Introduction

As forced migration becomes an increasingly prominent global challenge, political responses to it demand closer scrutiny. This essay considers one of the most widely used responses to refugee flows, the refugee camp. For the past seventy years camps have been a primary response to forced migration. In 2016, several hundred camps and settlements existed worldwide, housing more than twelve million refugees and internally displaced.¹ From the Algerian desert to the Thai forest, these camps vary in almost every dimension. Some are the size of cities, while others are more like towns. Some are fenced and guarded, while others allow free movement. Some have existed for generations, while others are newly created. Amid such diversity, what do these spaces have in common? What is a refugee camp? This is a deceptively simple question, and one that has never been satisfactorily answered. Some authors have divided the universe of camps into categories, distinguishing (for example) self-settlements, assisted self-settlements, and organized settlements.² Others have focused on camps’ institutional governance, and particularly on the role of international agencies in providing assistance as a (non-transparent, largely unaccountable) “surrogate state.”³ Many more have sidestepped the problem entirely, recognizing refugee camps as spaces of contradiction—of “care and control,” “compassion and repression”—that defy more specific definition.⁴