Refugee Camps

With the increase of refugee movements since 2014 in Europe and the Near East, the debate of how to plan appropriate shelters and emergency accommodation has gained a new momentum. Established techno-managerial approaches have been criticised as inappropriate and the professional community of planners and architects was increasingly drawn into debates for alternative solutions. This article traces the “innovations” that promise better, more effective, and more humane emergency shelters using the examples of the “Tempohomes” in Berlin as well as the Jordanian refugee camps of Zaatari and Azraq. In both cases, planners were employed to address the ambivalent reality of protracted refugee camps and include “lessons” from failures of earlier solutions. While the article acknowledges the genuine attempt of planners to engage with the more complex needs and expectations of refugees, a careful look at the results of the planning for better camps reveals ambivalent outcomes. As camps acquir...

Sous la direction de Michel Agier, avec la collaboration de Clara Lecadet et les contributions de Hala Caroline Abou Zaki Marc Bernardot Tristan Bruslé Pierre Centlivres Olivier Clochard Alice Corbet Kamel Doraï Jean-Louis Edogué Agnès de Geoffroy François Gemenne Manuel Herz Sandi Hilal Alexander Horstmann Bram Jansen David Lagarde Clara Lecadet Pedro Neto Martin Olivera Alessandro Petti Sara Prestianni Nicolas Puig Stellio Rolland Anooradha Siddiqi Louise Tassin Simon Turner Hélène Thiollet Eyal Weizman.

Les camps se multiplient et se banalisent partout sur la planète. Ils sont aujourd’hui des milliers, dessinant peu à peu un nouveau paysage mondial. Gouvernements nationaux et agences internationales adoptent de plus en plus systématiquement cette solution pour « regrouper » les réfugiés humanitaires, pour « parquer », faire « transiter », « retenir » ou mettre à l’écart les « déplacés » et les migrants, les « clandestins » et autres indésirables. Douze millions de personnes vivent dans ces camps, des millions d’autres dans des campements de fortune, au creux des forêts, dans les interstices des villes, le long des frontières ; d’autres encore sont piégés dans des centres de rétention, des zones d’attente ou de transit. Si ces « hors-lieux » sont des espaces de parias, nombre d’entre eux s’inscrivent dans la durée et se transforment au fil du temps : la vie s’y renouvelle, s’y attache, et l’emporte le plus souvent sur la mort ou le dépérissement.
En vingt-cinq monographies (qui nous font faire un tour du monde des camps, du plus ancien à Chatila au Liban, au plus grand à Dadaab au Kenya, regroupant 450 000 habitants, en passant par le plus informel à Canaan en Haïti ou le plus précaire à Calais), cet ouvrage fait découvrir la vie intime et quotidienne de leurs habitants. Loin d’être l’« exception » que l’on évoque généralement dans un cadre humanitaire ou sécuritaire pour en justifier l’existence, les camps font durablement partie des espaces et des sociétés qui composent le monde aujourd’hui. Dans ces lieux s’inventent de nouveaux modèles sociaux, à côté ou au-delà du périmètre des États-nations, qui préfigurent peut-être de nouvelles formes de citoyenneté mondiale.

Based on long term archaeological ethnography on the border island of Lesvos situated on Europe's margins, this article explores the regimes of eating and the role of food practices in the refugee camp/processing centre of Moria. Starting from the double liminality of eating and border-crossing, it outlines and juxtaposes two regimes of corporeal life. The first is the biopolitical arena of official food provision as produced by the border apparatus and the logic of humanitarian governmentality. This regulates border-crosser's time and daily routines and renders them 'people of concern', tress-passers or victimized individuals with no agency. The second is the affective, trans-corporeal, multisensorial field of cooking, eating, making kin, making community. It is produced through the agency of border-crossers themselves, when they take charge of their own eating. In doing so, they constitute eating in these liminal conditions as affirmative biopolitics, as the affirmative politics of life and hope.

