Between War and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps

Abstract

Two elements constitute a new category of world population, that of 50 million displaced persons and refugees: on the one hand, so-called `dirty' or `low-intensity' wars, with the endless exoduses, suffering and multiple losses they provoke; on the other, the humanitarian response that accompanies them very closely. The camps are both the emblem of the social condition created by the coupling of war with humanitarian action, the site where it is constructed in the most elaborate manner, as a life kept at a distance from the ordinary social and political world, and the experimentation of the large-scale segregations that are being established on a planetary scale. Created in a situation of emergency as a protective device intended to provide for the physical, food and health safety of all kinds of survivors and fugitives from wars, refugee camps agglomerate tens of thousands of inhabitants for periods that generally last far beyond the duration of the emergency. In this article, we describe and analyse camps as an urban ethnographic case. Social and cultural complexities emerge with the formation of the novel sociospatial form of `city-camps' in which new identities crystallize and subjectivation takes root.