Refugee Camps in 'Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity' (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.
Internment Refugee Camps. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (eds., 2023)
2023
How did and does the fate of refugees unfold in internment camps? The contributors to this book facilitate an extensive engagement with the organized, state led, and forced placement of refugees in the past and present. They show the parallels and differences between the practices and types of internment in different countries – while considering the specific historical contexts. Moreover, they highlight the nexus of relationships and agencies which constitute the camps in question as transitory spaces. The contributions consist of analyses of local phenomena or case studies as well as comparative engagements from an international and/or historical perspective. Gabriele Anderl/Linda Erker/ Christoph Reinprecht (eds.), Internment Refugee Camps. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, transcript 2023. >> The volume goes back to an initiative of the Austrian Society for Exile Research (öge), which brought researchers from different disciplines together to discuss this subject in an international conference. In a context of new border regimes and restrictive asylum policies worldwide, the öge research network has a growing interest in recent research on exile, expulsion, and forced migration. The book wants to intervene into the debate on the role of states in the treatment of refugees and forced migrants with research-based knowledge and critical arguments.
Camps of Containment: A Genealogy of the Refugee Camp
What is a refugee camp? Existing definitions have focused on logics of power and institutions of governance. This article argues instead that refugee camps are best understood in relation to their purpose of containment. It posits ‘camps of containment’ as a specific form of encampment consisting of three primary categories: prisoner-of-war camps, internment camps and camps for forced migrants. This genealogy sheds new light on the origin of the refugee camp and reveals camps of containment to be an evolving politico-military strategy related to changing patterns of political conflict and to shifting anxieties about national security.
2020
Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for Exile Research (öge) in cooperation with the Department for Contemporary History (University of Vienna) and the research network “Migration, Citizenship and Belonging” (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna) 2-4 December 2020, Vienna online The conference aims to facilitate an extensive engagement with the organized, state-led, and forced placement of refugees in both the past and present. The emphasis will be on a comparative perspective – synchronic as well as diachronic. One of the key aims of the conference is to make visible the parallels and differences between the practices and types of internment in different countries – while considering the specific historical contexts. Another important focus will be the nexus of relationships and agencies which constitute the camps in question as transitory spaces. The contributions consist of analyses of local phenomena or case studies as well as comparative engagements from an international or historical perspective. Committee: Gabriele Anderl (öge), Linda Erker (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Kerstin von Lingen (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Christoph Reinprecht (öge & Department of Sociology/University of Vienna), Nora Walch (öge)
Refugee Camps and the Problem of Ethnic Extremism
Humanitarian Exchange
""Large encampments to receive fleeing refugees facilitate reception, and save lives. Yet the long-term effects of camp life may themselves create the potential for further conflict. Refugee camps are a way of controlling the technical, political and social problems inherent to conflict. They permit easy access to vulnerable, needy people in difficult and dangerous environments, meeting immediate needs for food, shelter and healthcare and helping to overcome the typical reluctance of host countries to receive foreigners. They also provide a convenient short-term holding place for refugees able to return after a short period. Yet is doubtful whether they are of long-term benefit, particularly when compared to the successes of some second- and third-country resettlement programmes. This is not because immediate physical needs are not met; rather, the segregation, inequality and social isolation of the refugee camp can fuel political resentments which prolong the refugee situation, and create the potential for further conflict. The modern refugee camp Typically, refugee camps are established in the early days of an emergency. They are sited within walking distance of a border (most refugees flee on foot), there are water sources that can be developed quickly, and there are few local people around to create political problems for the host country. Often, the host country’s military has asserted some level of control in the confined area of the camp. Confinement is usually combined with regulations restricting economic activities like farming or foraging, and social activities such as school attendance. This limits contact between refugees and the host population. Settled camp conditions are conducive to the control of mortality and morbidity rates in vulnerable refugee populations otherwise at great risk. At the same time, however, camp conditions can generate their own, less obvious problems. Refugee populations are typically isolated and made idle by the circumstances in which they find themselves. As a result, a ‘refugee culture’ can emerge, often among young people. This culture develops its own definitions of who is part of the group, and who is not. A caste-like inequality between refugees, locals and expatriate camp staff becomes normal, and a hierarchy emerges in which refugees are defined as the recipients of international largesse, host-country nationals provide the services refugees are banned from providing for themselves, and a small group of expatriates brings in what money there is. Meanwhile, life in the home country continues, and another social stratification emerges: between the people in the camp, and the people who stayed behind. Unable to visit, refugees create mental images of what the home country is about