What Comes After The Refugee Camp

[John Ashworth]

What Comes After The Refugee Camp

As humanitarian funding collapses, the global system for dealing with
refugees is coming apart at the seams.

By Joshua Craze
Noema
June 23, 2026

After U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly suspended foreign
assistance last year, 100,000 residents of the Kakuma refugee camp
were told they would no longer receive humanitarian support. The camp
is in Kenya’s arid Turkana County and contains more than 300,000
people, who subsist almost entirely on aid. Trump’s cuts compounded
years of diminished support: In 2023, the World Food Programme (WFP)
reduced assistance from the equivalent of $17 a month per refugee —
enough for 80% of basic nutritional needs — to $13. In 2025, WFP
slashed support to $5 a month.

In response, residents protested, and humanitarians asked the Kenyan
police to repress the very people they were there to help. The cuts in
Kakuma were mirrored across the world. There are 6.6 million people
living in refugee camps, some 22% of the world’s refugee population,
and their futures are now in question.

Humanitarianism has been in retreat for some time, even before Trump’s
shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The
Global North is ever more skeptical of foreign assistance, partly
because of the wave of austerity that followed the 2008 financial
crisis and partly because of the rise of right-wing movements hostile
to overseas spending. U.S. reductions in humanitarian funding followed
similar cuts by the European Union (EU), France and Germany.
Proportionately, the U.K. slashed foreign assistance in 2025–26 even
more aggressively than America did.

Over the past year, I’ve watched the collapse unfold. As a writer and
researcher on the Horn of Africa, I often brief Western ambassadors,
and the diplomats who once celebrated their countries’ support for aid
agencies are now reconsidering their prior commitments. The
humanitarian sector ballooned in the 1980s as a means of ministering
to emergencies. In theory, aid workers would stabilize catastrophes
before development agencies took the lead and enabled formerly
war-torn countries to become functional states. That worldview no
longer makes sense.

Humanitarian emergencies have often become permanent, as countries
like Sudan remain mired in conflict, leading to refugee camps that
exist for decades, with donors — largely from the Global North —
bearing the cost. As the hope of viable governments in much of the
Horn of Africa recedes, donors question whether it is worth paying to
permanently administer palliative care to the world’s neediest.
European funds frequently flow to “migration management” instead.
Border enforcement consumes vastly more capital than feeding the
displaced. Even before Trump’s cuts, the detention center had replaced
the refugee camp as a policy priority.

The crisis in the global refugee regime does not mean that
humanitarian catastrophes have gone away. Quite the contrary. By the
end of 2025, 117 million people were displaced worldwide, a slight
decrease from a world record 123 million in 2024 — a peak partly due
to the continuing crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar
and Syria, along with the war in Sudan, which is the world’s largest
displacement crisis. In 2000, by comparison, there were 38 million
displaced.

For these refugees, the situation further deteriorated after Trump’s
cuts. In Rohingya settlements near Cox’s Bazar, on the southeast coast
of Bangladesh, more than a million people already faced severe
overcrowding and shrinking rations. After the cuts, essential camp
services were suspended and hospitals boarded up. WFP, which depended
on U.S. funds for many of its operations, was forced to triage between
the hungry and the starving. It removed all food assistance for a
million refugees in Uganda, while another 800,000 had their rations
reduced by up to 80%.

Across the world, humanitarian operations in refugee camps were
plunged into crisis by the implosion of aid budgets. The U.N. refugee
agency, the UNHCR, laid off 30% of its workforce and cut assistance to
13 million refugees. The U.N.’s International Organization for
Migration (IOM) let 6,000 staff members go, as its budget fell by 25%
in 2025 and contracted further in 2026. The institutions underlying
the global refugee regime, which have been in place since the 1950s,
were collapsing.

But what is to come will likely be far worse.

In July 2025, I walked through grazing land in South Sudan, the water
up to my chest. Once-in-a-century floods occur almost annually,
rendering vast tracts of the country uninhabitable. At the end of a
particularly arduous trek, I sat, disconsolate and humming with heat,
ready to vent my frustrations to anyone within earshot.

An old woman had spent the day hiking through the floods in the
opposite direction and let me know she didn’t think much of my
complaints. For the last year, she told me, she had been living on a
raft, eating only the fish she caught in the floodwaters. She was
coming to town to repair her mosquito net, and then she would return
to the swamp. It was safer there, she said, before muttering about
government airstrikes. Security, for her, meant a more aqueous form of
life, as far from the state as possible. Besides, she told me, she was
too old to leave South Sudan.

Many have already left, and many more will follow. Globally, the
number of people displaced by climate catastrophe is projected to
quadruple by 2050. Not that, sensu stricto, they will even be called
refugees. Under the terms of the U.N. Refugee Convention, which, along
with the 1967 Protocol, provides the basic coordinates of the global
regime governing displacement, those fleeing climate-change-induced
disaster are not accorded refugee status.

