Research Interests
Political anthropology, migration, the state, borders, bureaucracies, identity, militarism, political violence, disappearances
Research Area(s)
Kenya, European Union
Profile
Stefan Millar is a doctoral candidate in the Law and Anthropology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle. He earned a BSc in Anthropology at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), and then conducted his Master’s studies in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research (with a specialization in Social Anthropology) at Tampere University (Finland). Millar’s master’s thesis examined policing in the Nairobi district of Eastleigh, analysing the consequences of state violence on concepts of Kenyan citizenship for ethnic Somalis. Currently, his research examines state transformations in relation to migration in Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement in Turkana county, Kenya. The researcher is a part of a cohort “the technicization of exclusionary practices in the context of migration” at the Law and Anthropology Department, which critically examines the expansion and impact of the EU’s legal and technological strategies to control migration.
Why Law & Anthropology?
The combination of law and anthropology allows me to critically examine the consequences of normative legal and policy frameworks on refugees in Kakuma Refugee Camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement. UN, AU, EU, and Kenyan policies are all being enacted at different scales, and how these interrelate and become understood by those who inhabit Kakuma and Kalobeyei results in different understanding of identity, belonging and statehood. Combining law and anthropology allows me to decode such processes and understand why certain actors use some frameworks over others, such as refugees using their protection status under the UNHCR as a way of circumventing increasingly invasive biometric registration measures by the Kenyan state.