Beyond the Losers: Transforming Governmental Practice in Refugee-Affected Tanzania

Through a comparative study of two rural Tanzanian districts, this article assesses the potentially transformatory effects of a humanitarian influx—the arrival of refugees and relief—on a host community's regime of governmental practice. It reveals that while the influx of Burundian and Congolese refugees has not produced the harmful economic and environmental effects many claim, its influence on identity and perceptions of legal and administrative responsibility has led to a geographic variance in Tanzania's national regime of governmental practice. Within this sub‐national regime, the refugee‐affected areas' permanent residents have strengthened their identitive ties to a distinctly Tanzanian population and territory, even as functional relations with, and expectations of, the state become fragmented and directed towards non‐state entities. Such findings problematize dominant, structuralist models of rural transformation and Weberian understandings of the modern nation‐state's territorial and functional foundations.