Afterword: What Contemporary Camps Tell Us about the World

to Come

Michel Agier

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 7, Number 3, Winter 2016, pp. 459-468 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2016.0026

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/643498

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 Michel Agier

Afterword: What Contemporary Camps

Tell Us about the World to Come

Our knowledge and understanding of contemporary camps developed significantly at

the end of the 1990s, and the relative importance of this field of study today reflects
not only the significance of encampment in the world but also the political concerns
it raises. The history of encampment can be captured through some landmark studies
(in French and in English) referenced here.
In order to attempt a genealogical reading of the current literature on camps, I
will outline three arguments that are central to the issues tackled by researchers and
are the main themes of the controversies surrounding all discourses and practices
about camps: a securitarian argument, which links the general concept of encampment
to the colonial era, a time when an ambivalent relationship between camps and
humanitarian action started to emerge; a humanitarian argument, which somehow
reproduces the first argument in reverse because encampment, when considered as a
problem, is dealt with from an array of positions going from moral denunciation to
(bio-)political analysis; and an identity-based argument, which first caught the
attention of anthropologists when this new research highlighted issues such as the loss
of identity or the anchoring of relationships and subjectivities. We will see, however,
that these three approaches have often intertwined in recent years.

The Securitarian, Humanitarian, and Identity-Based Arguments: Social Debates and

Multidisciplinary Research Questions
In this afterword, I will focus mainly on the postcolonial period, but it is important
to mention the trailblazing work of the French and Algerian sociologists Pierre
Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad in Algeria in the 1960s—even though their book was
written and published after Algeria’s independence in 1962. Le déracinement or
“uprooting” is a study about the displacement of rural populations by the French
military colonial administration in Algeria between 1957 and 1960—“one of the most
brutal [displacements] ever to take place in history,” according to the authors.1 In a
bid to fight resistance, the displacement aimed to isolate people from their traditional
social settings and from the “rebels’ influence” by dispersing and resettling them in
“regroupment camps” located near military posts. Bourdieu and Sayad’s study shows
how encampment introduces the totalitarian model within the colonial rationale. It
also highlights the social and economic dislocations of rural agricultural areas as a
result of the eviction of their inhabitants. Finally, it demonstrates how humanitarian
intervention, traditionally aimed at regrouping and controlling populations, had,
according to the authors, objectively become “a weapon of war.”2 The (post)colonial

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 dimension of camps has since been one of the major focuses of (mainly) political and
sociohistorical approaches to camps, which in Europe are tackled from the angle of
immigrant control policies.3
In the early 1980s, the anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond was the first to take
an interest in this type of confinement and in the violence within the so-called human-
itarian camps, that is, those established and managed by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).4 According to her, these camps were charac-
terized by a “deprivation of liberty” when they were precisely established in the name
of emergency and rescue. For Harrell-Bond, the mere existence of camps was a
violation of human rights in itself, and the humanitarian world was thus betraying its
humanistic mission. Her close proximity to international intervention organizations—
where she worked as an expert/researcher—explains both her indignation and the
limits of her analysis since it de facto places her in the humanitarian moral framework.
She also argued that the term “refugee” had shifted from representing an adminis-
trative category to characterizing a social identity, without this newly assigned identity
ever being questioned. However, Harrell-Bond (along with the Refugee Studies
Center she created in 1982 at the University of Oxford) has given good reasons to
consider regroupment camps as privileged places for social and political attention, as
well as for inquiry: camps are political places, even sites of lasting “biopolitics.” The
analysis of the contradictions, ambiguities and limits of humanitarian confinement
considerably developed from the 1980s onward, through a critique of the separate
management of bodies, spaces, and populations by systems that can be jointly or
alternatively securitarian, humanitarian, or military—be they governmental or non-
governmental, national or global, public or private—through approaches where a
dialogue was established between philosophy, social sciences, and sometimes law.5
Eventually, among the three major questions posed by the existence of camps
today, it is the issue of identity (in the form of loss, preservation, or transformation)
that has sparked the most interest among observers, especially anthropologists. Pierre
Centlivres is certainly the researcher who has addressed this issue most directly (often
in collaboration with Micheline Centlivres-Demont). Both authors developed an
ethnology of refugees very early on, which focused on ethnic identity and its transforma-
tions.6 During the displacements of populations caused by the Soviet invasion,
Centlivres notes that Pashtuns from Afghanistan moved from one camp to another
without necessarily losing their identity; they relied on their own cultural codes to
make sense of new contexts, albeit with some ambiguities. The strength and self-
evidence of Centlivres’s arguments rest on a simple epistemic frame: he first carried
out his inquiry as an ethnologist in places (Afghanistan) which were later to become
the “places of origin” of refugees when Centlivres followed them to Pakistan. It was
in Pakistan that he was led to “include the refugees’ experience of camps” in his work
on the itinerary of Pashtun identity. Starting from a similar research question (conti-
nuity and change in refugees’ identity), other works later used the places of arrival and
settlement as the primary frame of analysis, which led them to give a different (and
sometimes inverse) weight to the respective places of arrival and origin. One example
is the book edited by Linda A. Camino and Ruth M. Krulfeld, which was the first
edited volume bringing together anthropologists having worked in the 1980s on

