Categories,Refugee Camps,and the Governance of De-Territorialized Bodies

Introduction

Encampment has become the standard arrangement to accommodate refugees in many host countries around the world notwithstanding the protracted and sometimes intermittent and cyclic nature of most of the conflicts, which has resulted in generations of refugees failing to repatriate. Camps have become a recognizable feature of refugee hosting in the Global South with the categorization of refugees as de-territorialized bodies warranting institution of measures and mechanisms of containment (Jaji, 2012). Camps have also proliferated in countries in the Global North where encampment contradicts the idea of countries in this region being citadels of human rights and democracy—a paradox that has resulted in the use of euphemisms in reference to arrangements that essentially reflect refugee encampment. In this article, we use the term refugee camp or encampment to refer to the spectrum of spatial arrangements meant to contain refugees. Following Zetter’s (1991) argument that labeling functions as a tool for inclusion, exclusion, stereotyping, control, and formation of political identity, we discuss the rationale for categorization within the nation-state configuration and, more specifically, the resultant casting of refugees as disruptive of the normative and presumably orderly. We also address how categorizations that portray refugees and citizens in antithetical terms, especially in protracted situations, have perpetuated the fallacy that refugees are transient. Although there are instances where refugees have repatriated, locally integrated, or resettled in a third country, the idea of transience sustains and perpetuates refugee camps as a governance mechanism deemed appropriate for “waiting,” especially in contexts where displacement is conflated with insecurity or danger and an economic burden—a situation that renders many host governments reluctant to implement local integration. Without necessarily reducing contemporary refugees to stateless and rightless victims in ways that are reminiscent of Arendt’s (1976) work, we concur nonetheless that encampment was designed as the “solution” to the problem of accommodation and residence for people detached from the country of citizenship.

Having discussed the logic of encampment, we discuss how refugees’ lived realities transcend the mobile/immobile, forced/voluntary, emplaced/displaced, and refugee/citizen binaries by blending them and rendering unstable classificatory boundaries in the study of migration and refugees. In this respect, we challenge the reification of encampment and the sustained depiction of refugee camps as spaces of desolation, stagnation, and uncertainty. We highlight reclamation and performance of the very subjectivities that encampment seeks to stifle in the refugee category. These subjectivities provide insights into possibilities that not only contradict the victim label tagged onto refugees but also necessitate critiquing assumptions and normative interpretations of categories in human mobility. Refugees’ subjectivities have the potential to transform the regions where refugee camps are located from underdeveloped hinterlands to economic hubs that benefit both refugees and citizens, thus challenging the idea of dependent helpless victims or agents of insecurity who pose a threat to the host country and its citizens. We thus critique the idea of refugees as “bare life” (Agamben, 1998) in contrast to other categories of migrants. We concur with Bradley (2014), who cautions against inadvertently undermining refugees’ rights and claims in the country of origin and with Singh (2020), who demonstrates refugees’ political agency in camp settings. We focus on encamped refugees in protracted situations and argue that refugees mediate encampment in ways that subvert its intended objective and transform refugees’ visibility as objects of humanitarianism to visibility with agency. We take into cognizance refugees’ varied circumstances as they are influenced by social class and economic and cultural capital. We accordingly situate this article within the growing body of literature challenging normative, essentializing, and pathologizing interpretations of categories such as refugees and encampment. Instead of either reifying encampment or romanticizing agency, we demonstrate how the two mediate each other such that the endurance of encampment is counteracted by refugees’ subversion of its fundamental goal to keep them in a state waiting. We present in this article theoretical reflections emanating from years of research with refugees in varied encampment arrangements in countries such as Germany, Greece, Kenya, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

Protracted situations and transience as fallacy

Many violent conflicts and other causes of forced migration tend to take time to resolve such that many refugees are unable to voluntarily return to their countries of origin. The resolution of the reasons for flight does not necessarily lead to voluntary repatriation due to a wide array of reasons. Some of the refugees would have lived for many years in the host country to contemplate returning to the country of origin where they may not have a home anymore to return to. There are also refugees who fled when they were too young to remember much, if anything, about the country or area of origin and children born in the host country and who may not have emotional attachment to the country of origin. Generations of refugees have lived in refugee camps and transformed them from temporary accommodation to long-term features of the regions where the camps are located.

