"Sono qui per vivere una vita senza vita": donne somale a Damasco, Siria

This article represents an attempt to map the Somali diasporic community in Damascus, Syria, with particular regard to the women’s experience of exile both in their role as mothers and university students. As the second biggest refugee group in the country after the Iraqis, Somali women’s experience can be considered a model for analyzing livelihood strategies which involve transnationalism and new forms of autonomy in order to face social marginalization as women and refugees. Furthermore, from the Somali refugees’ agency, the article tries to capture the contradiction both of the immigration law based on the ideology of Pan-Arabism as well as Basshar al-Assad’s regime, which became dramatically evident after the popular uprising started in March 2011. Nevertheless, the second part of the article deals with the national identity of refugees and the process through which this shared consciousness is continuously reshaping, as a perpetration of the imagined community, in which a crucial role is played by elements such as the Somali language and the civil war.