What Is a Refugee Camp? Explorations of the Limits and Effects of the Camp

Abstract

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 hyper-politicized space where nothing is taken for granted and everything is contested.