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refugees in their places of settlement.7 These studies, conducted in the United States,
focused mainly on Asian refugees and on their integration in their new environment.
In all cases, this situation of exile is characterized by an ambivalence of behaviors and
identification among refugees, a characteristic that was to be found in most later
studies on refugees.
Liisa Malkki was one of the forerunners in social science research on refugee
camps, and her work in the 1980s on Hutu refugees from Burundi who had settled
fifteen years earlier in Tanzania (in the Mishamo camp or in the small town of
Kigoma) had a remarkable influence.8 Malkki was the first to demonstrate that beyond
their humanitarian function, refugee camps are political places where identities are
reconstructed, partly because regrouping facilitates the rehashing, and even the
strengthening, of a national memory. Although the clear distinction she established
between refugees in camps (imprisoned in a memory of national identity) and those
in cities (described as open, nomadic) has proved somewhat refutable, her research has
nonetheless highlighted the main benchmarks for questioning places, the relation to
the norm of the “national order of things,” as well as the cultural implications of social
life in camps in the context of forced displacements.9 Above all, Malkki demonstrated
that refugee camps could be both a site for fieldwork and an object of reflection for
anthropologists without renouncing the benefits of the local monographic approach.10
The three main themes laid out above regarding representations of, and policies
on, contemporary camps (securitarian, humanitarian, and identity-based) have largely
determined the questions posed about these fields of inquiry in social science disci-
plines. Today the novelty is that these questions and arguments are intertwined, as
can be seen in the field studies that have been conducted since the mid-1990s and
especially since the beginning of the 2000s. While drawing their inspiration from
older works, these studies aim to capture the complexity of the social form of contem-
porary camps. In this context, new issues have emerged with regard to the processes
of social change and development taking place in camps in the long term—their
relations to marginal urbanization and stateless citizenship, and also their links to
migratory trajectories and migration policies. I will return to these issues later.
I should also mention that the human and political stakes of displacement and
encampment policies have given rise to a number of multisited, multiscalar, and
multidisciplinary studies—architects, lawyers, and artists joining geographers, political
scientists, and anthropologists in these areas of study. These longer, circulatory, and
often collective studies have put camps in broader and more diversified contexts—
regions of departure or arrival, groups and diasporas formed during the displacement
and in places of exile. Such studies focused particularly on Palestinian displacement
and refugee camps, on Africa and more generally on countries from the global south.11
They have addressed the different stakes mentioned above to better understand the
studied situations, and gone beyond the strictly local contexts to capture overall
configurations, “landscapes,” networks, and mechanisms at the regional and global
levels. This endeavor recently led to a collective project: a global ethnography of
camps.12
What do contemporary camps teach us about the current state of the world? As