For instance, Palestinian refugees in the Middle East have lived for generations in refugee camps due to endurance of the conflict that forced them out of their homes. In Africa, Somalis have lived in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp for more than three decades. No sooner had southern Sudan seceded from northern Sudan to form Africa’s youngest country of South Sudan that civil war erupted in this new country forcing voluntarily repatriated refugees back into exile and many more among those who had stayed on during the pre-secession war to flee. Kenya’s hope that it could now close Kakuma refugee camp whose inhabitants are predominantly South Sudanese had barely blossomed when the camp saw an influx of the same refugees. Rohingya refugees from Myanmar remain trapped in a stateless limbo in Kutupalong and Nayapara refugee camps in Cox Bazaar District in Bangladesh, away from a country that rejects their claim to citizenship. Voluntary repatriation of Syrian refugees encamped in countries such as Jordan remains uncertain. Palestinians, Somalis, South Sudanese, Rohingya, and, in recent years, Syrians’ presence in host countries has morphed or is morphing into a state of permanent transience. It remains to be seen whether the ongoing conflict in Sudan, which started in April 2023, will end soon so that Sudanese refugees can return to their country and another protracted situation is averted.

The three durable solutions, namely, voluntary repatriation, local integration, and third country resettlement have not been readily available to many of these refugees. Even with current movements to the Global North, millions of refugees remain in the Global South mainly in refugee camps scattered across this disparate part of the world. According to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), as of 2023, 9 out of 10 or 75% of the world’s refugee population and other people in need of international protection were hosted in the Global South. ¹ Ninety-six percent of people who are forcibly displaced in Africa are hosted in neighboring countries on the continent. ² Protracted situations and cyclic violent conflicts have led to refugee camps becoming a constant feature of the landscape in many host countries that pursue refugee encampment. Although there is ample evidence showing that very few refugees have been able to repatriate as soon as expected, refugee policies in many parts of the world continue to designate camps as the suitable spaces for refugee residence.

In the nation-state framework which “privileg[es] [. . . ] the citizen/nation/state ensemble as the hierarchical imperative to life activities” (Soguk, 1999: 18), refugee camps are an anomaly whose existence is tolerated because camps are considered to be temporary and appropriate for a population categorized as equally anomalous and ostensibly transient. Underpinning refugee encampment within the nation-state framework is demarcation of space and corporeal management of “outcasts” of the nation-state. Refugee camps are premised on the counter-position of citizen, emplaced, and sedentary to non-citizen, displaced, and mobile. This binary depiction of categories legitimizes the subjection of the people belonging to them to separate governance apparatuses visible in containment in camps of refugees as the non-normative category. In this logic, camps are designed for temporary habitation with the view that conflicts that generated the refugees will be short-lived and that refugees will rejoin the nation-state norm and the citizens category through repatriation.

In many camps, refugees’ presumed transience is reflected by accommodation in temporary shelters, such as tarpaulin, as opposed to durable housing. Refugee camps are constructed with destruction in mind, premised on ostensible temporariness and the idea that the nation-state is the normal configuration for access to and the exercise of rights. Refugees exist outside the normalcy created around the nation-state whose physical boundaries demarcate the state of belonging inside them from the state of not belonging. Refugees as a population, which is present where it ostensibly does not belong, are considered by both the humanitarian regime and host countries as undesirable and transient. In this scheme of things, camps become the “appropriate” spaces to contain refugees as “non-citizens.” The endurance and transformation over time of refugee camps from spaces for waiting to homes where people live constitute the essence of what is termed here the transiency fallacy. Notwithstanding this fallacy, many countries that host refugees in protracted situations continue to champion (in)voluntary repatriation or refugees’ re-establishment of physical, political, and legal bonds with the national community through “return to the status quo ante” (Soguk, 1999: 35; Salvatici, 2019).

