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Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment—marginality, erasure, and invisibility—as they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This paper explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non‐state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti‐migrant sentiment. In so doing, this paper emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work‐related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis‐gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city. [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]