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 emerging places, what can they tell us about the future? This Humanity dossier illus-
trates the desire to think and inquire collectively about camps to see what can emerge
from them both theoretically and politically. The contributions show that, as we
know, camps can be defined both as spaces of exclusion and exception, but also that
they can be empirically studied and questioned as in-between, liminal, and transitory
spaces. The ethnographic inquiry is the tool that helps bring answers to the philo-
sophical conception of camps as an “exception,” even as some kind of “death row.”
Ethnography denaturalizes and recontextualizes the camp in all its forms. It uncovers
capacities for transformation in the humanitarian or securitarian situation of the camp.
This is what is usually called “agency” in English, a term which stems from what
George Balandier referred to as reprise d’initiative (regaining initiative) in the context
of the end of the colonial era and the struggle for independence in Africa.13 Basically
it is the issue of the formation and the manifestation of the subject—or, more
precisely, that of subjectivation—that can be tackled from a social science point of
view in relation to the questions of power and social relations as they exist in the very
places of encampment. These places are hybrid and often cosmopolitan living
environments—camps being one of the many border landscapes in the contemporary
world.14 Thanks to this renewed theoretical framework, it is now possible to tackle
the different kinds of camps (not only refugee camps and internally displaced persons
settlements but also makeshift migrant camps, and to a certain extent detention
centers, accommodation centers, transit shelters, etc.) and focus on the relations
between mobility and immobility without denying the immobilizing power of relative
confinement, or in other words without forgetting that camps, even humanitarian
ones, do generally and effectively represent a form of “deprivation of liberty.”

Margins, Urbanity, and Otherness: New Research Questions on Camps

The proliferation of camps is a by-product of post–Cold War worldwide deregulation
and of our growing difficulty to “act and live as a common world” (faire monde)
following the political, economic, and ecological disruptions of the early 2000s. The
resulting de facto situation is important not only from a demographical and socio-
logical point of view but also because of all the transformations camps undergo and
because these mutations can be helpful to anticipate further changes not only for
camps but also for other contexts. Considering the exemplary aspect of camps will
help them transcend the political imaginaries that confine them to a fated “exception.”
As I have briefly demonstrated, our knowledge of camps has been expanding for a
while now. New research avenues have opened up, and new reflections and policies
can be proposed. I would now like to identify these, more as paths for further research
than as a set of conclusions.
The most radical insights emerging from camps relate to the issue of life and
citizenship at the margins of the nation-state.15 This issue has now become essential
to reflect on tomorrow’s “world society.” As camps are made to last and as they
urbanize, they showcase two complementary realities that are both entirely global and
entirely local: the disappearance of the stranger on the one hand, and, on the other,

