Overview

In a world shaped by war, climate disaster, and displacement, refugee camps are imagined as indispensable safe havens for millions of people fleeing crises. In Occupied Refuge, Hanno Brankamp challenges the presumed innocence of refugee humanitarianism as a system of civilian protection that can manage global inequalities and forced migration by peaceful means. He shows that although humanitarian missions aim to protect displaced populations in the global South, they often function as militarized occupations that treat camp inhabitants as new colonized subjects. Through ethnographic research in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, Brankamp demonstrates how aid operations rely on a combination of infrastructural expansion, militarized policing, ethno-racial subjugation, indirect rule, and economic extraction. By co-managing these camps with international aid agencies, the Kenyan state becomes not only a willing accomplice in planetary humanitarian containment but seeks to pacify its own peripheral territories, securitize unwanted migrants, and impose national rule. Illuminating how refugee camps serve as key sites where carceral protectionism, postcolonial nation-building, and global mobility control intersect, Brankamp calls for abolitionist futures beyond the violent structures of encampment, borders, and citizenship.

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9781478033134

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Reviews

“Occupied Refuge is an innovative, comprehensive, and ethnographically detailed study that marks a much-needed shift within refugee studies by situating the politics of refugee camps and their neoliberalization within a broader discussion of colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization.” - Nandita Sharma, author of Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants “Hanno Brankamp does an excellent job of situating the Kakuma camp in Kenya within a political and historical context, paying particular attention to the ways that national and international structures of power interact and shore each other up. Well-written and engaging, Occupied Refuge makes an important argument in a nuanced and powerful way that will resonate with scholars of political geography and global development.” - Jenna N. Hanchey, author of The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO

Author Information

Hanno Brankamp is a Lecturer in Critical Global Geographies in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

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