Informality and Protracted Statelessness: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Long-Term Refugee Camps

Abstract

Over the past two decades, scholarship analyzing long-term refugee camps in the Global South in terms of the social production of space has proliferated, as has statelessness around the world. A comprehensive review of this large body of scholarship is beyond the scope of this present work. Its goal, rather, is to trace continuities and shifts in the conceptual paradigms that have been deployed in this body of work, and to examine these changes in relation to shifts in local and global political economies. Early efforts to analyze the continued existence of spaces formally established as “temporary” responses to conflict, were initiated by anthropologists conducting fieldwork in Southeast Asia and East Africa. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on the exercise of power in modern states, this body of scholarship was preoccupied with the attempts of host-states and humanitarian aid organizations to discipline refugees within spaces of containment and surveillance, as well as refugees’ articulation of diasporic nationalism in response to these unequal relationships of power. With the securitization of (im)migration policy in the Global North as well as the Global South, concepts of “encampment” and “humanitarian government,” drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s critique of liberal democracies, have been deployed to highlight the difficult conditions within refugee camps, and to question the legitimacy of the authority with which they are administered. A shortcoming of these paradigms is a focus on the “political” to the exclusion of the “economic.” Drawing on long-term fieldwork conducted in Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a different conceptual framework is proposed which seeks to locate the histories of particular refugee camps within changing local and global political economies.

Keywords

• Refugee camps
• Informality
• Statelessness
• Refugee camps
• Informality
• Statelessness

Formal Exclusion/Informal Inclusion: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Long-Term Refugee Camps

Abstract

This essay traces conceptual shifts in ethnographic analyses of long-term refugee camps. Earlier studies analyzing long-term refugee camps formally established as “temporary” responses to conflict drew on Foucault’s theorization of the exercise of power in modern states. This literature focused on the attempts of host-states and humanitarian aid organizations to discipline refugees within spaces of containment and surveillance, as well as refugees’ articulation of diasporic nationalism in response to these unequal relationships of power. With the securitization of (im)migration policy in the Global North as well as Global South, researchers have deployed the concepts of “encampment” and “humanitarian government,” drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s critique of liberal democracies, to highlight the difficult conditions within refugee camps, and question the legitimacy of the authority with which they are administered. A shortcoming of these paradigms is a focus on the “political” to the exclusion of the “economic.” Drawing on long-term fieldwork conducted in the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a different conceptual framework is proposed which examines social relationships within particular refugee camps in light of their historically shifting location within local and global political economies.

Keywords

• Refugee camps
• Informality
• Statelessness

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