socially and politically, interpreting what snippets of information come their way to confirm their fears, hopes and suspicions about when they might return. The regularisation of assistance The emergency period can pass quickly, often within weeks or months. However, by default the dependent camp situations assisted by UNHCR, and fed by WFP, are maintained because the easiest thing to do is simply to continue. Thus, humanitarian agencies typically focus on the establishment of a ‘maintenance’ policy for the continuation of the camp situation, in the hope that a quick repatriation will be organised. For the international humanitarian community, maintenance is viewed as the completion of the ‘emergency’. After all, under difficult circumstances infrastructure has been built, political relationships have been established with the host country, food pipelines set up and major purchases made with donor money. In essence, maintenance for the agencies means the regularisation of their aid programmes. The problem is that maintenance policies rigidify the principles established during the initial flight. And these maintenance policies kick in at the same time that refugee culture is being established in the context of crowded camp conditions, norms for food distribution from international supplies are established, and the other tools used to receive and sustain fleeing refugee masses developed. This is fertile ground for the legitimisation of refugee nostalgia for a vanished past. Dreams of return Refugee ideologies quickly emerge with the establishment of camp routines, which typically suit the more powerful actors, including the humanitarian community, the host country and ethnic nationalists whose ideology feeds on nostalgia for the homeland. In particular, an ideology is established that voluntary repatriation, sometime, eventually, sooner rather than later, is the only solution. Not coincidentally, this is a convenient policy for humanitarian actors, the host country and refugee leaders alike: humanitarian actors because they have the infrastructure, routines and resources to maintain camps to control the situation, host countries because they do not want to deal with the issues of integrating foreigners, offending local constituencies in the process, and refugee leaders because they nurture dreams of leading a liberation force back to the home country. Promises of eventual return can become very attractive to refugees faced with frequent reminders that they are ‘different’, both from host-country nationals and from the people back home. In this kind of environment, extremism can flourish, and refugee populations, tantalised by promises of return to a mythologised ‘homeland’, can be mobilised for political purposes. Refugee camps for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza provide some of the most fertile recruiting-grounds for suicide bombers. Closed camps for Rwandans in Zaire in the late 1990s provided first a cover for the toppled, genocidal government, then a military target for the new regime. In both cases, the hundreds of thousands of refugees suffered. Repatriation or resettlement? Repatriation is usually seen as the best long-term solution to a refugee crisis. In certain circumstances, Mozambique in the early 1990s for instance, it can work well, but the experience of the last 30 to 40 years suggests that this is the exception. Resettlement – which often permits refugees to re-establish self-sufficiency as quickly as possible – is in fact at least as common, irrespective of the typically hostile political winds that oppose it. Resettlement also has the advantage of redirecting attention away from dreams of return, and towards lives elsewhere. Not every country wants or needs ‘their’ refugees back; this is why many refugee crises are resolved not just by mass voluntary repatriation, but by permanent relocation elsewhere. The flight from the Indochinese countries in the 1970s and 1980s is an example of how diverting refugee attention away from camps leads to other alternatives. Whether legally or illegally, most Indochinese refugees ended up resettled in countries as varied as the US, China, Australia and Thailand. One of the unsung successes of the Indochinese refugee resettlement programmes is that there are no teeming refugee camps in the region. Similarly, Iranians after the fall of the Shah, Burundians in Tanzania, Central Americans in Mexico and the US, Russians in Israel and Eastern Europeans in Germany found new lives not dominated by food distribution lines, head counts and the dreary segregated life of the modern refugee camp. Stumbling-blocks The capacity to manage refugee camps effectively allows potential hosts to avoid difficult political questions about resettlement, while persisting in the illusion that the refugee camp itself is there only ‘temporarily’. Camps provide the veneer of respectability: people do not starve because they are there; and due to the skilled delivery of medical care, refugees often have low mortality and morbidity rates, particularly in the short run. This is of course a good thing; but in the big picture is it the most important? Predictably, the provision of high-quality health care results in high birth rates and low infant mortality. But just as predictably, refugee camps isolated from the rest of the world will produce large numbers of angry young men focused on violently righting the perceived wrongs of the past. Tony Watersis Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, California State University, Chico, CA. Previously, he worked for the Lutheran World Federation in Tanzania and the International Rescue Committee in Thailand. He is the author of Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan: The Limitations to Humanitarian Relief Operations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001); and Crime and Immigrant Youth (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999). He has written widely on humanitarian relief, development and migration. Further reading Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Karen Jacobsen, ‘The Forgotten Solution: Local Integration of Refugees in Developing Countries’, in New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper 45 (Geneva: UNHCR, Huly 2001), www.unhcr.ch. Lynelyn Long, Ban Vinai: The Refugee Camp (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). ""
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.