Transformation of refugee camps into permanent features of host countries and refugees’ self-settlement in spaces outside the camps suggest the need to reconsider the idea of transience that many host countries cite to rationalize the temporary and exclusionary character of refugee camps. It also challenges the equation of refugee status to the idea of burdening host countries and dependence on charity. Critiquing assumptions embedded in the category refugees does not only provide structural and institutional support to refugees’ quest to lead normal lives but also benefits host countries through additional skills and tax revenue. Acknowledging that refugees may spend their lifetimes or live for generations in the camps requires humanitarianism to go beyond the bare minimum of providing security and food rations to embracing policies that prioritize overall wellbeing rather than governance and policing of refugees.

In contrast to the idea of transience, which persists in many host countries despite the fact that many of the cases involved have turned out to be protracted situations, a more realistic assessment of encampment and efforts to normalize life in refugee camps is beneficial to the often-underdeveloped regions where refugee camps are usually located. For example, host countries’ insistence that refugees are ephemeral has led to massive environmental degradation in and around many refugee camps. This is exemplified by the burned down Moria surrounded by the so-called “olive grove” on Lesvos at one of the European Union’s (EU’s) external borders and many others in the Global South because of refugees’ dependence on the natural environment for firewood and poles to construct shelters. Acknowledging the likelihood of camps existing for longer periods than expected can lead to policies that ensure sustainability considering refugees’ dependence on the natural environment. For instance, such policies would encourage them to plant trees in the camps, which would still benefit the host country’s environmental conservation efforts in the event of repatriation. Indeed, some refugees take the initiative and plant trees even without active support and encouragement from the host country. Planting trees is a powerful symbol of refugees gradually planting their roots in the host country and blurring the dividing line between the emplaced and displaced.

The politics of space and the state of not belonging

What Agamben (1998) refers to as the trinity between the nation, state, and land, compartmentalizes people into specific territorial spaces such that to leave such spaces is akin to infringing on the integrity of categories such as sovereignty, nationhood, and citizenship. The norm is a presumed state of equilibrium within the trinity, although the very conflicts that generate refugees suggest otherwise and demonstrate that the trinity occasionally experiences internal discord. This becomes evident when violent conflicts occur and turn countries into enclaves of unconventionality ejecting citizens to spaces beyond their borders in search of refuge. The trinity, or what Malkki (1995) refers to as “the national order of things,” has political and juridical connotations that become manifest in the governance of human mobility and, more specifically, regimes of refugee hosting. The politics of space thrives on categorizations that determine who goes where, how, as well as under what circumstances, name, and status. The dissection of mobility into varied categories warranting different governance mechanisms subjects people on the move to a wide range of migration apparatuses that determine the terms under which they enter or are denied entry into the prospective destination country.

For example, categorization of mobile people into different groups such as economic migrants and refugees necessitates channeling of people into different spaces. Economic migrants need to meet specific requirements that legitimize their residence among citizens while refugees undergo the process of status determination, which culminates in either humanitarianized residence among citizens or accommodation in refugee camps where host countries pursue encampment policies. Without the requisite travel documents, the “abnormal” circumstances under which refugees travel subject them to questioning, which results in either refoulement or granting of refugee status and documents. Both refugees and migrants are scrutinized, but these categorizations result in refugees undergoing refugee status determination whereas migrants submit to immigration requirements such as valid travel documents and visa regimes. These processes signify what Boedeltje (2012) refers to as “rituals of purification” (see also Douglas, 2001). The nation-state’s reaction to refugee movements and plans on how to host them are necessarily intended to conform to and maintain the “national order of things” (Malkki, 1995). Host countries accordingly seek to contain refugees as the embodiment of the state of deviance in camps that are equated to “heterotopias of deviation” away from “normal” spaces inhabited by citizens (Boedeltje, 2012; Foucault, 1986). The boundary between countries at peace on one hand and countries at war on the other is reproduced through separation of refugees from citizens through containment policies epitomized by refugee camps. Although camps are physically part of the host countries, the latter are not part of the former in a juridical and political sense. In this regard, refugee camps are a microcosm of the deviant character of refugees’ countries of origin and they therefore warrant a special form of governance falling outside the customary jurisdiction of the state (Turner, 2005).

