Paper: Humanitarian spill-over: the expansion of humanitarian governance from camps to refugee hosting societies in East Africa

Paper details

Paper authors Bram Jansen
In panel on Post-Humanitarian Ecologies: from Spill-over Effects to Ambiguous Territorial Control in Chronic and Recurring Crises
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting In-Person / Online

Abstract

Following recent studies that seek to nuance the hard boundaries between camps and its outsides, this paper explores the idea of “humanitarian spill-over”. Based on a spatial analysis of refugee camp development, this paper analyses how over time, non-refugee populations become subjected to forms of humanitarian governance, either by program or as “auxiliary effect” (Smirl 2015) of (long term) humanitarian presence. Humanitarian governance in this perspective implies the control over people and place, and the idea of a humanitarian spill-over highlights that rather than a temporary measure to protect refugees, camps and its humanitarian entourage, and their everyday practices and movements, materialize as an expanding influence over wider regions in economic, social, cultural and political ways. By turning our eye to the ways in which refugee camps as inclusionary polities expand to include non-refugee populations, we seek to engage with debates about the blurring of boundaries between camps and their surroundings as “ambiguous zones of indistinction” (Oesch 2017), and camps as “normalising” rather than exceptional spaces of governance. Based on ethnographic data from Kenya and Tanzania, this paper seeks to apply a less refugee-centred approach to understand these socio-spatial dynamics around protracted refugee camps by zooming in on the relations between camp actors, local populations and authorities, as influenced by and responding to forms of humanitarian spill-over.

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