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an everyday experience of the world that takes place at the margins and in the border-
lands. Last, by incarnating the permanent fight between life and death, disappearance
and transformation, camps anticipate new urban environments.
Camps set the stage or, rather, the “space” to show the condition of the foreigner
as uprooted, disoriented, delocalized, and denationalized. As the sociologist Abdel-
malek Sayad wrote, an immigrant is first and foremost an emigrant, referring to an
era of immigration—the 1960s–80s in France—when the economic and political
insertion of foreign workers in national frameworks was much more a reality than it
is today.16 By contrast, the typical displaced person arrives in the camp (a generic term
that also includes refugee camps, makeshift settlements, and possibly reception centers
or accommodation facilities for migrants) after having experienced many losses: a
complete or partial loss of place, belongings, and links. Even if at a given time that
person “chose” to leave due to whatever constraint (be it political, ecological,
economic, or social), these losses are the main mark of his/her dis-identification (a
term that refers to the complaint relating to the “loss of identity”). Furthermore, all
displaced people end up in one way or another separated from, abandoned, or even
rejected by the state that was supposed to protect and represent them. The camp is
the place of the stateless, an “out-place” (hors-lieu) established in a zone between the
jurisdictions, territories, and societies of the country or countries whose territory on
which it stands, or to which it is adjacent. In camps that act as a border, the displaced
only exceptionally come in groups; they are individuals who find themselves in a camp
and try to recognize each other, get closer to one another and form at most a
community of survival or a community of shared existence.
Once settled in a camp, encampment, or long-term waiting zone, the displaced
have not yet found replacements for their losses. They remain affected by the loss of
the departure, by the “the pain of leaving” (la douleur du partir), and by their lost
mobility.17 Living in a camp is never a choice; it is at least the result of a constraint
(surviving, seeking medical help, hiding), or the outcome of an administrative obli-
gation, or of a police or military operation. The displaced who live in camps are both
strangers and foreigners in the eyes of the locals or “the nationals.” They are first
strangers as opposed to other locally known and familiar people, and then they become
foreigners as opposed to national subjects.18 Michel Foucault’s concept of enfermement
dehors (being confined outside) provides a third designation for displaced people. It is
to be feared as a result that the very rationale of encampment, and its associated effects
of invisibility, threaten to radicalize this last conception of the missing stranger. This
could indeed lead to an a priori, noncultural yet radical conception of the other, who
is not necessarily perceived as (culturally) different but as absent because s/he is kept
away from the world where “normal” human beings get around, work, and live. The
proliferation of brutal and racialized narratives in wealthy Western countries for the
past twenty years not only stands in contradiction to the humanistic and egalitarian
civic-minded traditions these countries often boast about; it also echoes the dehu-
manized vision of encamped foreigners associated with abnormality and a diminished
form of humanity. The persistence and banalization of camps as a solution have thus
become (usually implicitly, but not always) a way for public policies to deal with the

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 undesirables. With this encampment apparatus all the fears and identity-based delu-
sions toward undesirable strangers can be expressed arbitrarily and without restraint
because these strangers have been durably excluded, and encampment signals their
social disappearance. In this context, it is the camp that creates foreigners, and these
foreigners will remain inaccessible to me for as long as they are confined in camps.
Neither immigrants nor emigrants, these people are migrants stalled in the course
of their uncompleted migration process. The camp is a complete reflection of this
frustration. It is an experience of living in the world while being maintained on the
margins of the states, in a spatial, legal, and political in-between zone. Will the dehu-
manization and “disappearance” of migrants in camps translate into the vanishing of
the figure of the stranger? In fact, a society that keeps the “other” confined outside is
also confining itself because encampment is a mutual process—though obviously the
levels of confinement and freedom differ greatly between the two.19
Camps for refugees, for internally displaced persons, and for so-called illegal aliens
bear witness to a strong and relentless tension between two theoretical designs: that of
“confinement outside,” thus defined from the point of view of an analysis focused on
state power, as we have just seen; and that of cultural, ethnic, national, and social
diversity, in other words the camp seen as a global crossroads and a place for banal
cosmopolitanism, as ethnographic fieldwork carried out at the heart of everyday life
in camps have shown. Mobility and immobility intersect within the very places of
confinement that act as borders—state or city borders that, depending on cases, can
act as “airlocks” (for example, the camps for displaced persons on the outskirts of
Monrovia or Khartoum), as “ghettos” (for example, the numerous Palestinian camps
that keep growing vertically because of the lack of space to expand horizontally). What
links these two dimensions is what can be called the pragmatics of borders: characterized
by new and “other” learning experiences, life on the border encourages strategies for
coping, muddling through, transforming oneself, mastering the art of “making do”
and “living with it” as people deal with middlemen and smugglers, adversity, resil-
ience, and rebirths. Can this pragmatics of everyday life help transform these places of
confinement into places of mobility to the point of making them livable and open, of
making their walls fall by scratching them until they crumble, by drilling doors or
putting up ladders? We may well think so if we look at how some refugees have
managed to cope with constraints—Karen refugees in Thailand, Sudanese and Somali
refugees in Kenyan camps, Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, migrants living in
makeshift camps in Northern Morocco and on the fringes of Europe. These examples
allow us to capture and describe the vitality as well as the tensions and conflicts that
characterize contemporary camps.
It is no longer time for a thanatopolitics of camps. Even though the “death camps”
still haunt European reflections and discourses on this topic, we cannot address camps
worldwide as being primarily killing-places.20 The social death of camp dwellers—a
precursor to their physical death—is itself reversible in the very place of their isolation.
Living a long and even “good” life in camps is the most current and radical political
question that has been brought about by the contemporary policy of excluding the
undesirables.
The most recent surveys enable us to go even further in transforming the scientific

