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The introduction, “Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp,” The Introduction, “Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp,” asks what we learn when we look closely at a refugee camp, and argues for understanding it not as object but event, one that unfolds into lifeworlds of migration. It situates an architecture of migration as a theoretical vantage point from which to understand enclosures. It provides sociospatial and historical context for the Dadaab refugee camps, as spaces where forces of belonging, sedentarization, and underdevelopment undergird complex processes of humanitarian settlement. The Introduction introduces and analyzes architectures within the Dadaab refugee camps, and epistemological and ethical problems in studying with them.
The introduction, “Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp,” The Introduction, “Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp,” asks what we learn when we look closely at a refugee camp, and argues for understanding it not as object but event, one that unfolds into lifeworlds of migration. It situates an architecture of migration as a theoretical vantage point from which to understand enclosures. It provides sociospatial and historical context for the Dadaab refugee camps, as spaces where forces of belonging, sedentarization, and underdevelopment undergird complex processes of humanitarian settlement. The Introduction introduces and analyzes architectures within the Dadaab refugee camps, and epistemological and ethical problems in studying with them.
Chapter One, “From Partitions,” explores the argument foundational to the book: that underlying a refugee camp is a partition. Two forms of partition are central to understanding the Dadaab refugee camps' history: the partition of land, a colonial practice that entrenches territorial contestations, and the partition of the self, a humanitarian practice that stratifies the lives of persons. Through a dialogue between the author and Alishine Osman, a former Dadaab resident,the architectural and political divide created by the camps provides an opening onto the construction of a humanitarian borderland. It examines humanitarian settlement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the partition of the Somali Jubaland in the twentieth century to study how emergency intervention entangled discourses on human rights with those of territory. Learning from the refugee camp thus enables a conceptual reorientation toward it.
Chapter Two, “Land, Emergency, and Sedentarization in East Africa,” argues through the concept of enclosure (as legal strategy and empirical space) that the refugee camp iterates approaches to land that intertwine the construction of emergency territory with sedentarization. The chapter opens with Maganai Saddiq Hassan's farm, a lush, green cultivated area on an assigned plot within the arid landscape of Dagaheley refugee camp, imbricating the history of enslavement behind her agricultural skill with that of Dadaab's marginal territory, the colonial and postcolonial manyattas (villages, or settlements) that were predecessors to the refugee camps, and the ubiquitous makuti and tuqul architectures that represent a long history of sedentarization and resistance: arguing that the abolitionist cultivation of land justified humanitarian settlement, producing a moral imperative pathologizing the nomad and instituting the drive to mass sedentarization by carceral means.
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