Dadaab ("the rocky hard place") is a sprawling network of wynds, souks, huts and lean-tos slapped down in eastern Kenya's desert region.  First settled in 1991 by big game hunters, in the ensuing years it has morphed into the largest refugee camp in the world and has never housed fewer than 150,000 people.  There is nothing nearby to sustain a significant population and the residents have become unwelcome wards of the Kenyan state but dependent on the United Nations and affiliate agencies for food and other essentials.

In a new publication entitled City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp (Random House, 2016), Ben Rawlence, a former Human Rights Watch researcher, describes Dadaab as "a world with its own rules, its own boundaries, and its own histories",  where largely Sufi Islam residents struggle for survival, maintain family and extended kinship ties, and dream of migrating to places that will provide employment, education, health care, housing, peace, and hope.  Rawlence asserts that the West is complicit in creating "notopias" such as Dadaab while politicians at home welcome refugees at high profile photo-ops.

For students of urban anthropology (eg. Anthropolgoy 394) City of Thorns is an informative and thought-provoking read.  It examines the massive scale of human dislocation fostered by wars and climate change; it discusses a new type of urban settlement that houses millions of people and is growing in number; and it is a reappraisal of the meaning of "human', "citizen", "home", and "nation".