Media and public attention to “people on the move” focuses predominantly on the catastrophic experiences of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants (e.g., capsizing boats, the separation of traumatized children from their caregivers at borders, and the detention of asylum seekers in the egregious conditions), but Sophia Balakian persuasively argues that we must study closely the everyday realities of displaced refugees in the process of “resettlement.” The Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) designates only a very small percentage of displaced refugees in “first asylum” countries as eligible to “resettle” in another country that will provide a path to citizenship. While seemingly the “safest” of migration options, when compared to entering countries without authorization or applying for asylum after fleeing persecution, applying for resettlement as a refugee is fraught, precarious, and extraordinarily difficult to navigate.

In Balakian’s careful study of Somali and Congolese refugees living in Kenya—which does not offer a path to citizenship for refugees—and trying to resettle in the United States, she finds an excessive focus on “real” families comprised of “normative, bureaucratically eligible, biogenetic” relationships (p. 119). That is because organizations and governments prioritize not only resettlement cases driven by medical need or a risk of violence but also those involving family reunification, so as to keep together relatives who may be scattered across their countries of origin, the first asylum countries, and the countries of resettlement. But host governments’ elusive search for “legitimate” families that “qualify” for reunification comes with devastating consequences. These same governments designate as fraudulent the wide variety of family formations and kinship networks that displaced refugees necessarily and lovingly create; obscure and ignore the corrupt behavior of gatekeeping humanitarian refugee organizations; and increase surveillance and criminalization of those communities most likely to engage in a variety of kinship networks. Balakian’s most important contribution to both the scholarly and media attention to displacement and migration is in naming the agonies and traumas of waiting to be resettled—and the beauty and creativity involved in constantly remaking kinship in order to navigate and survive that wait.

Balakian walks the reader through a comprehensive and clear-eyed analysis of the “life cycle” of resettlement, from Somali and Congolese refugees’ struggles as “outsiders” in Kenya to their infuriating experiences with the bureaucracies of refugee management to being “resettled” to grappling with additional layers of life as outsiders once in the US. First, chapter one examines how people’s own narratives of their experiences and feelings are no match for the brutalizing technocracy of “asylum text analytics” and “algorithms” (p. 63), which today are deployed to determine if someone’s story seems like a fake “script.” By the end of the chapter, the reader is invested in the lives of Somali refugees, like Mohamed, and Banyamulenge Tutsi ethnic minorities displaced from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, like Isaro and Francine, as well as in the cast of characters institutionally empowered to decide these refugees’ fate. Chapter two then demonstrates that not only is the refugee resettlement system designed to screen out as many potential applicants as possible under the guise of preventing “fraud” but also (and ironically) that this system is itself corrupt. Refugees living in Kenya flip the script, describing resettlement organizations, including the local Kenyan staff, as secretive and predatory, particularly in situations where organizational staff make profits off “selling cases.” As the book shows, refugees continuously claim their own stories and resist the classifications imposed on them by more powerful gatekeepers.

Balakian’s brilliant third chapter explores what happens in those years-long, sometimes generations-long periods of “waiting” to hear about, appeal, or revisit a resettlement case, examining how Somali communities caught in limbo strategically use their resources to ease the suffering of relatives and strangers alike. It is not the humanitarian organizations that “help” but rather Somalis themselves. And so a significant contribution of the book is the theorizing of the space, time, and rhythms of languishing in a bureaucratic system laden with injustice, errors, and loss.

Chapter four explores the continuous testing and vetting of refugees, including the United States’s use of mandatory DNA testing to identify and verify family members. This DNA testing policy emerged as a result of a 2008 US-run pilot program created in the wake of 9/11 amid the spectral fear of inadvertently admitting “terrorists” (p. 120). DNA tests conducted in the Kenyan headquarters of Resettlement Support Center Africa revealed that 80% of candidates were “fraudulently” related (p. 2). The United States therefore suspended for 4 years the resettlement program, devastating those already deep in the application review process, and then resurrected it in 2012, only to mandate that refugees themselves pay for the testing. It was a smart move by Balakian to put this chapter after the reader had already read 100+ pages on how people make and remake “family” in a multitude of ways, all while grieving dead or left-behind loved ones and seeking love and care in the face of loss, abandonment, separation, and betrayal. The author’s ability to immerse the reader in the world of resettlement increases the urgency one feels by the end of this chapter to learn and care more about those impacted by the strictures of this burdensome DNA testing protocol. The final chapter reveals what the reader suspects all along—that even when one is “resettled” in the United States, they will never be able to “settle.” These resettled refugees will always be waiting for family members to join them, struggling under the weight of paying remittances, and contending with being constructed as a potential threat by the very state that agreed to resettle them.

An unexpected bonus of this book is that it is not only a vibrant anthropological study of the legal processes that refugees endure, but it is also very well versed on how power, national security, and governance operate, making it necessary reading for political scientists researching migration and refugee movement. For example, the author examines how Somalis responded to the lack of a stable state through the creation of Islamic courts localized to Somali neighborhoods and diasporic banking networks for transferring remittances; but such innovative problem-solving only increased US actors’ suspicion, surveillance, and racial profiling due to the circumventing of the Somali government. She also has a sophisticated grasp of the increasing bureaucratization of law and humanitarianism in the wake of Cold War geopolitics, the September 11 terror attacks on the United States, and the US’s support of Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2006.

Most importantly, Balakian immerses the reader in her daily travels, encounters, conversations, and frustrations, not to center herself but to force the reader to walk along the people about whom she writes. The book will be valued by undergraduate students who will appreciate how the author deftly weaves together extraordinarily complex and nuanced experiences, and it will serve as an important intervention for more seasoned researchers as a reminder of the kind of careful, thoughtful work we should be doing when engaging and becoming a part of precarious communities. After all, it is Balakian’s sensitive handling of her own presence in refugees’ lives that makes us realize that researchers, too, are imbricated in the work of kinship, whether through smaller acts of giving and receiving care or through seeing how we are part of the broader ecosystem that shapes (and is shaped by) refugees’ attempts to build life and community against all odds.