Proximity of the camps to international borders in many host countries functions as a physical barrier aimed at dissuading refugees from moving into spaces designated for citizens. The Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are accommodated in Bangladesh close to the border with their country of origin and on the island of Bashan Char. Zaatari refugee camp for Syrian refugees is at the edge of the desert close to the Jordan–Syria border. The refugee camp for Syrian refugees in Yayladagi, Turkey is close to the border with Syria, while the camp in Atmeh is on the Syrian side of the same border. The European so-called “Hot Spots” are mainly located alongside the migration routes for Syrians, Afghans, and Africans on the move and hence close to the Greek, Italian, and Spanish borders, with prison-like control systems being established. In many instances, location of the camps close to the border is coupled with long distances between the camps and the metropolises of the host countries. For example, Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, which predominantly accommodates refugees from Somalia, is 80 km from the Kenya–Somalia border and 500 km from Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, while Kakuma refugee camp, which predominantly hosts South Sudanese refugees, is 95 km from the Kenya–South Sudan border and 1000 km from Nairobi (Jaji, 2012).

Location of refugee camps in border regions or on an island or the use of geographical and aquatic barriers as shown above makes repatriation easier and also reinforces the separation of refugees from citizens. In this sense, refugee camps are designed to police, control, and confine refugee bodies through curtailment of freedom of movement and association outside camp perimeters (Jaji, 2012). Encampment can be equated to what Douglas (2001: 97) refers to as “rituals of segregation.” In the same way that initiands “die to their old life and are reborn to the new” (Douglas, 2001: 97), camps are similarly intended to transform refugees from citizens to a vulnerable population whose political rights are, in many instances, suspended until they can re-enter the normalized state of belonging to the nation-state. For example, encamped refugees cannot participate in the host country’s political processes as candidates for political office or voters. Their re-entry into “normalcy” is mainly through repatriation considering that the camps themselves are meant to deter local integration. This is reminiscent of Douglas’ (2001) study of initiands and how they are separated from the broader community until rituals of re-entry have been performed. Containment of refugees in camps can thus be said to reflect the national community’s self-definition by exclusion of people who, in the words of Comaroff and Comaroff (2005: 121), are categorized as falling outside “the received order of things.”

The categorization of people into those who belong and those who do not to the nation-state, respectively, symbolized by citizens and refugees, accounts for securitization of refugees evident in how crime, terrorism, and social ills are blamed on those cast as outsiders leading to policies tailored to block the perceived threat (Balzacq, 2011; Bello, 2022; Juma and Kagwanja, 2003; Léonard and Kaunert, 2022). The state of not belonging takes the form of conspicuousness of that which is construed as different in territorial spaces where this difference presumably does not belong, for example, where difference is categorized in racial, ethnic, and even religious terms. In many host countries where anti-refugee or anti-immigrant sentiments are high, the presence of difference represented by non-citizenship is seen as signaling transplantation of danger and other social ills from countries experiencing chaos to those in a state of peace or, to borrow from Boedeltje (2012), from spaces that are depicted as “deviant” to those that are viewed as “normal.” Securitization of refugees is sustained by the tendency to interpret mobility or uprootedness as antithetical to the “normalcy” associated with immobility and rootedness (Schapendonk et al., 2021). This perception of mobility and displacement as anomalous is sustained, in the words of Comaroff and Comaroff (2005: 128), by “the proclivity of citizens of all stripes to deflect shared anxieties onto outsiders.” In this respect, the logic of refugee camps, in its simplified sense, is to contain “dangerous outsiders.”

