Managing the Undesirables

Managing the Undesirables PDF

Author: Michel Agier

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0745649025

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Official figures classify some fifty million of the world’s people as 'victims of forced displacement'. Refugees, asylum seekers, disaster victims, the internally displaced and the temporarily tolerated - categories of the excluded proliferate, but many more are left out of count. In the face of this tragedy, humanitarian action increasingly seems the only possible response. On the ground, however, the 'facilities' put in place are more reminiscent of the logic of totalitarianism. In a situation of permanent catastrophe and endless emergency, 'undesirables' are kept apart and out of sight, while the care dispensed is designed to control, filter and confine. How should we interpret the disturbing symbiosis between the hand that cares and the hand that strikes? After seven years of study in the refugee camps, Michel Agier reveals their 'disquieting ambiguity' and stresses the imperative need to take into account forms of improvisation and challenge that are currently transforming the camps, sometimes making them into towns and heralding the emergence of political subjects. A radical critique of the foundations, contexts, and political effects of humanitarian action.

Managing the Undesirables

Managing the Undesirables PDF

Author: Michel Agier

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Official figures classify some fifty million of the worldʹs people as 'victims of forced displacement'. Refugees, asylum seekers, disaster victims, the internally displaced and the temporarily tolerated -- categories of the excluded proliferate, but many more are left out of count. In the face of this tragedy, humanitarian action increasingly seems the only possible response. On the ground, however, the 'facilities' put in place are more reminiscent of the logic of totalitarianism. In a situation of permanent catastrophe and endless emergency, 'undesirables' are kept apart and out of sight, while the care dispensed is designed to control, filter and confine. How should we interpret the disturbing symbiosis between the hand that cares and the hand that strikes? After seven years of study in the refugee camps, Michel Agier reveals their 'disquieting ambiguity' and stresses the imperative need to take into account forms of improvisation and challenge that are currently transforming the camps, sometimes making them into towns and heralding the emergence of political subjects. --

Camps

Camps PDF

Author: Aidan Forth

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2024-06-03

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1487588305

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The concentration of terrorists, political suspects, ethnic minorities, prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and other potentially “dangerous” populations spans the modern era. From Konzentrationslager in colonial Africa to strategic villages in Southeast Asia, from slave plantations in America to Uyghur sweatshops in Xinjiang, and from civilian internment in World War II to extraordinary rendition at Guantanamo Bay, mass detention is as diverse as it is ubiquitous. Camps offers a short but compelling guide to the varied manifestations of concentration camps in the last two centuries, while tracing provocative transnational connections with related institutions such as workhouses, migrant detention centers, and residential schools.

Kakuma Refugee Camp

Kakuma Refugee Camp PDF

Author: Bram J. Jansen

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2018-06-15

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1786991918

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp is one of the world’s largest, home to over 100,000 people drawn from across east and central Africa. Though notionally still a ‘temporary’ camp, it has become a permanent urban space in all but name with businesses, schools, a hospital and its own court system. Such places, Bram J. Jansen argues, should be recognised as ‘accidental cities’, a unique form of urbanization that has so far been overlooked by scholars. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Jansen’s book explores the dynamics of everyday life in such accidental cities. The result is a holistic socio-economic picture, moving beyond the conventional view of such spaces as transitory and desolate to demonstrate how their inhabitants can develop a permanent society and a distinctive identity. Crucially, the book offers important insights into one of the greatest challenges facing humanitarian and international development workers: how we might develop more effective strategies for managing refugee camps in the global South and beyond. An original take on African urbanism, Kakuma Refugee Camp will appeal to practitioners and academics across the social sciences interested in social and economic issues increasingly at the heart of contemporary development.

Barbed-Wire Imperialism

Barbed-Wire Imperialism PDF

Author: Aidan Forth

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-10-17

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0520967267

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Camps are emblems of the modern world, but they first appeared under the imperial tutelage of Victorian Britain. Comparative and transnational in scope, Barbed-Wire Imperialism situates the concentration and refugee camps of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) within longer traditions of controlling the urban poor in metropolitan Britain and managing "suspect" populations in the empire. Workhouses and prisons, along with criminal tribe settlements and enclosures for the millions of Indians displaced by famine and plague in the late nineteenth century, offered early prototypes for mass encampment. Venues of great human suffering, British camps were artifacts of liberal empire that inspired and legitimized the practices of future regimes.