The global refugee crisis reveals refugees and other forcibly displaced persons (FDP) are uniquely vulnerable consumers on a dynamic pathway precipitated by trigger events that have disrupted or fractured marketing systems requisite for safety and well-being, resulting in dangerous journeys to temporary or permanent settlements. The Syrian Conflict is introduced to contextualize the challenges along the pathway and to show that a more Humanitarian Marketing System, spanning time, space and other systems, brings opportunities for governments, NGOs and businesses to cooperate and to provide FDP with resources, which enhance connectedness, reduce vulnerabilities and suffering, illuminate good practices and enable FDP to flourish when resettled. The authors discuss research-opportunities to facilitate further understanding, to develop and repair marketing systems, and to enhance the well-being of FDP and other stakeholders of the crisis.

Resumen: En este trabajo se analiza la existencia de un derecho a solicitar asilo tanto en el territorio del Estado como en frontera. Para ello se toman en consideración la normativa internacional sobre la materia, y la normativa de la Unión Europea, concretamente la Carta de Derechos Fundamentales de la Unión Europea y la Directiva de Procedimiento. El objetivo es determinar si Hungría mediante el rechazo en frontera de los refugiados, así como mediante la imposición de sanciones penales por el cruce ilegal, según la normativa húngara, de frontera, vendría a estar violando dicho de derecho a solicitar asilo. La confirmación de dicha violación, junto con la posible confirmación de las violaciones relativas a los procedimientos de asilo señaladas por la Comisión Europea en la carta de emplazamiento enviada a Hungría en 2015, planteamos podría permitir considerar a Hungría como país " no seguro " siendo de aplicación el artículo 3.2 del Reglamento de Dublín. Summary: This paper analyzes the existence of a right to seek asylum both, in the territory of the State and in the border of the State. For this purpose the international regulations on the matter, and the regulations of the European Union (namely the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the Directive of Procedure) are taken into consideration. The aim is to determine whether Hungary through the border rejection of refugees, as well as by imposing criminal penalties for the illegal crossing, according to the Hungarian legislation, would violate the right to seek asylum. The confirmation of such a violation, along with the possible confirmation of violations concerning asylum procedures outlined by the European Commission in the letter of formal notice sent to Hungary in 2015, could allow considering Hungary as a " non-safe " country and applying article 3.2 of the Dublin Regulation.

La bibliografia està plena de definicions que matisen un dels fenòmens més vergonyosos de la història de la humanitat: una instal·lació destinada al confinament de persones, sense judici previ, que els règims totalitaris
han utilitzat per tancar-hi intel·lectuals i polítics dissidents, presoners de guerra, minories ètniques, grups religiosos, homosexuals, i altres grups de persones.
Noms diferents per diferenciar camps d’internament, de concentració, de presoners, de treballs forçats, d’extermini.... camps de mort i de vergonya. Els pitjors de tots els de l'Alemanya nazi

Displacement is increasingly common (affecting one in every 122 people) and also increasingly protracted (over half of the world’s 14 million refugees in 2015 have been displaced for over ten years). Circa 90% of these refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in the global South, and most of them, in turn, reside in urban spaces.[1] However, while it clear that we are facing a period of protracted displacement in (peri- )urban settings, it is less frequently acknowledged that this is also a period of overlapping displacements. This is the case in at least two senses. Firstly, refugees and IDPs have often both personally and collectively experienced secondary and tertiary displacement, as in the case of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees who had originally sought safety in Damascus only to be displaced once more by the on-going Syrian conflict, and of Sahrawi and Palestinian refugees who had left their refugee camp homes in Algeria and Lebanon respectively to study or work in Libya before being displaced by the outbreak of conflict in that country in 2011 (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2012). Secondly, refugees are increasingly experiencing overlapping displacement in the sense that they often physically share spaces with other displaced people in diverse spaces of asylum: Turkey hosts refugees from over 35 countries of origin, Lebanon from 17, Kenya 16, Jordan 14, Chad 12, and both Ethiopia and Pakistan 11 (Crawford et al: 2015). However, in spite of the widespread reality of these overlapping groups, and given the interest in ‘superdiversity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in urban spaces across migration studies writ large (Vertovec, 2007; Derrida 2007), it is particularly notable that refugees’ positions, identities, beliefs and behaviours in relation to other groups of refugees remain almost entirely unexplored to date.

