Informal migrant camps

Davies, Thom; Isakjee, Arshad; Dhesi, Surindar

doi:10.4337/9781786436030.00027

Cited by 21 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…Within this dialectic, closing a camp may make refugees momentarily disappear but then displaces them into urban precarity or exposes them to subsequent encampment. This means that camp closures exist on a continuum between encampment, gradual divestment of services and more openly violent or abrupt "campicide"the killing of camps (Davies et al 2019; see also Abreek-Zubiedat and Nitzan-Shiftan 2018).…”

Section: Decampment: Camp Closure Relocation and Repatriationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Camp Abolition: Ending Carceral Humanitarianism in Kenya (and Beyond)

Brankamp

2021

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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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Section: Decampment: Camp Closure Relocation and Repatriationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Camp Abolition: Ending Carceral Humanitarianism in Kenya (and Beyond)

Brankamp

2021

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“…The situating of camp closures in broader spatial-temporal patterns is also evident in literature on informal camps. The proliferation of informal camps in parts of Europe and the Middle East has been matched with widespread camp destructions, often mentioned in writings more focused on other aspects of the geographies of encampment (Davies et al, 2019;Martin et al, 2020;Mould, 2017a;Rygiel, 2011;Sanyal, 2017). Indirectly, the increasing attention to informal camps may thus contribute to shaping theories and empirical accounts of camp closure.…”

Section: Contextualizing Camp Closurementioning

confidence: 99%

Closing camps

Weima

Minca

2021

Progress in Human Geography

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Refugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be situated within the exclusionary landscapes in which states manage migrants custody, protection and displacement. We accordingly present camp closures as manifestations of sovereign power and the study of camp afterlives as key to critical understandings of camp geographies.

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“…It reflects on the approaches I drew on while carrying out ethnographic research with migrant groups inhabiting “contingent camps” around Calais (France) and Tangier (Morocco) between 2017 and 2020 2 . I use the term “contingent camps” to refer to the tentative places of life displaced people inhabit in fiercely policed borderlands: rudimentary encampments routinely destroyed or evicted by the authorities, in reaction to which their inhabitants must constantly rebuild (Davies et al, 2019; Hagan, 2018). During my fieldwork in Tangier, camp raids occurred bi‐weekly on average, while in Calais encampments were evicted once every 48 hours.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These readings understand the camp diversely, but always as a bounded and fixed, physical geography (McConnachie, 2016). However, with intensified arrivals to Europe and tightening border control policies in recent years, impermanent and makeshift encampments have multiplied in form and number along strategic migration routes (Davies et al, 2019;Katz, 2017;Martin et al, 2020). These encampments have fittingly been read as the spatial manifestation of violent inaction by states, as the outcome of a deliberate neglect of migrant people in a bid to deter them (Davies et al, 2017(Davies et al, , 2019.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, with intensified arrivals to Europe and tightening border control policies in recent years, impermanent and makeshift encampments have multiplied in form and number along strategic migration routes (Davies et al, 2019;Katz, 2017;Martin et al, 2020). These encampments have fittingly been read as the spatial manifestation of violent inaction by states, as the outcome of a deliberate neglect of migrant people in a bid to deter them (Davies et al, 2017(Davies et al, , 2019. Contingent camps, however, mark yet a further development: they are the form of encampment that emerges when the violent neglect of the state develops into an intense and constant active violence against the makeshift materialities to which migrant people are abandoned.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Precarious encampments in hostile border zones: The methodological challenges of and possibilities for studying contingent camps

Hagan

2021

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In migration studies, the space of the camp is most often understood as a fixed, humanitarian or institutional space of containment. In recent years, however, hardened border control strategies have given rise to contingent and precarious forms of encampment that stretch the scope of what we might understand as camp spaces. This paper is a methodological intervention on the study of “contingent camps”: encampments that are not fixed but dynamic and shifting, caught in constant cycles of destruction by state authorities and reinvention by those who inhabit them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant people inhabiting contingent camps in and around the borderlands at Calais (France) and Tangier (Morocco) between 2017 and 2020, this paper reflects on the methodological challenges of, and possibilities for, carrying out research in these spaces that lack fixed boundaries and thresholds in which to anchor a field strategy. In response to the uncertain ontology of contingent camps and their obscurity, I propose the simultaneous pursuit of embodied ethnography, a forensic scrutiny of camp materialities, and the study of affective atmospheres through attention to the immaterial practices of their residents. Finally, this paper stresses the importance of strategic method selection in these contexts, not only as a tool for approaching and exploring contingent camps, but also as a vector for actively bearing witness to and recording their existence to political ends.

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Informal migrant camps

Cited by 21 publications

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Camp Abolition: Ending Carceral Humanitarianism in Kenya (and Beyond)

Camp Abolition: Ending Carceral Humanitarianism in Kenya (and Beyond)

Closing camps

Precarious encampments in hostile border zones: The methodological challenges of and possibilities for studying contingent camps

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