Reflections on Camps – Space, Agency, Materiality

Reflections on Camps – Space, Agency, Materiality PDF

Author: Antje Senarclens de Grancy

Publisher: V&R Unipress

Published: 2019-06-17

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 384700851X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Camps as a global and ubiquitous mass phenomenon of the present and a flexible isolation tool for/against specific socially, politically, or ethnically defined groups are at the centre of current policies and societal debates. In the present volume, the authors explore camps as (cultural) spaces in a broad sense and deal with their complex dimensions as sites of the Modern. They examine camp spaces and their social configurations, physical/architectural qualities, symbolic functions as well as cultural representations in an intent to define the inscribed ambivalences, inconsistencies and paradoxes of the phenomenon. Positioned within different disciplinary contexts (Contemporary History, Visual Studies, Architectural History, Refugee and Gender Studies), the assembled articles present a wide range of understandings and approaches to space, materiality and the relations between governance and agency. The contributors stress the entanglement of social structures, cultural discourse, institutionalisation, individual perception and appropriation. They show how the issue of camps can serve as cross-sectional matter for researchers in different fields in Cultural Theory and Contemporary History.

Rightlessness in an Age of Rights

Rightlessness in an Age of Rights PDF

Author: Ayten Gündogdu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-12-09

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0199370435

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

There have been remarkable developments in the field of human rights in the past few decades. Still, millions of asylum-seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants continue to find it challenging to access human rights. In this book, Ayten Gündogdu builds on Hannah Arendt's analysis of statelessness and argues that these challenges reveal the perplexities of human rights. Human rights promise equal personhood regardless of citizenship status, yet their existing formulations are tied to the principle of territorial sovereignty. This situation leaves various categories of migrants in a condition of "rightlessness," with a very precarious legal, political, and human standing. Gündogdu examines this problem in the context of immigration detention, deportation, and refugee camps. Critical of the existing system of human rights without seeing it as a dead end, she argues for the need to pay closer attention to the political practices of migrants who challenge their condition of rightlessness and propose new understandings of human rights. What arises from this critical reflection on human rights is also a novel reading of Arendt, one that offers refreshing insights into various dimensions of her political thought, including her account of the human condition, "the social question," and "the right to have rights." Rightlessness in an Age of Rights is a valuable addition to the literature on Hannah Arendt and a vital way of rethinking human rights as they relate to contemporary issues of immigration.

Borderlands

Borderlands PDF

Author: Michel Agier

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0745696813

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world. But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today, and what do we know about the individuals who occupy these places? In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of subject, the border dweller, who is both inside and outside, enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people. In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a cosmopolitan condition in which the experience of the unfamiliar is more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal.

Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed

Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed PDF

Author: Claire Magone

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-02-28

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1849045259

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From international NGOs to UN agencies, from donors to observers of humanitarianism, opinion is unanimous: in a context of the alleged "clash of civilizations", our "humanitarian space" is shrinking. Put another way, the freedom of action and of speech of humanitarians is being eroded due to the radicalisation of conflicts and the reaffirmation of state sovereignty over aid actors and policies. The purpose of this book is to challenge this assumption through an analysis of the events that have marked MSF's history since 2003 (when MSF published its first general work on humanitarian action and its relationships with governments). It addresses the evolution of humanitarian goals, the resistance to these goals and the political arrangements that overcame this resistance (or that failed to do so). The contributors seek to analyse the political transactions and balances of power and interests that allow aid activities to move forward, but that are usually masked by the lofty rhetoric of "humanitarian principles". They focus on one key question: what is an acceptable compromise for MSF? This book seeks to puncture a number of the myths that have grown up over the forty years since MSF was founded and describes in detail how the ideals of humanitarian principles and "humanitarian space" operating in conflict zones are in reality illusory. How, in fact, it is the grubby negotiations with varying parties, each of whom have their own vested interests, that may allow organisations such as MSF to operate in a given crisis situation - or not.

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives PDF

Author: Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-17

Total Pages: 716

ISBN-13: 1000852393

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.