Refugee Camps: Initiation, Current Conditions, Development & Integration with the City
2018
The issue of Palestinian refugees exists for nearly 70 years now, starting from the occupation of Palestine by Israeli forces and immigrants in the late 40s. Approximately 900,000 Palestinian refugees were forced to leave Palestine following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The majority of them fled to neighboring Arab countries; Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Following the 1967 war; another wave of Palestinian refugees fled to Jordan, when Israel occupied the Gaza and West Bank along with other Arab territories. These waves of refugees who moved to Jordan transformed its demographic structure and reformed Jordan's socioeconomic , political, and cultural life. The Syrian conflict and civil war onwards of 2011 has seen thousands of Syrian and Palestinian refugees being forced to leave Syria and move to adjacent countries, creating accommodation issues for the hosts. The governments of the said host nations found it essential to formulate new policies to accommodate the refugee flux. One of the major historical issues of refugee camps is that they are considered by both the host governments and refugees themselves as a temporary solution until the conflict gets resolved. In some cases, however, what began as temporary arrangements have morphed into permanent residences; this is, especially true of the hapless Palestinian refugees. This research studies the structure and development of the refugee camps and looks at ways in which the camps can be better integrated with the surrounding cities and communities. It also provides a high-level study for two cases in Jordan, Al-Baqaa and Al-Zaatari refugee camps, with a particular focus on their edges and connections with the surrounding urban and social fabric. iv The areas of concern were explored in several ways starting from the literature review for the background and history, analyzing case studies, interviewing refugees and involved personnel ending with summarizing the outcomes. The research concludes by proposing urban design enhancements that can be implemented in the existing camps to create a better interface with the adjoining land and settlements. These are accompanied by a list of recommendations to modify the legislation and to create best practices for future refugee camps.
York University, 2021
In this dissertation, I investigate the question how, and to what extent, can the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) be held accountable, under international law, for its contribution to the harm to the environment and lives of refugees resulting from refugee encampment in refugee camps that it helps create, fund, and manage? I use the term "accountability" in this dissertation to mean answerability, responsibility, and liability for internationally wrongful acts or injurious consequences arising out of acts that international law does not prohibit and making good for the loss or injury suffered as a result of such acts or omissions. vii Hall Law School, the Graduate Studies, York University, librarians at both the Osgoode Hall Law School and Scott libraries, and the Human Participants Review SubCommittee of the Ethics Review Board. I would like to single out especially Professor Dayna Scott, former Director of the Graduate Program in Law, and Jeanine Woodall, former Director of Research and Graduate Studies Operations, Osgoode Hall Law School, for working hard to ensure that I had access to funding; Professor Sonia Lawrence, former Director of the Graduate Program in Law, for guiding me through the Ethics Review process with insightful comments and suggestions; Heather Moore, Manager Graduate and Research Services, Chantel Thompson, Graduate Assistant, and Ammad Khan, Graduate & Research Secretary, for their patience and professionalism in addressing my many questions and inquiries and guiding me through various processes, from termly registrations, study permit extensions, to petitions for change of status and reinstatement to defend. The staff at the Osgoode Hall Law Library were also fantastic. I would like to especially single out Yemisi Dina, Chief Law Librarian, and Hari Saugh, Library Staff, and other library staff and assistants, for their prompt responses to my many inquiries and frantic search for reference materials. Indeed, the commitment and dedication of each of the staff and officers I met, both physically and