This pioneering study compares the refugee and migration experiences of Somalis residing in three very different parts of the world: the United Arab Emirates (UAE); South Africa (especially, but not only, Gauteng Province); and the US (especially Minnesota and Ohio). Combining approaches that often remain apart – the anthropologist's focus on identity and belonging and the sociologist's emphasis on settlement, resource mobilization, and integration – Cawo Abdi uses the method of multi-sited ethnography to give the Somali men and women she interviewed a voice. By focusing on the gaps between expectations and reality or between what migrants managed to achieve and what remained out of reach, the author succeeds in giving this book a unity that constitutes one of its major strengths and makes it eminently readable.

In the UAE, Somali migrants of a range of economic levels emphasized their sense of religious and cultural belonging, but with the exception of the top transnational businessmen, chafed at their insecure legal status, which also constituted a barrier to unhindered movement across borders. In South Africa, migrants expressed satisfaction at the speedy access to legal refugee papers and the crucial support from Indian fellow Muslims that facilitated initial settlement. However, barriers to permanent settlement and family reunification, as well as the extreme risk of physical violence in the economic niches open to them, made them dream of the more flexible citizenship represented by a European or US passport, not unlike their fellow Somalis in the UAE. In the US, Somalis made extensive use of governmental support systems, including health care and subsidized housing. Still, they expressed concern about the negative racialization and increasing Islamophobia confronting them. They also spoke about the strains of raising big families, disciplining teenage youth, and coping with a new gender order in which women are economically more independent from men than back home, in part because welfare checks and housing are registered in the names of mothers rather than fathers. The sense of obligation (shared by Somalis transnationally) of having to send remittances to relatives in Somalia and beyond also made successful integration more difficult. Even in the much-coveted American location, then, the earthly paradise of which Somali migrants dream remains elusive.

There are drawbacks to the tight focus of the book. First, while the author gives the numbers of the individuals she interviewed in a range of social settings (18–20), she does not clarify which sociological variables beyond gender and economic class guided her selection of respondents. While qualitative research does not require formal sampling, the absence of transparency in this matter makes it more difficult to evaluate the answers she elicits from those she interviewed. Second, the author pays no attention to the specific circumstances that motivated her respondents to leave Somalia, although this subject lies well within the conventions of immigration and transnationalism studies. The key events of the civil war in the period 1988–92 are summarized in Chapter One, but the respondents’ specific and differential experiences of violence and circumstances of escape – in what stage of the civil war, from what kind of violence occurring in what area, and at what personal and family cost and loss – are not explored. Did those experiences not potentially affect the outcomes of their resettlement and shape the personal reflections that lie at the core of this study? Moreover, given that clan-based communal violence, directed at and perpetrated by civilians in the name of clan, constituted a significant dimension of Somali civil war violence, especially at the time of state collapse, this blind spot leads to another important absence in the study, namely the issue of how Somalis in the locations under study related, or failed to relate, to each other. The author may find any mention of clan unnecessary and improper (24–5), but given the fact that clan has been a crucial and long-standing technology of power in Somalia (from colonial times onwards and, with increasing lethalness, in 1978, 1988, and after the collapse of the state in 1991), ignoring when and how the politics and discourse of clan identity shape (or do not shape) the actions and mindsets of Somalis in the diaspora constitutes, to the mind of this reviewer, a missed opportunity and a serious shortcoming.

Finally, readers of this journal may want to note that this book is not framed as a study that documents the histories of the diaspora communities or traces change-over-time within them in any detail. Such themes may be fruitfully explored in the future. For example, one wonders whether, now that many Somalis have been in the US for twenty years or more, there have been changes in men's negative evaluations of a new gender order that empowers their wives’ economic agency at their expense but has also expanded opportunity for their daughters.

All in all, this ambitious, pioneering, and informative study, which draws on ethnographic fieldwork in three different countries, is an important accomplishment that solidifies Cawo Abdi's position as a major scholar in the field of Somali and Somali diaspora studies.