Indeed, a large proportion of studies of urban refugees focus on one particular refugee group in one city (i.e. Lyytinen 2015; Bartolomei 2015), while multisited, comparative studies often focus on one group dispersed across a number of cities or divided across a city and a camp setting (i.e. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2012, 2013; and Malkki 1995 respectively), or compare the conditions and dynamics of one group of refugees in one city with another group in another city (i.e. Sanyal 2014). In contrast, only a small number of studies explicitly examine the experiences of different refugees in the same city (i.e. Brown et al 2004; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh 2010). Of particular relevance to the argument I make below vis-à-vis the ‘relationality’ of refugees in shared spaces of refuge, Buscher (2011: 21- 22) analyses the relative strength of social ties and networks within Somali, Congolese and Burundian refugee communities in the city of Kampala. While Buscher’s article thus recognizes the overlapping presence of refugees from different countries of origin in Kampala, it seemingly highlights both the relative isolation of Somalis and Congolese refugees from other refugee communities, and the extent to which fractures and mistrust characterize relations within the Burundi refugee community. This may helpfully demonstrate that segregation, rather than social integration via cohabitation, can maximize livelihood strategies for certain refugees (in this case, Burundian refugees), and yet this focus on nationality-based social networks continues to render invisible the relationality of refugees in spaces inhabited by multiple, and often overlapping, groups of refugees in urban contexts.

Les camps représentent la place idéale aujourd’hui des Sans-État. Qu’ils soient explicitement sécuritaires (Calais) ou édifiés d’abord à des fins humanitaires (Grande-Synthe), ils sont créés comme des espaces à l’écart, des lieux hors de tous les lieux, qui doivent eux-mêmes se détruire ou se transformer. C’est cela qui rapproche ce qui se passe en Europe ces dernières années de ce qui se passe dans d’autres parties du monde depuis plus longtemps, où l’on est habitué à voir naître et durer des camps.

With an estimated figure of 215 million migrants worldwide or 3.1% of the world's population, a globalized world has become reality. More than 50 million of the world's migrants are forcibly displaced. One-third of them are refugees who are settled in temporary camps. Unfortunately, in most cases, these camps subsist for a long time. Some even grow into permanent settlements, merging with nearby communities like Ein el-Hillweh in Lebanon. Others grow rapidly becoming, in a matter of months, bigger than many cities. Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, which opened on July 28th, 2012, had, at some stage 200,000 refugees, making it Jordan's fourth-largest city.
Despite their sizes, refugee camps are not recognized as cities. This lack of recognition deprives them of the right to subsist as such, hampering the logistics of daily routines, and consequently compromising the quality of life of their residents.
Unfortunately the situation is more likely to deteriorate in the near future. Food scarcity, due to climate change and increase in population coupled with political instability, will only increase the number of refugees and consequently the number and size of refugee camps over the world.
Uncovering Forgotten Cities reveals this new type of city, shaped in refugee camps all around and open our eyes for what is about to come in the near future, regarding human migration and settlement.

Through six intensive and semi-structured interviews, this research paper examines the role social support networks may or may not have played in facilitating the resettlement experiences of Chinese-Vietnamese refugees living in Canada after the Vietnam War. It was observed that those who were privately-sponsored emphasized the instrumental role their benefactors played in assisting their successful resettlement, whereas those who were government-sponsored were forced to adopt a more independent mindset of forming their own social support systems. Regardless of sponsorship type, the notion of hard work was a commonality found amongst the participants. They arrived at the receiving country expecting and willing to accept conditions of underemployment and downward mobility. The effects of pre-migration enabling factors such as marital status and educational attainment are also acknowledged. Within a social support framework, theories of social capital and resiliency are used to analyze the lives of the participants after the traumatic experience of forced migration.