virtually, in their various departments during the course of my studies was inspiring and uplifting. A BIG thank you all! I also owe a huge debt of thanks to both the Government of Kenya (GoK), the UNHCR officials in Kenya, and the Windle Trust International in Kenya for having provided me with invaluable help during my fieldwork there in 2017 and 2018. In the first place, I would like to thank officials of the Kenya National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI) for expediting the processing of my research permit, without which I would not have conducted the field work in Kenya, and officials of the Refugee Affairs Secretariat, Office of the President, Ministry of Interior and Coordination of National Government, for permission to visit and conduct research in Dadaab Refugee Camp Complex. In the second place, my heartfelt thanks go to the UNHCR representative in Nairobi for accepting my request for interviews and for arranging with his colleagues in Dadaab not only for me to be able to conduct fieldwork in Dadaab refugee camps, but also support me with accommodation and transport to the camps. I also thank the head of UNHCR Dadaab Sub-Office for accepting to meet me and the Associate External Relations officers for coordinating my stay and research activities viii with his colleagues in the Dadaab office. Without their invaluable support, in terms of time and logistics, I would not have conducted the fieldwork in Dadaab refugee camps. In the third place, I my heartfelt gratitude goes to the Windle Trust head of education in Dadaab and her colleagues for all the support with meeting teachers and students in select refugee schools in the camps in the Dadaab Refugee Camp Complex. Without their support, I would not have organised, successfully, the focus group interviews. I also received invaluable help from friends. I would like to single out and thank, posthumously, the late Dr Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, whose untiring commitment to social justice and fairness for refugees inspired me while a youthful Ugandan refugee in the Sudan, now Southern Sudan. I thank her for her unwavering support-moral and intellectual-throughout the early stages of this study. There is much more to thank Dr Harrell-Bond for, but that is for another day. In addition, I also thank, posthumously, the late Fr. Massimo Lombardi (affectionately referred to as Fr. Massey), former Pastor of St Wilfrid's Catholic Church, for introducing me to Joseph D. Sorbara, Q.C., of the Sorbara Group and former Chair of the Board of Directors of York University Development Corporation, who generously contributed to my fieldwork in Kenya in 2017. Furthermore, I express my heartfelt gratitude a cohort of friends. First, to Justice Dr Joel Ngugi and Dr Sylvia Kang'ara for their priceless support while I was in Nairobi during my first fieldwork trip to Kenya in 2017, especially providing me with a place to stay from where I coordinated my research activities. In addition, I benefitted greatly from conversations with Justice Dr Ngugi on my research topic, theory, and method and especially TWAIL's theoretical commitments. I also thank Dr Kang'ara, former founding Dean of Riara Law School, for offering me the Visiting Lecturer position at Riara Law School, Riara University, Nairobi. Similarly, my appreciation goes to Dr Ekuru Aukot (my Turkana Lawyer), for invaluable support while I was in Nairobi, for my second fieldwork trip to Kenya in 2018. I am especially grateful to Dr Aukot for providing me with a quiet place to stay from where I coordinated my interviews schedules with participants. I also benefitted from Dr Aukot's insights on refugee policy and practice in Kenya during the free times he spared for me to brainstorm on my research topic. In addition, I received invaluable support from long-term friends, Dr Kofi Boakye and Dr Vincent Adunga of the Ginger Tea and Benet House Fraternity. Thank you, Kofi ix and Vin, for those long conversations; they buoyed me up while in the storm! In a special way, I thank my sister, Etelle Strizhak, for invaluable moral, spiritual, and material support throughout the course of my studies, invoking Hashem's mercies upon me, and especially for those Sunday dinners at your flat in Nairobi, during my fieldwork in Kenya, which allowed me to share and sound my research ideas on your guests. My gratitude also goes to my sister, Caroline Mbasuen, for moral support and fervent prayers! And, not least,