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and political outlook on the world of camps. Indeed, the oldest of the Palestinian
camps and of the African and Asian camps for refugees or internally displaced persons
have not only been urbanized; they have also become attractive urban hubs. Migrants
and refugees of other origins come and settle in or on the edge of these camps. These
places become the core of new urban configurations that are both poor and cosmo-
politan, so that some of them now illustrate a new “centrality of the margins.”21
Furthermore, the fact that Palestinian settlements were first defined as camps (and
remain as such in the eyes of the authorities and the dwellers) even though they “look
like” dense working-class suburban zones, is evocative of the relationship between the
urban and political marginality in which these settlements find themselves today: with
a whole array of favelas, barrios, slums, ghettos, and townships.22 As they develop and
urbanize, these spaces never completely lose the characteristics of the “camp form”
(exception, extraterritoriality, exclusion). What happens instead is that ordinary urban
marginalized zones come closer to them, thus reinforcing the impression of a gener-
alized apartheid—the encampment of the world.
Uncertainty, “undesirability,” and precariousness continue to characterize these
places, and any reflection about their future must take this into account. When we
reflect on their possible future, three possible scenarios loom on the horizon. The first
is their disappearance, as was the case with the destruction of migrant settlements in
Patras (Greece) or in Calais (France) in 2009, or the repeated destruction of the so-
called Roma camps in France in the outskirts of Paris or Lyon. But making older
camps disappear is always a difficult task, as can be seen with Maheba, a camp for
Angolan refugees in Zambia opened in 1971 that has been destined to close since 2002
without ever managing to do so. Another scenario is a gradual and long-term transfor-
mation, which can go as far as granting them recognition and a “right to the city” as
is now the case for Palestinian camps in the Middle East or with the slow integration
of internally displaced persons from South Sudan in the periphery of Khartoum. The
last option is waiting, and this is currently a particularly widespread situation. It results
from a compromise between the different forces currently at play on the future of
camps (the camps’ occupants, the international organizations’ agents, and the repre-
sentatives of the national state) as illustrated by the long-lasting negotiation over the
twelve camps of Eritrean “former refugees” from East Sudan.23
Neither monstrous nor pitiful, these “places apart” will be perceived in a new light
once they have been replaced in the perspective of the world society to come. One
could argue that the existence, the transformation, and even the persistence of camps
and encampments gradually form part of a strategy of “occupation of space” by indi-
viduals and groups who were never allocated any place or role. This is what happens
when refugees oppose the closure and the destruction of their camp and decide to
occupy it, or when groups of peasants and forest communities expelled from their
land set up a camp in a nearby city for some (in Colombia), or in the middle of the
capital city for others (in other Latin American countries), and manage to stay there
for years both as a survival strategy and as a form of protest. This strategy of occu-
pation combines two forms of agency: inhabitation, an urban form of agency that
consists of appropriating a place by maintaining, occupying, and personalizing it; and
politics, which means turning the place into a “polis” where the voicing of opinion is

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 both real and legitimate. In this perspective, camps can be considered as quasi-
experimental places of “presence in the world” in a precarious environment where no
form of political organization or mobilization is envisaged. This strategy meets an
emerging form of politics in general, that of the occupation of public spaces as a form
of political protest and advocacy for equality. The history of camps and encampment
can therefore be rewritten not only as that of the banishment and the invisibility of
undesirables but also a presence and agency in a “global” world that is still in search
for the loci of politics beyond the existing national and urban frameworks.

