States of emergency?: managing refugees in theory and practice

Long-term refugee camps and settlements present a series of legal, political and social problems that exceed their conception as humanitarian crises. After the acute crisis phase is over, extended displacement among refugees becomes the norm in the post-emergency phase. Most refugees, albeit not all in camps, find themselves in protracted contexts of displacement for five years or more (UNHCR, 2012a). In 2003, the average length of displacement for refugees was 17 years, and is now closer to two decades (Milner & Loescher, 2011: 3). Displacement in and from Syria has recently reached the five-year mark (as of March 2016), so refugees belonging to the official United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) category of “protracted refugee situations” is increasing significantly, with almost 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide. This chapter has several objectives: to trace the links between geopolitics

and biopolitics in the context of state and international responses to longterm displacement in East and South Africa, regions that have been widely affected by war and displacement. We also situate different hosts’ treatment of extended exile within various theoretical frameworks that shed more light on protracted displacement. The South African context provides a useful foil to the state-led management of refugees in East African host states and highlights the de facto integration of refugees in cities (Landau & Amit, 2014). Hence, the chapter is loosely comparative in that we examine how different governments provide sanctuary and support to refugees, managing them in their respective national contexts, but also what happens to refugees and other migrants when the state abdicates such management to more local governance bodies and to migrants, including refugees, themselves. Theoretically, we aim to keep different understandings of power in tension

with one another, drawing alternately on theories of the biopolitical and geopolitical, and ultimately combining the two. We elucidate the exclusions and violence played out among different actors, including states, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), UN organizations, and refugees living in conditions of extended exile in the region. The conditions that refugees face in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are first traced to determine what patterns and politics of “managing displacement” are salient to understanding long-term

exile in East Africa. Theoretical claims that encampments are spaces of exception, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) has argued, are scrutinized. “What does it mean to live under a state of emergency that is also the rule?” (Secor, 2007: 40). How exceptional are these situations of long-term displacement if most exiled people live in them? We also probe the biopolitics of refugee camps, sites where power is exercised over the individual and collective body of the population (Foucault, 1979): “Instead of sovereign power to take life, this new biopower is the power to make, sustain or remove life” (Elden, 2009: 48). We demonstrate that refugee lives in this region are made, sustained and remade at different times, in distinct places and in particular ways (Brun & Fábos, 2015). Refugee camps are more than mere sites where lives are wasted (Bauman, 2004, in Stoler, 2008: 204), and many refugees leave camps for informal settlements and undocumented status in cities to enhance their livelihoods. We are keen to unpack the rationalities that generate and reproduce sites of displacement today. In short, how are displaced populations segregated and managed for years, even decades, at a time? How can theory become more accountable and nuanced so that it speaks to this conundrum of extended exile? The wide-ranging practices of managing refugees and regulating their

mobility are expression of both humanitarianism and of sovereignty. Evidence of a “seriality of exception, of the indistinction between law and violence being reproduced at countless replicant sites” (Gregory & Pred, 2007: 4) across different states and refugee groups appears as a pattern in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Yet each of these states handles asylum and refugees in distinct ways. A single host government may treat refugees from the same country differently over time, as well. One example is Tanzania’s treatment of Burundian refugees who arrived in Tanzania at different political moments and received distinct treatment on each occasion-a story to which we return. Uganda is often credited with granting refugees more scope and livelihood

opportunities than Kenya. In Kenya, refugee camps are mandatory sites of residence for those forced into exile, with a few exceptions (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond, 2005).1 A tripartite agreement for voluntary return of refugees was signed in 2013, between the governments of Kenya and Somalia and UNHCR, after the bombing of Westgate Mall in Nairobi by extremists connected with Somalian rebel group Al-Shabaab. The attacks killed more than 60 people, including many expatriates (Mutambo, 2015). In Uganda, scholars have noted the restrictive terms for land use granted to refugees, including the location and quality of land, and the lack of market access for their products (Kaiser, 2008). In this loosely comparative context, refugee futures among those in extended exile are grim in both countries. Moving to the Tanzanian context, the government there has been repre-

sented in a largely heroic light, after finalizing the naturalization of some 162,156 former Burundian refugees and making them citizens of Tanzania late in 2014 (UNHCR, 2014e). Yet, this same government has also been a harsh host, forcing the return of more than 36,000 Burundian refugees from Mtabila refugee camp in northwestern Tanzania starting in 2009 (International Refugee

