Border Breathing and the Governance of Refugee Presence in Uganda’s West Nile

Uganda’s West Nile sub-region, bordering South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, offers a critical vantage point for understanding how borders are continually produced through the governance of displacement, and how national refugee policy interacts with everyday borderland practices to generate new boundaries. Drawing on fieldwork in Yumbe and Nebbi districts, the article examines how Uganda’s open-door refugee policy is interpreted and negotiated in these peripheral spaces, where formal authority is uneven and cross-border social worlds remain deeply embedded. Migration governance generates new internal borders by differentiating people through documentation regimes, aid eligibility, and spatial categorization, creating shifting borders of belonging and exclusion that complicate the presumed inclusivity of Uganda’s refugee framework. National policy grants refugees freedom of movement and work, but its implementation in fragile border contexts exposes the limits of hospitality when local governance and humanitarian systems are overstretched. Comparing the formalized humanitarian infrastructures with the informal, kinship-mediated reception dynamics, the study shows how borderwork unfolds both at the territorial edge and within the social fabric of borderlands . It contributes to scholarship by reframing Uganda’s refugee response as everyday border breathing, in which borders are enacted, contested, and reconfigured through the mundane governance of displacement.