absent from the text itself.

So I think from a writing standpoint, you find quite a range of approaches. But I think there is, while some people don't really write themselves into their text, I think, yes, there's a wide, a shared agreement that who we are, where we sit in the world, our background experiences, our, you know, our gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, that this informs the way we are interacting with the people we work with, that it gives us access to certain worlds and forecloses access to other worlds. You know, and that varies widely based on the scholar and their project and their field site. what I have probably written about the most in terms of my own positionality is my

mobility, you know, that I was working with people who did not hold a passport that, well, either held no passport at all or a passport they could access was meaningless in the marketplace of movement in the world. And I, by contrast, you know, conducted this multi-sighted study precisely because I had this, you know, this powerful passport in my hand. So that's one of the ways in which I've engaged sort of questions of my own subjectivity as an author and a scholar. Kind of a funny question. Have you ever read a work of history and thought, oh, they could have really benefited from an anthropologist touch? No names. You don't have to drop any names.

And like, what would that touch have been? Oh, gosh. That is so interesting. One of the things I'm often struck by is the ways in which a historian's sources shape the story that they tell. And as the historians, you know, tell me where I'm wrong. Because I'm actually very interested in this question. But it seems to me that one of the perils and promises, I suppose,

of an anthropologist, did you use that phrase before? I say that all the time now too. So one of the perils and promises of the anthropologist, I think, is that we have by no means unlimited, right? We have, the world is mediated for us by many things, right? But there is more there to sort of choose from.

Who do I want to talk to? What organization do I want to work with? What, you know, what politician or whoever can I interview for this particular part of my project? Where do I want to go to, you know, which community? Am I going to go to Columbus or Minneapolis? Am I going to, you know, whatever? Am I going to work in a refugee camp or in the city? You know, there are all these choices because the world is a little bit open.

And I've always been struck in reading, you know, historical monographs. I've been so interested by the ways in which the sources shape the story and what does the scholar do with those sources that they have available. So, I mean, I'm always interested in the experience near, you know, how can I feel what it felt like? How can I get inside the experience of someone living in a particular historical moment, but that's not always available? Yeah.

Well, that's a very polite way of saying that maybe when writing history, we need to use more imagination. Maybe ask questions that we don't think our sources will necessarily answer for us, but then try to answer them, especially stuff about feelings, right? Things that we know are very present in daily life, but are often absent in the sources. Yeah. Well, we shouldn't necessarily write a history that deletes those, those aspects, those effective dimensions of life that are very meaningful just because we don't think. we can access them. Right, right. And so, you know, reading the questions the anthropologists will ask might be very instructive

of how questions we should pose to historical context in that regard. Sure, sure. But the other thing that I was thinking about while you were talking is that paradoxically, historians often have a trouble of presentism, of having the present shape how they're thinking about the past, and this is very controversial actually right now in the field of history to even discuss this really, I would say, because of course, the present influences how we study the past. But then, of course, methodologically, we want to resist over presentism. The anthropologist maybe is not free of that, but it's different because you are actually

working in the present. In the present, yeah. I think the sort of equivalent challenge for anthropologists is to resist something that's sort of politically trendy or maybe there are certain things that feel like they can't be said or that, you know, because of the politics of where they work. And I mean, do you think, the thing I see in anthropology, maybe more than that is like that there are just on-trend questions and topics and a lot of things get sort of left behind. Do you see that as something that has? happens in history or is that, are you less vulnerable to that problem because you're studying in the past? It's an interesting question because obviously history is very much influenced by trends,

but often what we have is people saying, hey, I bet you've never thought about this theme and this time period that people are interested in today. And so following the trends actually can unearth things that have been ignored. Whereas I could see how, maybe, and knowing all the niche things that anthropologists study, I don't know if it's actually the case. But I could see how following the trends might actually reinforce the silencing of certain stories that may be important to think about in our present. But again, I'm not sure that this would be the biggest critique of the field. Given all the things that people do, a really impressive work. I mean, that's what we have to also acknowledge, like, the type of work that the anthropologist does, you don't have a luxury of