Rights Initiative, 2009). As James Milner (2011, 2014) points out, after 35 years in exile, Burundians who have been repatriated speak English and Kiswahili, not French and Kirundi. Their “return” to a country that some have never visited has not been straightforward, and their reception has been less than optimal. In 2015, after the controversial re-election of the incumbent president, the social and political environment in Burundi remained precarious. Human rights organizations and the media reported arbitrary arrests, torture and extra-judicial killings (UNHCR, 2013c). In 2015, thousands of Burundians fled the country to Tanzania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for safety (UNHCR, 2015g). In the last part of this chapter, we demonstrate that the increased restriction of asylum and resettlement opportunities in wealthier countries of the global North extend people’s tenure as displaced and reinforce the “temporary” stopgap humanitarian activities carried out by UNHCRand its partner organizations in settlements and camps. These latter global South sites, specifically in East Africa, are characterized primarily by prima facie refugee status based on group displacement. In April 2012, Africa hosted the greatest number of humanitarian interven-

tions of any continent (Daley, 2013b). Of 54 countries on the continent, 30 had crises that included flooding, droughts, cholera, and people seeking safety from war: refugees. Many of these crises of displacement have been prolonged, extending over decades. While humanitarian efforts are meant to reduce human suffering and sustain life in the short term, such measures cannot and are not intended to ameliorate or end long-term displacement. The “right to life,” the pillar of humanitarian principles, ensures human survival without prejudice and promises basic food, shelter and medical aid for the everyday survival of many refugee camp populations. Emergency assistance to preserve the right to life seemingly has no expiry date, so this basic humanitarian aid continues to flow in the absence of other options. Refugee camps have become an expression of containment and margin-

alization where they exist. While many refugees do not live in camps (UNHCR, 2009b; Landau & Amit, 2014), camps remain a barometer of prevailing geopolitics and a technology of refugee management in a post-Cold War landscape that is over 25 years old. The granting of Convention refugee status-the Cadillac standard that allows refugees legal status to move around, work, and establish residence rights-is rare in comparison to the designation of group-based prima facie refugee status, granted to most asylum seekers who cross international land borders in regions of origin. Prima facie refugees are, by definition, outside their countries of citizenship, often segregated or confined, and afforded only temporary protection by the host governments and international agencies that agree to assist them. There are also those displaced by similar politics and violence, but who may not be recognized as refugees: the “irregular migrants” or “illegals” whose material and legal vulnerability is arguably the greatest.2 In an effort to broaden the discussion of encampment to other conditions of exile, this chapter touches on access to land, residence rights and citizenship across geographical sites in sub-Saharan Africa. As elsewhere in the world, refugees

from Sudan, Somalia, Burundi and the DRC are largely unwanted by their hosts, who see them more as liabilities than the social and economic assets some authors have highlighted (Jacobsen, 2005). Where these refugee groups exist, most host governments want to be able to quantify their presence and demonstrate the support they offer so that they can garner further donor aid. The management of refugees in camps and the social identities these pro-

duce have been reviewed in some detail (Grayson-Courtemanche, 2015; Agier, 2011b; Horst, 2008 [2006]; Hyndman, 2000; Malkki, 1995). Daily life in refugee camps is spatially organized at least as much by the bureaucracy and the logistical imperatives of humanitarian operations on the ground as by the needs or desires of those living in them. In a geopolitical sense, those who have been exiled experience a double displacement: first by their own governments who cannot or will not protect them, and then by the international humanitarian regime that keeps many of them alive in a context of minimal provision in concert with the host state. The survival rations and prevention of forcible return (non-refoulement) are