NOTES

1. Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le déracinement: La crise de l’agriculture tradition-

nelle en Algérie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964).
2. Ibid., 25.
3. See Emile Temime and Nathalie Deguigné, Le camp du Grand Arénas, Marseille, 1944–1966
(Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2001); Marc Bernardot, Camps d’étrangers (Bellecombe-en-Bauges:
Éditions du Croquant, 2008); Jérôme Valluy, ed., “L’Europe des camps: La mise à l’écart des
étrangers,” special issue, Cultures et Conflits, no. 57 (Spring 2005); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison
et al., eds., Le retour des camps? Sangatte, Lampedusa, Guantanamo . . . (Paris: Autrement, 2007);
Carolina Kobelinsky and Chowra Makaremi, Enfermés dehors: Enquêtes sur le confinement des
étrangers (Paris: Éditions du Croquant, Collection Terra, 2009).
4. Barbara Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Barbara Harrell-Bond and Guglielmo Verdirame, Rights in Exile: Janus-
Faced Humanitarianism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1966); Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres, hétérotopies,” in Michel Foucault, Dits et
Ecrits, 1954–1988, vol. 4, 1980–1988 (1984; Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 752–62; Giorgio Agamben, Homo
Sacer, I: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Mariella Pandolfi, “Une souveraineté
mouvante et supracoloniale,” Multitudes 3 no. 3 (2000): 97–105; Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, Les
étrangers aux frontières de l’Europe et le spectre des camps (Paris: La Dispute, 2004); Bulent Diken
and Carsten B. Laustsen, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (New York:
Routledge, 2005); Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (New York:
Routledge, 2006); Federico Rahola, “La forme-camp: Pour une généalogie des lieux de transit et
d’internement du présent,” Cultures et Conflits, no. 68 (Winter 2007): 32–50; Didier Fassin and
Mariella Pandolfi, eds., Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humani-
tarian Interventions (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Illana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds., In
the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2010); Michel Agier, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian
Government (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian
Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011); Maja Janmyr, Protecting Civilians in Refugee
Camps: Unable and Unwilling States, UNHCR and International Responsibility (Boston: Martinus
Nijhoff /Brill, 2014).
6. Micheline Centlivres-Demont and Pierre Centlivres, “The Afghan Refugees in Pakistan: A
Nation in Exile,” Current Sociology 36, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 71–92; Micheline Centlivres-Demont
and Pierre Centlivres, “The Afghan Refugee in Pakistan: An Ambiguous Identity,” Journal of
Refugee Studies 1, no. 2 (1988): 141–52.