Governance and (de)-politicization of refugees

Refugees are an outcome of the condition within the nation-state configuration as it is expressed in the politics of citizenship (Zhang, 2014). Politicization or de-politicization of refugees varies with historical period, national interest, identity politics, regional geopolitics, unequal power relationships, and injustice. The politicization of refugees can focus on these matters in which case refugees become both a humanitarian and political category (Agier et al., 2002; Jaji, 2022; Olivius, 2017). African refugees who fled colonial violence and armed resistance to colonialism were highly politicized and bestowed with political subjectivity in their host countries where refugee camps were both centers for humanitarianism and hives of political activity. This is in contrast to post-independence African refugees who have been reduced simply to an apolitical, social, and humanitarian category for equally political reasons. The various cases in which refugees are politicized or de-politicized illustrate how host countries can interpret refugee hosting as an opportunity to pursue national and regional geopolitical interests. Jaji (2022) offers a more comprehensive discussion of the rationale for politicization and de-politicization of African refugees in different historical periods on the continent in ways that blur the boundary between the political and apolitical categorization.

Palestinian refugees in camps in Lebanon are a historically politicized refugee population whose political subjectivity is tied to dispossession and injustice. Politicization, which is framed around innocence and vulnerability and strongly embedded in Western social work practice, seems to organically lead to a parallel search for guilt and hence, deviance, criminalization, and compliance with the control apparatus associated with these terms (Kleibl and Xypolytas, 2022). Innocence then works as part of a binary, in which guilt is its necessary other. Currently, the warm European welcome extended to Ukrainian refugees is in sharp contrast to the criminalized arrival of Afghan refugees. In this context, using Spivak’s (2004: 563) words, the categories labor migrants and refugees are treated in terms of their difference, or of “the discontinuous divide between those who right wrongs and those who are wronged.” Looking at this exclusionary system, the question is whether humanitarianism provides space for people who are neither innocent nor guilty, neither victims nor heroes or, in other words, if the system produces victims, passivity, and people unable to care for themselves (Ticktin, 2016). However, innocence and injustice as implied in denial of citizenship and the resultant statelessness of the refugee population in question do not always lead to a politics of solidarity but to a politics of exclusion due to diffusion of responsibility among host countries. For example, the fate of Rohingya refugees hangs in the balance due to reluctance by host countries in the region to commit to the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol (Ahsan Ullah, 2016). Even when the injustice is acknowledged, no one seems to be ready to grant citizenship to this refugee population and thus offer them a lasting solution.

In many other instances, refugee camps seek to de-politicize the space within their perimeters drawing from the preamble of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which presents the “problem of refugees” as having a “social and humanitarian nature.” To this end, camps generally discourage political activity among refugees with those who refuse or fail to embrace the apolitical refugee profile living with the threat of various sanctions that include refoulement (Jaji, 2012, 2022). De-politicization of refugees and camp life is observable in various countries and has been noted in Mishamo refugee camp in Tanzania (Malkki, 1997), Lukole refugee camp in Tanzania (Turner, 2005), Meheba refugee camp in Zambia (Inhetveen, 2006), and Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in Kenya (Jaji, 2012).

A couple of issues can be highlighted regarding de-politicization of refugees. First, filtering out political subjectivity from refugees and reducing them to “bare life” (Agamben, 1998) or “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1977) facilitates easier management of refugees. This is achieved through enabling of camp administrators and humanitarian agencies to “exert a caring biopower” (Turner, 2005: 313) or to control refugees through the arrangements built into the humanitarian apparatus obtaining in the camps, for example, registration, headcounts, and asking for permission to leave the camp. This humanitarian approach, predominantly in the Global South, coexists with criminalization in European countries where detention centers take the character of prisons that are controlled by police or private security companies (Ticktin, 2016). In line with the nation-state, camps are characterized by colonial governmentality (Turner, 2006). Refugee camp or detention centers in countries such as Germany are created for specific categories of people on the move, whose non-conformity to national identity subjects them to a biopolitics designed for non-membership in the state (Zeveleva, 2017). In this train of thought, spatial segregation symbolizes the chasm between the non-democratic represented by people on the move and the democratic spaces to which they move (Zaviršek, 2017). It is a regression to the old colonial system of divide et impera that finds its roots in colonial governance.

