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In this exploratory article, we aim to open a research agenda for renewed attention to the relationship between the capitalist state and the technology ecosystem. Over the last decade, private technology companies have increasingly become enmeshed with the activities of the state in arenas such as policing, healthcare, and welfare administration. At a time when so many facets of state activity are being infiltrated by technology firms and their products, we ask how we should theorise the relationship between the capitalist state and technology capital? This paper develops one approach to answer this question by aligning the priorities of tech capital with those of the neoliberal state namely, through the disciplining and managing of the relative surplus population. In this arena, we argue, a form of techfare has begun to take shape: a technology-assisted extension and intensification of the disciplinary logics that work to lock the relative surplus population into exploitative market relations and punitive institutions in advanced capitalist countries like the United States. We explore techfare and the disciplining of labour through two avenues: the business of consumer finance vis-à-vis debt and credit instruments, and various forms of tech-enabled strategies of law-enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forced displacement – the involuntary movement of people from their homes and livelihoods – has captured public attention through diverging discourses of humanitarianism and global xenophobia. 2.5 million asylum claims were lodged in the European Union (EU) in 2015–16 leading to national and region-wide strategies of border securitization. Refugee governance in the EU is marked by contradictory ideological positions where liberal humanitarianism, through refugee acceptance, dovetails with racial violence evidenced by ongoing detention and circuitous displacement. These divergent positions, and their resultant policies of refugee management, avoid the social reality of neoliberalisation as it pertains to widespread homelessness and work-related insecurity in major EU cities such as Paris. This disavowal occurs in a raced market and impedes the survival of refugees through insistence on self-reliance – a disciplinary logic endemic to neoliberalism and imposed on refugees upon relocation. I argue that self-reliance transforms refugees into disposable subjects in capitalism at various stages of the asylum process from escape and detention to relocation and ongoing displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenya was amongst the first countries in the world to undergo structural adjustment programmes in 1980 leading to welfare retrenchment and the lack of social safety nets for many of its urban poor. This article shows how refugee hosting in Kenya has coincided with ongoing statewide neoliberalisation. With lack of state-led welfare support, and diminished global aid for a nearly three-decade long encampment in Dadaab and Kakuma, refugees have no choice but to turn to the private sector for shelter aid through microcredit loans especially in major urban centres. This article shows how neoliberal policies dovetail with refugee governance in Kenya by examining the deployment of financial inclusion strategies on multiple scales. Drawing upon fieldwork in 2018, I argue that refugee assistance intersects with the needs of private capital where refugees, due to their social marginality, are prone to experimentation in terms of financial inclusion. Housing microfinance, an ineffective guarantor of long-term refugee shelter, and new technologies of financial inclusion exemplify neoliberal experimentation and illustrate how these strategies fail to ensure the long-term survival of refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fintech and digital financial services involve the delivery of financial products and services through technology. Fintech companies are part of a financial lending infrastructure claiming to offer an alternative to 'big banks', and are often touted as digitally disruptive technology that is rapidly reshaping financial inclusion agendas and improving the lives of the poor. For many refugees living in camps and informal settlements in Kenya, fintech is often the only viable option for credit or microfinance aid. While refugees are often excluded from credit, the spread of fintech as a solution for direct peer-to-peer aid transfers from the Global North to refugees has resulted in the uneven distribution of credit access and livelihood support. Through fintech, private citizens and groups in the Global North are able to disrupt and subvert refugee assistance, deeming some worthy of aid while others face ongoing exclusion. While fintech remains a hopeful source of greater efficiency and empowerment, the direct transfer of aid money masks profit and corporate power by only extending assistance to those refugees who are appropriately entrepreneurial, that is to say those who will start small businesses and pay back their loans. This paper argues that processes of financial inclusion carried out by and through fintech are still distinguished largely by exclusion. In so doing, this paper highlights a theoretical position that refugee governance is embedded in racial forms of capital accumulation and expropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kenya currently hosts around half a million refugees in two of the world's largest refugee camps in Dadaab and Kakuma. While these camps have held refugees for nearly three decades, they face ongoing threats of closure resulting in an uptick of urban refugees in Nairobi. This article places refugees in the context of urban disposability and hinges this concept on three interrelated aspects: citizenship, housing, and income-based survival against the backdrop of neoliberalisation in Kenya. Lack of state support and widespread xenophobia on the national scale has led to piecemeal market-based policies of self-reliance such as microfinance and entrepreneurship as institution-led strategies for survival. These solutions forego refugee life in favour of capital accumulation creating unsustainable indebtedness and poverty on the urban scale. I argue that urban refugees are rendered disposable populations and are forced to survive through informal structures within Kenyan neoliberalism. In doing this, refugees are not passively wasted populations, rather, they are brought into the folds of capital accumulation through modes of survival based on self-reliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on refugees in authoritarian neoliberalism and necessity to follow international norms of refugee resettlement to accept the exodus of migrants and problem that threatens European sovereignty and security. It also mentions embrace of marketized social housing provisioning and difficult to meet the growing demands for affordable rental housing. It also mentions place-based practices of neoliberalization that have facilitated increasing levels of housing insecurity.