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 7. Lina A. Camino and Ruth M. Krulfeld, eds., Reconstructing Lives, Recapturing Meaning:
Refugee Identity, Gender, and Culture Change (New York: Routledge, 1994).
8. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu
Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Liisa H. Malkki, “Refugees and
Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology
24 (1995): 495–523.
9. For a critique of the dichotomy between camps and cities, see Michel Agier “Between War
and City: Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps,” Ethnography 3, no. 3 (September
2002): 317–41.
10. Cindy Horst, Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab
Camps of Kenya (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Simon Turner, Politics of Innocence: Hutu
Identity, Conflict and Camp Life (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Amanda S. A. Dias, Aux
marges de la ville et de l’etat: Camps palestiniens au Liban et favelas cariocas, preface by Michel Agier
(Paris: Karthala/IFPO, 2013); Alexander Horstmann, “Ethical Dilemmas and Identifications of
Faith-Based Humanitarian Organizations in the Karen Refugee Crisis,” Journal of Refugee Studies
24, no. 3 (September 2011): 513–32; Bram J. Jansen, “The Accidental City: Violence, Economy and
Humanitarianism in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya” (Ph.D. diss., Wageningen University, 2011);
Tristan Bruslé, “What Kind of Place Is This? Daily Life, Privacy and the Inmate Metaphor in a
Nepalese Worker’s Labour Camp (Qatar),” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, no. 6
(2012), accessed June 14, 2016, http://samaj.revues.org/3446; Hala Abou Zaki, “Revisiting Politics
in Spaces ‘Beyond the Center’: The Shātı̄lā Palestinian Refugee Camp in Lebanon,” in Local
Politics and Contemporary Transformations in the Arab World: Revisiting Governance Beyond the
Center, ed. Malika Bouziane, Cilja Harders and Anja Hoffnann (New York: Palgrave, 2014),
178–95.
11. For works on Palestinian displacement and refugee camps, see Julie Peteet, Landscape of
Hope and Despair: Palestinian Refugee Camps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2005); Mohamed Kamel Doraı̈, “Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon: Migration, Mobility and
the Urbanization Process,” in Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant, ed. Are
Knudsen and Sari Hanafi (New York: Routledge, 2010): 67–80; Sari Hanafi and Are Knudsen,
Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space and Place in the Levant (New York: Routledge, 2010). For
studies on Africa, see André Guichaoua, ed., Exilés, réfugiés, déplacés en Afrique centrale et orientale
(Paris: Karthala, 2004); Julien Brachet, Migrations transsahariennes: Vers un désert cosmopolite et
morcelé (Niger) (Paris: Éditions du Croquant, 2009); Anaı̈k Pian, Aux nouvelles frontières de
l’Europe: L’aventure incertaine des Sénégalais au Maroc (Paris: La Dispute, 2009). For studies of
countries in the global south, see Luc Cambrezy and Véronique Lassailly-Jacob, eds., Populations
réfugiées: De l’exil au retour (Paris: Éditions de l’IRD, 2001); Luc Cambrezy, Smaı̈n Laacher, Véro-
nique Lassailly-Jacob and Luc Legoux, eds., L’asile au Sud (Paris: La Dispute, 2008).
12. Michel Agier, ed., Un monde de camps (Paris: La Découverte, 2014).
13. George Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l’Afrique noire (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1955).
14. Michel Agier, Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Condition
(Cambridge: Polity, 2016).
15. On the relationships between margins and state, see Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds.,
Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2004).

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 16. Abdelmalek Sayad, La Double absence: Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré
(Paris: Seuil, 1999).
17. Translator’s note: from Louis Aragon’s poem “Aimer à perdre la raison.”
18. Translator’s note: in French, étranger can mean both “stranger” and “foreigner.”
19. Loı̈c Wacquant, “Designing Urban Seclusion in the 21st Century,” Perspecta: The Yale
Architectural Journal, no. 43 (2010): 165–78; Michel Agier, Campement urbain: Du refuge naı̂t le
ghetto (Paris: Payot, 2013).
20. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, and the critique in Alain Brossat, “L’espace-camp et
l’exception furtive,” Lignes, no. 26 (2008), 17–19.
21. Mohamed Kamel Doraı̈ and Nicolas Puig, L’urbanité des marges: Migrants et réfugiés dans
les villes du Proche-Orient (Paris: Téraèdre/IFPO, 2012).
22. Wacquant, “Designing Urban Seclusion in the Twenty-First Century”; Loı̈c Wacquant,
Parias urbains: Ghetto, banlieues, Etat (Paris: La Découverte, 2006); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
(New York: Verso, 2006); Dias, Aux marges de la ville et de l’Etat; Agnès de Geoffroy, “Fleeing War
and Relocating to the Urban Fringe—Issues and Actors: The Cases of Khartoum and Bogotá,”
International Review of the Red Cross 91, no. 875 (September 2009): 509–26.
23. Hélène Thiollet, “Wad Sharifey, Kishm el–Girbâ, Asotriba . . . Métamorphoses d’un
réseau régional de douze camps de réfugiés érythréens dans l’Est du Soudan (1962–2013),” in Un
monde de camps, ed. Agier, 203–17.

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