Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government
Author: Michel Agier
Publisher: Polity Press
Print Length: 300 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Political Science, Migration & Refugee Studies
Topic: Camps, Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Refugees & Forced Migration, Internally Displaced Person (IDP), Asylum & Refugee System, Governance, Refugee Management/Governance, Protracted Refugee Situations, Humanitarian Action & Humanitarianism, Social Work & Services, Humanitarian Urbanism, Social/Aid Workers, Mobility & Immobility, Vulnerability, Statelessness, Deserving & Undeserving, Expulsion, Survival, Politics & Power, Borders, Care, Everyday Life, Representation, Testimonies, Challenges & Opportunities, UNHCR, Ethnography
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Acronyms Used
Introduction: From Vulnerable to Undesirable
PART ONE: A WORLD OF UNDESIRABLES, A NETWORK OF CAMPS
1. Refugees, Displaced, Expelled: the Itinerary of the Stateless
2. Refugee Camps Today: An Attempted Inventory
PART TWO: EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY’S REFUGEE CAMPS
3. An Ethnologist in the Refugee Camps
4. The Interminable Insomnia of Exile: The Camp as an Ordinary Exceptionalism
5. Experiences of Wandering, Borders and Camps: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea
6. Surviving, Reviving, Leaving, Remaining: The Long Life of Angolan Refugees in Zambia
7. Camp-Towns. Somalia in Kenya
8. In the Name of the Refugees: Political Representation and Action in the Camps
9. Who Will Speak Out in the Camp? A Study of Refugees’ Testimony
PART THREE: AFTER THE CAMPS…
10. ‘If This Is a Town…’
11. ‘If This Is a World…’
12. ‘If This Is a Government…’
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Michel Agier is an anthropologist, professor, investigation director at the Institute of Investigation for the Development and member of the African Training center of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). His main interests are human globalization, exile, and urban marginalities. He is engaged in anthropological research in cities of Africa and Latin America, the dynamics of social change and urban cultural movements, mostly in peripheral zones, while also working on social groups in situations of precariousness and marginalisation. At present, he is studying how peoples reconstruct their identities after being forced into in exodus because of wars and, in particular, when they are regrouped in refugee camps. He is coordinating the research program Babels—The City as a Borderland (2016–18) supported by French Agency for Research (ANR). He published in English At the Margins of the World (Polity, 2008), Managing the Undesirables: Refugees Camps and Humanitarian Government (Polity, 2011), and Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of Cosmopolitan Condition (Polity, 2016).
Source: https://humanityjournal.org/author/michel-agier/ & https://www.cccb.org/en/participants/file/michel-agier/10185
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