Home in Refugee Camps

This chapter examines the concept of home in refugee camps and explores how homes are perceived in such sites. During the past decade, the number of displaced people living in state-run or makeshift camps across the globe has been steadily increasing. In the chapter, I consider the planning rationales, living conditions, power relations, and the processes of home making and belonging in refugee camps. I also analyse experiences of surveillance, control, and confinement and possibilities for agency, solidarity, and housing commoning practices among residents of refugee camps. I argue that the camp, and home in the camp, can be perceived as polysemic spaces balanced between authoritarian military humanitarianism and inventive social practices of contestation. Critical attention to home is an urgent priority in understanding lived experience of the growing global archipelago of refugee camps.