Keywords: Chinese-Vietnamese refugees, resettlement, Canada, social support network, resiliency theory

The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions is an ethnographic study of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon through an immersion in daily home life. Perla Issa asks how political factions remain the center of political life in the Palestinian camps in the face of mounting criticism. Through an examination of the daily, mundane practices of refugees in Nahr el-Bared camp in particular, this book shows how intimate, interpersonal, and kin-based relations are transformed into political networks and offers a fresh analysis of how those networks are in turn metamorphosed into political structures. By providing a detailed and intimate account of this process, this book reveals how factions are produced and reproduced in everyday life despite widespread condemnation.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has gained traction in humanitarian communication through its utopian promises of co-presence, experiential immediacy, and transcendence. I analyze three communication texts that engage with the Syrian refugee crisis. Two were made using immersive technology, while one is a traditional documentary. The paper argues that while VR brings new techniques of experiential immediacy to the practice of humanitarian communication, it also utilizes meaning-making codes in the simulations of other peoples and spaces. Therefore, VR remains subject to the operations of dominant ideologies. Comparing these artifacts, the paper demonstrates that although immersive technologies foreground the primacy of non-mediation, ignoring the structures of representation defangs the political possibilities of humanitarian communication.

Digital cultural assets are often thought to exist in separate spheres based on their two principal points of origin: digitized and born digital. Increasingly, advances in digital curation are blurring this dichotomy, by introducing so-called "collections as data," which regardless of their origination, make cultural assets more amenable to the application of new computational tools and methodologies. This paper brings together archivists, scholars, and technologists to demonstrate computational treatments of digital cultural assets using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques that can help unlock hard-to-reach archival content. It describes an extended, iterative study applied to digitized and datafied WWII-era records housed at the FDR Presidential Library, rich content that is regrettably under-utilized by scholars examining American responses to the Holocaust. Authors detail the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration for evaluating user needs, identifying and applying tools and methodologies (including ML through object detection and AI through Named Entity Recognition or NER), and reaching the real-world outcome of public access to augmented data. They also discuss issues of digital representation, relational context, and interface design in order to enable new modes of public and scholarly access. While based on a case study, we believe this work is a substantial contribution to revealing the strengths and weaknesses of using AI/ML systems in cultural organizations. We give particular care to lessons learned, and generalize the approach taken across broad classes of collections with a focus on responsive iterations, reproducibility, and the relevance of data and its structures to users.

Despite its inaccessibility (it remains untranslated and copies are hard to obtain), Vinigi Grottanelli’s Pescatori dell’Oceano indiano (1955) is generally agreed to be one of the best studies of a rural Swahili-speaking community. It’s our principal ethnographic source on the Bajuni (aka Gunya, aka Tikuu), whose traditional territory comprised a long string of coastal settlements and islands between Kismayu (Somalia) in the north and the Lamu archipelago (Kenya) in the south. And the political turmoil of recent decades in Somalia has turned it into a valuable historical document, a record of a way of life that for thousands of Bajuni has been shattered by persecution and conflict.

Σκοπός της παρούσας έρευνας είναι ο προσδιορισμός του προσφυγικού καταυλισμού ως εν δυνάμει αστικού χώρου, μέσω κριτικής θεώρησης του υφιστάμενου νομικού, τεχνητού, πολιτικού, φιλοσοφικού πλαισίου, των τακτικών και των εφαρμογών και τέλος η ανάδειξη του ρόλου του αρχιτέκτονα στον σχεδιασμό του.
Αρχικά δίνεται συνοπτικά ο ορισμός του «πρόσφυγα», τα αίτια προσφυγής, τα δικαιώματα ασύλου βάσει καταστατικών του ΟΗΕ, ιστορικά στοιχεία και το μέγεθος του προβλήματος στο σήμερα. Έπειτα, ορίζεται ο προσφυγικός καταυλισμός στο χώρο και στο χρόνο, επισημαίνονται οι ιδιαιτερότητες και τα προβλήματα σε επίπεδο σχεδιασμού, λειτουργίας και διαχείρισης, ενώ επιχειρείται μια φιλοσοφική προσέγγιση στην ανάγνωση του χώρου, στις σχέσεις εξουσίας και στις υπερβάσεις που γεννά. Ακολούθως, τεκμηριώνονται οι σχεδιαστικές πρακτικές βάσει των εγχειριδίων διάφορων ανθρωπιστικών οργανώσεων και παράλληλα ορίζεται το πλαίσιο διαχείρισης και λειτουργίας καθώς και οι δυνατότητες συμμετοχής των ίδιων των χρηστών σε αυτές. Αναπτύσσεται επομένως ο προβληματισμός σχετικά με τη δυνατότητα θεώρησης ενός προσφυγικού καταυλισμού ως αστική δομή, μέσω παραδειγμάτων εφαρμογής αλλά και αναζήτησης των χωρικών προτύπων. Τέλος τίθεται ο προβληματισμός σχετικά με το ρόλο του αρχιτέκτονα-πολεοδόμου στο σχεδιασμό ενός καταυλισμού και τη δυναμική του σχεδίου στη διαμόρφωση των κοινωνικών, πολιτικών και οικονομικών σχέσεων μέσα σε αυτόν τον ιδιαίτερα περίπλοκο και φορτισμένο χώρο.