Second, de-politicization reflects separation of humanitarianism from politics by treating political activity as incompatible with the refugee status. This is consistent with the differential treatment of citizens and refugees in which the political rights extended to the former are suspended from the latter in a process whereby the rights of refugees end where those of citizens begin. The humanitarian regime is premised on transformation of refugees into people without political subjectivity or, in the words of Turner (2005: 314), “innocent victims without a political past.” The efficacy of encampment as a fundamental aspect of the governance of a de-territorialized and presumably aberrant category of people lies in its separation of the displaced and mobile from the emplaced and sedentary and corresponding detachment of refugees’ mobility and physical presence from belonging. As much as refugees are physically present in the host country, they remain outsiders and their circumstances are unique in comparison not only to citizens but also to other categories of mobile populations.

For example, while the category of people referred to as economic migrants is deemed voluntary and excluded from international humanitarian protection, refugees are categorized as forced migrants deserving protection under international humanitarian law. In line with this distinction, refugee camps represent the sociocultural, political, and juridical boundaries between refugees and other categories of migrants as well as between refugees and citizens. The irony of such a distinction is that refugees who are unable to return to their countries of origin end up with limited rights in refugee camps despite the international protection extended to them. This is in contrast to the fact that the so-called voluntary migrants who can return to their countries of origin are in a better position to integrate than refugees most of whom remain encamped, notwithstanding that many are unable to repatriate. For example, as some migrants returned to their countries of origin in response to loss of employment triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, this option was not readily available to refugees due to security concerns. Situated within this broader context of the political economy of categorization, refugee camps seek to curtail a kind of selfhood normalized among other categories but deemed anomalous for refugees. The distinction between forced and voluntary migrants persists even when the lived realities of mobile populations blur the dividing line between these categories (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018).

Normalization of an aberration

Although host countries continue to insist that refugee camps are temporary, camps are morphing into a permanent feature of host countries’ landscapes. Over time, the arrival of more refugees instead of repatriation or resettlement in a third country and the birth of children to the refugees has increased the number of refugees. At the emergency phase, many refugees arrive with the same view as the host country that their stay will be temporary. However, as many refugees have stayed for longer periods than initially envisaged, refugee camps have transformed from spaces where “everything is potential but nothing develops” (Agier et al., 2002: 336) to permanent settlements and flourishing centers of economic activity. As the violent conflicts that led to flight drag on, refugees come to the realization that the uncertainty surrounding repatriation means living in a state of perpetual waiting and unpredictability. This encourages the refugees to find ways to normalize their lives in the camps. In discussing refugees’ capacity to transform their lives within the camp, we caution against romanticization. Refugees are not homogeneous and live in varied material circumstances that are mediated by individual resources in which social class and possession of various forms of capital play a role. Interventions are still indispensable for refugees living in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Instead of repeating the conditions of deprivation that have been comprehensively addressed in the literature, we seek to make a contribution in this section to refugee initiatives in transforming the camps to homes where the refugees are economically, socially, and even politically active.

