Author Archives: Maja Janmyr

About Maja Janmyr

Maja Janmyr is a postdoctoral researcher at the faculty of law, University of Bergen, Norway. Her first book, Protecting Civilians in Refugee Camps: Unwilling and Unable States, UNHCR and International Responsibility (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers/Brill, 2014), examines United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees administration of camps and avenues for international responsibility in instances of human rights abuse. Her research interests include issues of international law, in particular socio-legal and critical approaches to international refugee and human rights law. She has recently researched legal mobilization among the Nubian minority in Egypt and is currently working on a project exploring refugee rights in the Middle East.

Introduction: Hybrid Spaces

December 29, 2016 by and
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Recent decades have seen a proliferation of refugee camps; today there are more than one thousand “camps” in operation, catering for more than twelve million displaced people. The circumstances and features of these spaces vary widely—what we commonly describe as refugee camps may be as diverse as the semi-permanent Palestinian camps in the Middle East, temporary shelters set up by migrants in Calais, labeled “illegal” by the French authorities, or evacuation centers for victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States.1 On other occasions one Continue reading → Continue reading →

Spaces of Legal Ambiguity: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Power

December 29, 2016 by
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Introduction Scholars have long grappled with defining and conceptualizing refugee camps from a number of disciplines—political science, anthropology, human geography; few, however, have approached the issue from the perspective of international law.1 Because the refugee camp “label” may confer an array of legal, political, and bureaucratic implications for refugee protection, this lack of attention to refugee camps by international lawyers is rather peculiar. Traditionally, international human rights lawyers have focused on spaces often very similar to the idea of the refugee camp: places of confinement Continue reading → Continue reading →