Of identities, of experiences, of struggle: Manoranjan Byapari's book, "Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit", translated by Sipra Mukherjee from Bengali, despite being an engrossing read, is not an easy book to review.
First published in print in National Herald On Sunday, dated 08-April-2018.
This review may be read online, here:
https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/reviews-recommendations/a-dalit-writers-journey-of-multiple-identities-and-struggles

This paper analyses the Syrian displacement crisis within the context of contemporary forced migration theory and assesses its impact on the region. The Syrian revolt has over the past three years escalated into a massive humanitarian crisis with regional implications. The crisis is consistent with (global) panel data surveys demonstrating the robust link between violence and displacement. With no diplomatic or military solution in sight the civil war will continue. The refugee crises will therefore expand too, with Lebanon a favoured destination for many due the privileged access afforded to Syrian nationals. If the Assad regime is defeated, a new refugee crisis will fan out across the region with dire consequences for regional stability.

Civil War in Syria created a large scale humanitarian crisis causing a mass human migration up to seven million in total. The largest neighboring country-Turkey has the greatest number of Syrian refugees exceeding 2.7 million. In the expectation of a quick resolution for the conflict and sending the immigrants back, the host country has taken only palliative temporary actions. This study investigates the options that Turkey has for the immigration problem. Elaborating on integration techniques for immigrants, the paper suggests possible policies for implementation of social integration in the future decades. Based on strategic management principles, the author presents advantages and disadvantages of integration, maintenance of status quo, and prevention of immigration.

Feyza Macit ve Durnev Atılgan Yağan. “Remaking of Home by Syrian Refugees in Kilis Elbeyli Refugee Camp” (Vaudetti M., Minucciani, V., Canepa, S., Onay, N. ed. Suspended Living in Temporary Space, Emergencies in the Mediterranean Region, içinde) 2018, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa, Italy. s.153-168 (978-88-6242-252-9 ISBN).

This research is the story of remaking of home by Syrian refugees after their experience of displacement, loss of home and resettlement. Kilis Elbeyli Refugee Camp is located on the SouthEastern Anatolia, Turkey, five kilometers to the Syrian border. The camp is composed of 3600 container houses and with more than 20,000 refugees living by 2017. Stepping into its fifth year of establishment, the temporariness of the camp is now questionable and the standard container houses had started to evolve into homes. The processes of constructing a place and remaking of home is both construct of a mind and material. Through a site visit and interviews that had been carried out in the camp material and immaterial evidences of this possibility of rebuilding home that has been lost has been sought for. Through the study of changes, variations and interventions in the spatial configurations of the container houses and of re-established and restored meanings of what home is, this research aims, to understand the process of remaking of the home by Syrian refugees both in theoretical and practical context. The results of the observations of the transformation of container houses are evaluated in terms of programmatic, environmental and cultural performances in order to understand certain general recurring topics within cultural and global indications of home making for future camp design.