Refugees’ subversion of the script of temporariness demonstrates a quest to normalize life, especially at a time when encampment coincides with dwindling donor funding and voluntary repatriation appears to be a distant if not unlikely solution. The gap between the idea of transience and the refugees’ quest to transition from waiting to living their lives is evident in how refugees are tethering themselves to the host country regardless of the official policy of encampment. The formal encampment policy coexists with a refugee-initiated informal process of integration (Muhumad and Jaji, 2023). Normalcy is regained through re-establishment of personal autonomy within and outside camp governance and subversion of the apolitical and vulnerable refugee profile through reclamation of political and economic subjectivity. As soon as they come to terms with being forced out of their homes and countries, many refugees with the means resume their pre-flight economic activities and, where possible, look for new opportunities within the camp and work hard as entrepreneurs (Kachkar, 2019). In contrast to the customary image of desolation the name “refugee camp” invokes, many refugees endeavor to make the camps spaces where dreams are nurtured and realized. They seek to wean themselves from humanitarian aid which they find humiliating (Harrell-Bond, 1999).

Instead of wallowing in the misery of being caught up in the uncertainty that indefinite stay in the camps entail, many refugees adapt to their new circumstances and deploy forms of capital at their disposal. In the process, they transform spaces originally designed for irregularity and waiting into normalcy and permanence symbolically reflected by the morphing of temporary structures (tarpaulin) into durable shelter (brick houses, caravans, or shipment containers). Interestingly, the economic hierarchies or classes distinguishing those who have economic and social capital from those who do not can emerge in the camp in defiance of the homogenizing humanitarian discourse. As the refugees establish parallel education systems and alternative food markets, the camps become home. In refugee camps along the Myanmar–Thailand border, for example, refugees come up with a different perspective of the camps to which they transpose an urban configuration by building churches and schools (Sharples, 2016). Even as host governments continue to regard refugees as “matter out of place” (Malkki, 1995) and therefore dangerous to the order created around the territorial, sedentary, and conventional, the paradox of encampment is that refugees have become re-territorialized, although unofficially, in a governance system designed to keep them de-territorialized. It is thus important to consider how refugees actually live in the camp instead of merely focusing on how camps are conceived (Singh, 2020).

Some refugee situations have existed for a long time such that the refugees have found ways to get back on their feet and even take advantage of economic opportunities in the usually marginalized regions that host them. In Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, Syrian refugee entrepreneurs provide services in the camp and their markets extend to Jordanian cities. This has turned the camp into a thriving commercial center and an informal city despite the Jordanian government’s position that the camp is temporary (Aburamadan et al., 2020). While entrepreneurship appears to be associated with Syrian refugees as opposed to African refugees in what Turner (2020) presents as anti-black racism in contemporary humanitarianism, many refugee camps in African contexts are hives of entrepreneurship. In Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, refugees’ economic activities have impacted on the surrounding areas in ways that challenge the encampment model and demonstrate refugees’ socioeconomic potential (Jansen and de Bruijne, 2020). Refugees are turning the arid and dusty hinterlands of host countries such as Kenya and Jordan into pseudo towns and cities with thriving economies that are often linked to the host country economy especially the areas surrounding the camps (Dalal, 2022; de la Chaux and Haugh, 2020; Muhumad and Jaji, 2023). For example, Somali refugees in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya have taken advantage of the social ties with the host communities and the informal structures they present to engage in business and foster economic and social integration (Muhumad and Jaji, 2023). Other examples come from Beddawi refugee camp where refugees from different national backgrounds engaged in mutual assistance and solidarity initiatives during COVID-19 (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). Protracted situations have also resulted in established diasporas mostly in the Global North that have become a source of social and economic capital through remittances. Remittances render questionable in economic terms the difference between refugees and other migrants who send them. Similarly, refugees who receive these remittances find themselves in the same economic bracket as citizens in the host country who rely on the same source of income.

