'Resiliency Humanitarianism': Responsibilizing Refugees through Humanitarian Emergency Governance in the Camp (original) (raw)
Related papers
What Is a Refugee Camp? Explorations of the Limits and Effects of the Camp
On a global scale, millions of refugees are contained in camps of one sort or another. This special issue and this introductory article explore what characterizes a camp and how camps affect the lives of those who are placed in them. It argues that the camp is an exceptional space that is put in place to deal with populations that disturb the national order of things. While being exceptional, the camp does not, however, produce bare life in an Agambenian sense. Life goes on in camps— albeit a life that is affected by the camp. Camps are defined along two dimensions: spatially and temporally. Spatially, camps always have boundaries, while in practice refugees and locals cross these boundaries for trade, employment, etc. Temporally, refugee camps are meant to be temporary, while in practice this temporariness may become permanent. The article proposes that camps may be explored along three dimensions. First, analyses of refugee camps must be attentive to the fact that a camp is at once a place of social dissolution and a place of new beginnings where sociality is remoulded in new ways. Second, we must explore the precarity of life in the camp by exploring relations to the future in this temporary space. Finally, the depoliticization of life that takes place in refugee camps due to humanitarian government, paradoxically also produces a hyperpoliticized space where nothing is taken for granted and everything is contested.
Refugee Self-Management and the Question of Governance
Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 1997
The author considers the organization of refugee camps as "communities" or "institutions" and takes the position that refugee camps are too institutional in character to establish or maintain traditional community-based supports. The implications that such definitions hold for camp governance and for the situation of refugee women, in particular, are discussed and the problematics for refugee self-governance are focused on the complex organizational boundaries drawn between UNHCR, NGOs and the camp refugees. A gendered framework is pivotal to the analyses.
Refugee Politics: Self-Organized ‘Government’ and Protests in the Agame´ Refugee Camp (2005–13)
This article examines the different forms of representation and participation set up by Togolese refugees as a means of organizing life in the Agame camp in Benin between 2005 and 2013, and the wave of protests which accompanied their claims to statutory rights during that same period. The emergence of ‘refugee politics’ is considered not as an epiphenomenon, but as an aspiration that is found in numerous camp contexts, and which is indicative of the tensions brought about by the confrontation between refugees and humanitarian organizations. It is in fact a hybrid form of politics, at the crossroads between traditional political representation (electing a president, nominating representatives) and the categorization advocated by humanitarian organizations in an attempt to give an increased voice to vulnerable groups. Furthermore, self-organization by refugees and the instances of insubordination seen in the camps seem to be determining factors in the strategies employed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the organizations running the camps as regards setting them up, withdrawing from them and eventually dismantling them.
Refugee Camp: A Tool for Dignity and Security
Belügyi Szemle, 2021
Migration is the main challenge of the 21 st century. With 272 million people migrating in 2019, of whom 80 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide, their security and the security of those living in the destination countries or regions is a major concern. One of the decisive factors in protection and security is the planning and management of the camps where millions of refugees and internally displaced people are hosted, in several cases, for many years. Well planned and well-organized camps do not only provide assistance and ensure the dignity to those displaced, help the effective work of the aid workers, but can also contribute to reducing crime and gender-based violence, furthermore decrease security threats and concerns. This paper examines how migrant settlement options, especially camps can be a tool for upholding the dignity of those in the camp whether they are refugees, internally displaced persons or different kinds of migrants, but at the same time how they can provide the safety and security for both the hosted population and the hosting community. For this very reason, the purpose of a shelter, the advantages and disadvantages of camps, furthermore setting and planning of camps will be discussed.
European Journal of International Security
Until it was destroyed in a fire in September 2020, Moria camp on the island of Lesvos, Greece, was widely referred to as ‘a living hell’. This article investigates the causes and effects of poor camp conditions from the perspectives of humanitarian actors who have worked in the camp. We argue that poor conditions are intended to perform a deterrent function for both migrants and humanitarian actors. We also argue, however, that such camps are not simply static manifestations of violent borderwork, but complex, dynamic sites of struggle in which those who live and work there continuously make and remake the camp. This can be seen, for instance, in the ways in which humanitarian actors simultaneously fill the gap resulting from the violent inaction of the state while contributing to poor camp conditions, as a result of inter-agency competition and criticism, and the broader ways in which they challenge and reinforce the violent governance of migration.
"We are All Refugees": Camps and Informal Settlements as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements
Planning Theory & Practice, 2020
This paper is in conversation with two important bodies of literature: one on informal settlements (informal and insurgent grassroots practices) and another on camps (spatial practices and governance of refugees). Reading inhabitants’ experiences in Korail, an informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, through the literature grounded in the experiences of refugees, we seek to contribute to the relational theorization of informal settlements and camps as an expanding and overlapping reality in the era of intensified global displacements. Weaving back and forth between the camp literature and Korail’s reality, we bring to light the comparable spatial practices and governance of the so-called citizens and the so-called stateless. We present the insights we gain from this analytical conversation under three organizing themes: experiential to highlight the precarious relationship of the two groups to citizenship and place, what we call a state of “citizenship in wait” and “in-situ displacement”; institutional to highlight the humanitarian matrices of care that provide governmental structures in both contexts; and micropolitical, to characterize dwellers’ contestations with state and humanitarian governance that constitute the processes of life-making in informal settlements, much as in the camps. Conceptually the paper lends a forceful voice to the mounting critiques of the state-centered canon in planning theories and the needed Southern turn in planning theorization. Politically, it lends a hand to the efforts of activists working to overcome exclusions and erasures that are endemic to the politics of citizenship, that pit refugees against the poor, and to gesture toward forging solidarities for a humane urbanism.
Preserving order: Narrating resilience as threat in Jordan's Azraq refugee camp
Territory, Politics, Governance, 2021
Built in 2014, Azraq is narrated as the ‘new and improved’ refugee camp in the humanitarian world while at the same time containing 40,000 Syrians in a high-security desert environment. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq, Jordan, this article understands Azraq’s camp governance as bringing to light a Jordanian care-control politics operated through national aid workers, whose daily actions perpetuate a conflation of humanitarianism and security. This case study analyses Azraq’s politics of time to illuminate that humanitarian language of vulnerability in the camp reflects not only need but also control. National aid workers perceive the newest refugees to the camp (Village 5) to be the most vulnerable and least threatening to the camp’s order, a discursive relationship that has justified mechanisms of control carried out in the name of care. This article argues that local humanitarian assessments of vulnerability in Azraq create a system that preserves vulnerability, which is defined here as a refugee’s dependence on aid to survive, and prevents resilience, or a refugee’s ability to achieve self-sustenance. It confronts humanitarian narratives that drive Jordan’s securitized response by portraying time and refugee-led development as instigating disorder and chaos.