distance from things that you have when you're just working off of past sources. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, no, that's definitely true. And I mean, one of the things I learned in doing this study was, you know, not just my mobility, my access to mobility, but race and class and nationality as well made it really, really challenging to feel like I could do ethical work in the communities that I worked in. And I will never do a project like it again, quite, you know, quite frankly. So I think, you know, that kind of, that kind of closeness, you know, the inability to, you know, you don't turn off your phone and walk away. I mean, you're there. You know, these relationships have been built and they're there. And it's not up to you as the scholar to determine how people then engage with you. for any undergrads, grads or established scholars, historians who are interested in dipping their little toes in the anthropological pool, methodological pool. What tips would you give for ethical deep hanging out? Yes.

For ethical writing, for interview, any practical tips that you would give for a historian? When I think about my work in Kenya versus my work in the U.S., I think that when I worked in, Columbus, Ohio, I was based at a refugee resettlement agency that was staffed by people who were born, had been born in the U.S. and was also staffed by people who had come to the U.S. through the refugee admissions program. And I think that made for a more, for lack of a better were democratic environment. In Kenya, humanitarian workers really work at a distance from the people they work with professionally.

So people who live as refugees and people who work as, you know, for the UN or the U.S. Resettlement Support Center, which does this initial vetting of refugees for the U.S. government. I mean, they don't occupy the same social world. And so I don't know, I mean, I think the lesson for me from that particular experience, I guess was that positioning myself at the resettlement center in Columbus gave me an opportunity to offer something tangible and in a more structured way to people that I was working with. And that felt like more ethical work. I mean, it felt like I was, I could be of use. and also that was my own society.

I mean, I could be, you know, I knew more. I had more, you know, knowledge to offer. But I think, you know, working in the particular context, you know, in refugee resettlement where, you know, I was positioned as someone who was, you know, had access to this thing, you know, mobility, citizenship that the people I was working with were desperate to, obtain, that was just a really complicated, really, you know, a complicated, um, milieu to, to work in. And so I think, um, positioning, so if you're, you know, going to do ethnographic work, I think positioning yourself in a way where it's apparent that you can

offer something to people that you're working with that's, that's concrete and tangible is, you know, can be very fruitful and positive. It's hard when we are studying the history of migration and displacement to escape like the omnipresent suffering of past people and sort of like a pessimism and negative narrative that emerges. And corollary to that, when we have discussions in class about, well, how can we imagine a better system? How can we imagine things different?

Obviously, there's a lot of disagreement, which is very productive. But also, it can be hard to see how we're, how, what we're learning from our scholarship is imagining a better world. And what I want to ask you, you can comment on that if you like, but I want to ask you, like, let's say the scholars are wrong for being pessimist and everything gets fixed with regard to migration in like 10 years. Okay. Wow. Let's say it works out the solutions. Okay. Someone figures out something that works for everybody.

Okay. What would you study? What would you work on? What would you teach? That's a great question. What would you do with yourself? Yeah. This was because the reason why you study what you study is because it's an issue.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Yes. Would you find something that gives joy or would you look for the next problem?

Look for the next problem. Yeah. Yeah, I would definitely look for the next problem. If I'm honest, I would definitely look for the next problem. But I mean, one thing that I've become obsessed with is child care in the United States. And so I think about that a lot. And, you know, I'm interested in how people who come to the U.S. from other places with different past modes of caring for others, whether children and other kin, how do they negotiate a different landscape. So that's my next problem that I want to crack into.

I have a feeling I know part of the motivation. How you discovered this topic. Yes, yes, yeah. Knowing what we've all been through in the past years. But we'll save that for another time. We're going to have plenty of time for Q&A. Should we do our break before the Q&A? Would you like a five-minute break right now?

We usually take a five-minute break. We'll take a five-minute break, so save your question. question.