Similarly, refugees’ relocation and self-settlement in urban and rural areas outside the camps symbolize agency and permanence and thus defy the temporariness that the camps are intended to represent (see Jacobsen et al., 2020). The irony is that host countries inadvertently encourage the very self-settlement refugee encampment seeks to deter by making the camps unattractive to refugees. Self-settlement enables refugees to escape the constraints that encampment imposes on their lives especially on freedom of movement and the right to work. Outside the camps, refugees seek employment and reclaim the political subjectivities that are restricted by camp governance. The entrepreneurship observable in refugee camps is transferred to the towns and cities to which refugees relocate as illustrated by the thriving businesses run by Somalis in Eastleigh, Nairobi in Kenya (Campbell, 2006). Outside the camps, refugees establish social bonds with citizens through marriage which clouds the conceptual clarity between the refugee status and the status of people in marriage migration. Even as refugee camps remain the hallmark of refugee hosting in many countries in the Global South that host huge numbers of refugees, there are significant numbers of refugees in the cities and towns whose presence there in most cases defies the official refugee policy hinged upon encampment. Defiance of encampment is thus about self-representation in ways that demonstrate refugees’ capacity to take the initiative and transcend the mutual exclusivity in the categories refugees and citizens.

In cases where refugees have self-settled and in those of encampment, concern about security risks associated with allowing refugees to live among citizens or granting those in camps freedom of movement equally obscures opportunities to identify and address areas of mutual interest and benefit between refugees and the urban and rural poor whose circumstances equally need intervention. Assisting refugees in spaces inhabited by poor citizens, whether in self-settlement or camp settings, would necessitate collaboration between humanitarian agencies and host governments for the benefit of refugees and the poor citizens among whom they live. For example, this model was adopted in Kayole, on the outskirts of Nairobi where refugees and citizens identify areas of common interest such as sanitation, refuse collection, and environmental protection and work together to improve their living conditions. The location of refugee camps mostly in border regions is reflective of the marginalization of local communities living in these regions. The shared economic precarity not only challenges the citizen–refugee divide but also presents an opportunity for economic improvement and cooperation between them in marginalized communities hosting refugees (Muhumad and Jaji, 2023). Refugees facing exclusion would need solidarity-based interventions rather than complicity (Briskman, 2012), because this has seen many of them living in limbo-like circumstances for protracted periods. Providing in camps facilities and opportunities that currently draw refugees to spaces outside refugee camps where they self-settle against host government policy works in favor of host countries. An encampment regime that is more responsive to refugees’ needs would address the conundrum of how to protect refugees’ rights without raising fears of national security by reducing the numbers of refugees relocating to the villages, towns, and cities officially designated as citizens’ spaces.

Conclusion

Migration categories are generated in conformity to the nation-state’s sedentarist notions of normalcy in the governance of populations. These notions lead to varied relationships between different migrants and space in the host country. In this article, we highlighted migration categories mainly generated along the emplaced/displaced, voluntary/forced, and citizen/refugee binaries. We argued that refugees’ existence outside the nation-state’s governance norms results in encampment, which is intended to separate refugees as the displaced from citizens as the emplaced. The premise of encampment needs to be re-examined in view of how camps have transitioned from temporary spaces where refugees “wait” for repatriation to homes for the refugees. Without downplaying the challenges that refugees face in the camps, we highlight that long-term presence in the camps has led to refugees who possess the necessary social and economic capital investing in the goal to become self-reliant and transform the camps into homes.

Refugees also express political subjectivities in contrast to the apolitical refugee profile. Their political and economic subjectivities transform the state of de-territorialization into re-territorialization and camps from spaces of abnormality to spaces of normality. In the process, the refugees challenge the binary categorizations by engaging in economic activities, thus blurring the boundaries between victimhood and self-reliance as well as economic and forced migrants. Refugees’ “encroachment” into citizens’ spaces through self-settlement in defiance of encampment policies also blurs the dividing line between the two categories. Categories provide conceptual clarity which enables governments to formulate migration governance policies that include some and exclude others in line with the nation-state framework. However, categories are intricate and mutually inclusive in practice. It is important to consider how refugees’ agency, ingenuity, and self-initiatives have rendered fuzzy categories and muddied the classificatory waters in terms of how different migration categories are conceptualized and how this is contradicted by refugees’ lived experiences.