The camp is a technology of care and control that has been historically used in connection with a variety of forms of confinement, examples being concentration camps for soldiers and other prisoners and quarantine camps to prevent the spread of disease or pests. More recently, camps have become the critical device in the management of modern humanitarian crises, “temporary” solutions to accommodate either refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). Some scholars emphasize the historical transition at the end of World War II, when “certain key techniques for managing mass displacements of people first became standardized and then globalized” (Malkki 1995: 497). Of the approximately 70 million individuals forcibly displaced worldwide, around 2.6 million people live in official camps ( UNHCR 2019). Camps are set up as the most suitable solution for the management of the displaced, especially those who cannot find alternative accommodation elsewhere. Even though host states and the large network of humanitarian organizations involved in the management of camps often have different and even contradictory mandates, organizational cultures, and interests, all seem to converge on the idea that disenfranchised people are best managed and controlled in camps. As such, two major premises seem to underlie their functioning and determine the objectives of this spatial regime: (1) displaced populations are a transitory phenomenon of crisis and disorder and are thus only temporarily relevant, and (2) human nature is best served in a sedentary setting.
The discourse on (refugee) camps has traditionally cast the camps as spaces of exception where people are settled, controlled, disciplined, and visualized through humanitarian categories and programs. As Liisa Malkki states: “the segregation of political affiliations and identities, medical and hygienic programs and quarantining, ‘perpetual screening’ and the accumulation of documentation on the inhabitants of the camps, the control of movement and black-marketing, law enforcement and public discipline, and schooling and rehabilitation were some of the operations that the spatial concentration and ordering of people enabled or facilitated” (Malkki 1995: 498). Critical scholarship insists that the humanitarian system has extended a double-edged privilege in the camp: it has kept the destitute alive, educated most, and given jobs to some, but it has also created definitions and categorizations–such as “registered” and “non-registered”–that have minimized displaced numbers and ignored all those outside these definitions (Harrell-Bond 1999). Studies have highlighted how, through the imposition of specific forms of hierarchical organization, humanitarian agencies coordinate the life of populations living in camps around a rational planning of daily life, but often in contempt of former social realities and historical contest.
Even though they are conceived as short-term solutions, camps have the tendency to become permanent and can undergo a process of urbanization and infrastructure development (Agier 2002). Houses of several stories replace tents and shelters, and new roads are often established through the camps or around the perimeter. Scholars have explored the practices of everyday life and spatial forms of resistance through which camp dwellers reappropriate the space of the camp. Studies have documented how humanitarian camps, for their inhabitants, cease to be associated exclusively with negative images–helpless people, passive victims, raw humanity, and so on–and become primary references upon which they reconstruct their identity, their sense of history, their social, cultural, and political views. A body of ethnography on Palestinian studies, for example, shows how–60 years after their settlement in the first camps–Palestinian refugees have gone beyond bureaucratic and humanitarian labels and have rewritten the camp’s space, reproducing the Palestinian culture and land inside the administrative and physical camp boundaries (Achilli 2015; Bisharat 1994).
However, camps are not only established by governments or international organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. At times, activists, volunteers, non-governmental organizations, and displaced groups themselves have developed unofficial camps to provide shelter and facilitate service provision, and also as hubs for political activism and militancy as alternatives to overcrowded camps, or simply because official camps do not exist. A case in point was the unofficial refugee camp of Calais, overlooking the Strait of Dover in the northeast of France, which in 2016 reached an approximate population of 10,000 people–mostly asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Sudan, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa. The settlement, dubbed “the Jungle,” was established by volunteers and grassroots organizations in response to the lack of institutional support, but soon became a space where activists, migrants, and volunteers could exert pressure on the United Kingdom’s border policies and denounce French police brutality (Agier 2018; Sandri 2018).
References
Achilli, L. (2015) Palestinian Refugees and Identity: Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday. I.B. Tauris.
Agier, M. (2002) Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps. Ethnography, 3(3): 317–341.
Agier, M. (2018) La jungle de Calais. Presses Universitaires de France.
Bisharat, G.E. (1994) Displacement and Social Identity: Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank. Center for Migration Studies Special Issues, 11(4): 163–188.
Harrell-Bond, B. (1999) The Experience of Refugees as Recipients of Aid. Refugees: Perspectives on the Experience of Forced Migration. Pinter.
Malkki, L.H. (1995) Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1): 495–523.
Sandri, E. (2018) “Volunteer Humanitarianism”: Volunteers and Humanitarian Aid in the Jungle Refugee Camp of Calais. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1): 65–80.
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) (2019) What Is a Refugee Camp? www.unrefugees.org.