Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Humanitarian Urbanism 2. The Entitlement Arena Intermission: Walking the Camp 3. The Camp as Warscape 4. ‘Digging’ Aid: The Development of a Refugee Camp Economy 5. Moving Along: The Camp as Portal 6. There’s No Way Back to the Village Conclusion

Promotional Information

An extensive ethnographic analysis of one of the world's largest refugee camps, revealing a distinct form of urbanization and its unique challenges for effective humanitarian strategies.

About the Author

Bram J. Jansen is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology of development at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Reviews

An incisively argued study of humanitarian urbanism. Through Jansen’s carefully crafted observations, the extra-ordinary manages to find a productive ordinariness.
*AbdouMaliq Simone, Goldsmiths, University of London*

Mandatory reading for those concerned with humanitarian aid.
*Barbara Harrell-Bond, founder of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford*

Refugee camps are the defining spaces of contemporary humanitarianism. In this vivid ethnography, Bram Jansen cogently shows how the camp evolved into an improbable city, and how refugees became potential migrants.
*Didier Fassin, author of Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present*

An unrivalled and insightful account of Kakuma as a space in which people seek refuge, but also live and change. The book highlights the camp’s place in the region’s political economy as a home, a rear base, and as a stage in longer refugee journeys.
*Gabrielle Lynch, University of Warwick*

The findings of Jansen’s rich and original ethnography of Kakuma show how such camps create their own environment of stability and cosmopolitanism through everyday life. At a time when Europeans are discovering the brutal reality of their policies on migrant camps, this book should open the minds of politicians, activists and students alike.
*Michel Agier, Director of Studies, EHESS, Paris*

Jansen’s concept of humanitarian urbanism offers significant and much needed insight into refugee camps and the biopolitics which dominate the lives of the people who live in them.
*Roger Zetter, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford (Emeritus)*