European refugee camps are postcolonial entities. By discussing the postcolonial nature of informal refugee camps in Europe, we highlight how race, othering, and empire continue to underpin the logics of contemporary border politics. Reflecting on research in the Calais migrant encampment, nicknamed the ‘jungle’, we suggest that the invocation of biopolitics, bare life, and citizenship - at the expense of postcolonial thinking - may inadvertently diminish the role that racism plays in constructing the camp. An excavation of the ideological and material linkages that tie colonial histories with contemporary border governance is key to understanding Europe’s shifting constellation of camps, and the racial politics that underpins them. Drawing on necropolitical theory and dovetailing with recent calls within geography to forward postcolonial approaches, we call on critical geographers and migration scholars to incorporate the legacies of imperialism in their analysis of the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’.

Based on a critical analysis of the two notions of “crisis” and “compassion,” this article outlines and problematizes the increasing engagement of design practices with refugees and vulnerable communities on the move. By contextualizing different historical and contemporary humanitarian design examples in an analysis of current European border politics, the article questions the ways in which designing in the aftermath of the so-called “refugee crisis” has been mobilized without due consideration of what types of politics it produces and what types of politics it eventually ignores. It suggests that designers instead need to develop a more political understanding of the current border regime that produces and regulates refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants worldwide and to think of practices that support the struggles of racialized people on the move in transgressing and questioning the borders.

This study of refugee resettlement contributes a novel conceptual framework to the sociology of forced migration. Drawing on interviews with Syrian refugees in their first year of resettlement in Ontario, Canada, we demonstrate how successful sponsorship counters the “non-person” status associated with refugee recognition. During displacement refugees mobilize their pre-conflict roles to secure self-rescue against forces of conflict. During resettlement refugees assert their eligibility to exist and authority to act as “persons” in a reception context that challenges the normative authority of their pre-conflict social roles. Refugee-host interactions that affirm pre-conflict social roles provide the basis for shared trust and enhance the experience of resettlement, confirming statuses which counter the structural violence of refugee role confinement.

(request paper from author or follow link and download from Social Forces homepage)

Bangladesh is facing a severe crisis regarding the Rohingya refugees. This paper is a reflection of a theoretical ground to see whether they are involved in several protracted conflicts or may cause any insurgency. This is an analysis from the academic perspective.

This article aims to understand the main principles that design a worldwide landscape of precarious spaces. I argue that the increasing and more constraining policies of exclusion provoke the repeated creation of limits and ‘outsides’and that this represents a major aspect of contemporary urban and world governance. Contemporary ‘out-places’[‘hors-lieux’] or concrete ‘heterotopias’(Foucault) are
linked to one another by policies of exclusion, organisation and control, subjective experiences, and routes.
The formation and proliferation of heterotopias as an ensemble of margins and precarious spaces, turn visible as a global political fact the question of (in)equality.

Sexual and Gender-Based Violence is a manifestation of a power relation and it takes place in every society (although in different forms, with different levels of violence, some more subtle than others). Unfortunately, it is a timeless violence, since it has been going on for milleniums. This Phd research project focuses mainly on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in refugee camps. There are five phases of the refugee cycle according to the UNHCR and in all those phases there are reports of SGBV. Refugee camps are especially vulnerable sites that increase multilevel power relations that may, and
often do, create the «perfect» setting for Sexual and Gender-Based Violence to take place. Hence, this Phd research will focus on this particularly phase of the refugee cycle. This PhD research, also intends to debate on the best way to address these cases whilst ensuring access to justice to Sexual and Gender-Based Violence survivors.

Klappentext des Sammelbandes: "Im Jahr 2015 erreichte eine Flüchtlingsbewegung ungeahnten Ausmaßes Österreich. Rund 300.000 Schutz­ suchende überquerten innerhalb weniger Monate die Grenze zwischen Ungarn und dem Burgenland – der Großteil davon in Nickelsdorf.
Das Rote Kreuz unterstützte die Polizei bei der humanitä­ren Bewältigung dieser Herausforderung. Eine Welle der Hilfsbereitschaft  kam insbesondere auch aus der Zivilbe­völkerung.
Dieses Buch soll an diese Zeit erinnern und den Helfer­innen und Helfern eine Stimme geben, um über ihre Erleb­nisse zu berichten."