forms of social and political protection, but they do not change the political stalemate in which refugees find themselves: lacking the permanent legal status that entitles them to basic rights of housing, education, employment and mobility. The physical isolation of many refugee camps reinforces a social isolation. In South Africa, refugees can access housing and employment (Landau & Duponchel, 2011), albeit not because they are refugees, but in spite of it. Like other migrants, they are left to their own devices. In Kenya, where refugees have become securitized and produced as threats to national and global security, mobility, work, schooling and housing beyond a camp are all severely restricted (Grayson-Courtemanche, 2015). In short, long-term displacement becomes a low-grade, silent “emergency,” significant enough to warrant international aid, but not acute enough to command comprehensive action beyond support that ensures survival. In contrast to Verdirame and Harrell-Bond (2005), who attribute the violation

of refugee rights in long-term contexts to UNHCR, we do not see the UN agency as the perpetrator of human rights abuses or sole creator of conditions of protracted displacement. A constellation of power relations related to “offshoring” (Urry, 2014) keeps refugees in their “regions of origin.” While individual UNHCR staffmembers have been found guilty of violating UNHCR’s mandate to protect refugees, as documented by Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, no single UN agency or host government has caused long-term displacement among refugees. Rather, a toxic mix of securitization, externalization and neglect have created the “frozen otherness” in marginal regions to which Michel Agier (2008: viii) refers. UNHCR has a mandate to ensure protection for those in long-term exile and to “search for solutions” (UNHCR, 1995) where they exist.3 Whether UNHCR succeeds in meeting its mandate and creating solutions is quite a different question from whether or not it violates human rights. In 2014, UNHCR published a document entitled “UNHCR policy alternatives to camps,” admitting: “UNHCR’s experience has been

that camps can have significant negative impacts over the longer term for all concerned. Living in camps can engender dependency and weaken the ability of refugees to manage their own lives” (UNHCR, 2014d: 4). The neglect of many refugees facing protracted displacement in East African

host states is clear: their stay is not temporary. Negligence in this context is much harder to prove because there is no single actor responsible for the “endless emergency” (Agier, 2011b).4 UNHCR aims to ensure protection for those determined to be refugees, and protect their basic rights and freedoms, regardless of whether or not their stay is prolonged (Jamal, 2000; Durieux & McAdam, 2004), but it must also keep both donor and host states content. UNHCR must engage and, in some cases, persuade the host state to provide sanctuary for people displaced across borders. Camp security for refugees is normally provided by host states, at a cost. These security forces-civilian and military-however, often have dubious records of protecting displaced populations, as illustrated by the treatment of Somalians in Kenya (Human Rights Watch, 2013a; Hyndman, 2000). The silent and largely hidden situation of long-term displacement is not

caused by the international humanitarian regime, but remains its responsibility. The humanitarian response, which by definition should ensure the “right to life” in the short term, is simply an inadequate band aid where people have been displaced in excess of five, ten, or twenty years. During such time livelihoods, education, access to human rights and other requirements for a decent and secure life are put on hold or severely diminished. Structural violence, as defined by Farmer (2004), is a broad category that captures the denial of basic human needs and livelihoods that affords autonomy and a home. Farmer’s definition of structural violence is useful insofar as it is predicated on the erasure of history: “the most common explanatory sleight-of-hand relied upon by the architects of structural violence” (Farmer, 2004: 308). In a response to Farmer (ibid.), Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2004: 317-318) introduce the concept of structural violence as a “violence continuum” (ibid.) that moves from “direct physical assault to symbolic violence and routinized everyday violence, including the chronic historically embedded structural violence whose visibility is obscured by globalized hegemonies that Farmer denounces” (Farmer, 2004: 318). Lack of legal standing beyond prima facie refugee status provides a fertile context in which physical and mental deprivations easily can coincide with a continuum of violence. Such an approach departs from Farmer’s sole focus on poverty as the primary root of structural violence. Other countries and the international refugee regime, including humanitarians, also play a role. In the next section, we explore select theoretical approaches that address the material, psychological and political deprivation faced by those in long-term exile.