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Refugee camps are among the most prevalent institutional responses to global displacement. Despite a quasi consensus among scholars, activists, and humanitarians that camps are undesirable, and should only ever be temporary, little work has charted the political project and practices of camp abolition that challenge their spatial unfreedom. Rather than life-supporting spatial technologies of care that unwittingly signal political failures of inclusion, camps form part of a calculated system of "carceral humanitarianism". This article draws on experiences from Kenya where aid interventions have shaped politics, social dynamics and economic life since the 1990s. Kakuma camp and Kalobeyei settlement serve as empirical windows to explore the limits of institutional decampment and reform policies, while demonstrating that more radical, abolitionist struggles are enacted through everyday mobilisation and acts of fugitivity among refugees themselves. Advancing critical studies of humanitarianism and forced migration, this article contends that only abolishing camps and their carceral logics helps to build more viable, safe, and humane futures for people on the move.Muhtasari: Kambi za wakimbizi ni moja ya njia za kitaasisi zilizozoeleka kukabiliana na suala la uhamiaji wa kulazimishwa wa kimataifa. Ingawaje kuna muafaka baina ya wanazuoni, wanaharakati, na watetezi wa masuala ya kibinadamu kwamba kambi hazifai, na ziwepo kwa muda mfupi tu, michango michache ya kitaaluma imefafanua mradi wa kisiasa na vitendo vya ukomeshaji kambi ambavyo vinakabili ukosefu wa uhuru. Badala ya kuwa mahali pa kuokoa na kujali maisha-penye mapungufu yaliyosababishwa na sera jumuishi zilizoshindwa-kambi ni sehemu ya mfumo wa makusudi wa misaada ya kibinadamu yenye mrengo wa kiudhibiti. Makala hii inatumia mafunzo kutoka Kenya ambapo misaada imeathiri siasa, mienendo ya jamii na maisha ya kiuchumi tangu 1990. Kambi ya Kakuma na makazi ya Kalobeyei yanatumika kama madirisha halisia kuchunguza mkomo wa kitaasisi katika sera za uondoaji kambi na za kimageuzi, ilihali ninaonyesha kwamba mapambano makali ya ukomeshaji wa kambi yanafanywa kila siku kupitia uhamasishaji na vitendo vya kikimbizi kati ya wakimbizi wenyewe. Katika kuendeleza tafakuri ya kihakiki katika masomo ya mfumo wa kibinadamu na uhamiaji wa kulazimishwa, chapisho hili linadai kwamba njia pekee ya kujenga hatima nzuri, salama na ya kibinadamu kwa watu wanaotoka sehemu moja kwenda nyingine, ni kwa kukomesha kambi na mantiki yake ya kiudhibiti.

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This article examines the ways in which both colonial and postcolonial migration regimes in Kenya and Tanzania have reproduced forms of differential governance toward the mobilities of particular African bodies. While there has been a growing interest in the institutional discrimination and “othering” of migrants in or in transit to Europe, comparable dynamics in the global South have received less scholarly attention. The article traces the enduring governmental differentiation, racialization, and management of labor migrants and refugees in Kenya and Tanzania. It argues that analyses of contemporary policies of migration management are incomplete without a structured appreciation of the historical trajectories of migration control, which are inseparably linked to notions of coloniality and related constructions of (un)profitable African bodies. It concludes by recognizing the limits of controlling Africans on the move and points toward the inevitable emergence of social conditions in which conviviality and potentiality prevail.

This paper advances debates in camp geographies and forced migration studies by centring the methodological import of emotions and affect in research on refugee camps. Camps are often spatial expressions of compassion, fear, care, suspicion, but also incubate hope, solidarity, and feelings of belonging among encamped communities. Researchers are never insulated from these complex emotions and affects. While qualitative, ethnographic, experiential, or otherwise sensory methods continue to be widely used in this field of study, the emotional entanglements that arise from the embodied encounters between researchers, residents, and camp spaces are not yet well understood. The paper argues that it is methodologically pertinent to not simply incorporate such affectual intensities into existing readings of the camp as an exceptional space, but to understand people's differentially experienced feelings as actively shaping the camp's geography. It illustrates this argument by engaging with feelings of suspicion that pervaded my long‐term ethnographic fieldwork in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Ultimately, the paper urges scholars to explore camps beyond their known capacities for controlling mobility and motion as spaces that are also imbued with feelings and sensibilities.