The Convention defines a refugee as an individual with a well-founded
fear of persecution because of their political opinions or membership
of a particular group. Such a definition does not encompass those
forced into exile by desertification or flooding, occurrences that the
Convention’s clauses treat as natural phenomena, despite the clearly
political dimensions of global warming.

Some scholars have advocated for an expanded agreement that recognizes
climate refugees, but in truth, even the modest clauses of the 1951
Convention would not be ratified today by states more concerned with
the sanctity of their borders than with humanely addressing
displacement. Though, as has been suggested in these pages,
contemporary problems are planetary in nature, our international
institutions nonetheless remain resolutely global bodies, answerable
to a reactionary set of nation-states whose governments conjure
demonic phantasms of cat-chomping migrants to win popular support.

It’s right to be horrified by the consequences of Trump’s cuts, which
have left millions without lifesaving assistance. But we should not
mourn a humanitarian system that was fundamentally unable to meet the
challenges of forced displacement. Reductions in funding had such
terrible consequences for refugees precisely because the displaced had
been kept in camps, dependent on aid and not allowed to work or
travel.

The refugee camp has always functioned as both a cage, constructed to
control its inhabitants, and a hospital, intended to keep its patients
on life support. Without the funds to sustain humanitarian assistance,
camps will become only cages, designed to prevent their inhabitants
from crossing borders.

Lineaments Of The Current Crisis

The term refugee camp was coined during the Boer War in South Africa
(1899–1902), when the British used it to refer to settlements in which
they kept both prisoners of war and the internally displaced.
Britain’s South African camps were prefigured by its colonial practice
in India, where they were built to quarantine the sick and victims of
famine, and to restrict population movement and quell political
activity. Camps were also employed as a form of colonial control by
the Spanish in Cuba and the Americans in the Philippines. As cages,
camps have a long history.

The contemporary global refugee regime takes its lineaments from
postwar Europe, as nations were created and the conflict’s survivors
searched for new homes. The U.N. Refugee Convention was first adopted
in 1951. Under the terms of the Convention, only Europeans displaced
in the years before its adoption were considered refugees.

Preliminary discussions of the Convention focused on non-refoulement,
the principle that asylum seekers cannot be returned to countries
where they face persecution. This was a reaction to the original sin
of the Global North: that many countries refused entry to Jewish
refugees during World War II. UNHCR was created with a mandate to deal
with refugees in the ruins of Europe. It treated them as individuals
with political problems and campaigned for their legal rights. They
were to find a place within the existing order of nation-states.

In 1967, the U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees expanded
the category to include non-Europeans and those displaced after 1951.
UNHCR campaigned for a more expansive mandate. It soon extended its
work to Africa and Asia, where the violent repression of anti-colonial
struggles and the creation of new nation-states had produced fresh
waves of displacement. This geographical shift came with a change of
emphasis for the U.N. agency.

Outside Europe, UNHCR granted refugees prima facie recognition but
only addressed their material needs. While the refugee and the asylum
seeker can be one and the same person, they would now be separated
geographically and legally. In some states, there would be the
possibility of seeking asylum, and with it, the promise of eventual
citizenship. Countries that have signed the 1951 Convention must admit
asylum seekers who arrive at their borders, at least in theory, but no
country has a duty to admit refugees living elsewhere, which means the
possibility of asylum has always been shaped by national immigration
policies.

By the 1970s, as economies in the Global North were thrown into
turmoil, opportunistic politicians scapegoated migrants for their
countries’ woes. The world’s richest countries were pulling up their
drawbridges, making it increasingly difficult for the displaced to
find places to claim asylum.

This left UNHCR in some difficulty. What was it to do with the world’s
refugees? The agency has long had three preferred solutions for
dealing with those who have fled their homelands: return, resettlement
or integration. UNHCR’s overwhelming preference is to return refugees
to their country of origin. This is difficult to do when states are
whole only on maps. UNHCR hoped that the wars that scarred the Horn of
Africa in the 1990s would be exceptions, and their end would enable
refugee return and state-building. These conflicts, however, have
proved more enduring than many of the region’s nation-states, which
means that for these refugees, return is rarely an option.

Resettlement in a foreign country, UNHCR’s second preferred option,
has only ever been possible for a vanishingly small number of
refugees. While resettlement was occasionally a useful propaganda tool
during the Cold War, in the decades since, political fears around
migration in the Global North have made it ever more restricted. The
pandemic sounded an initial death knell for resettlement, with numbers
falling by over 50% from 2019 to 2021. In 2024, 188,800 of a total of
42.7 million refugees globally were resettled in a third country.
Trump’s cancellation of the U.S. resettlement program in January 2025
was a dramatic spectacle, but one that followed a script written many
years before.

Integrating the displaced into host communities, the third of UNHCR’s
preferred options, seemed possible during the 1960s and 1970s, as
optimistic postcolonial governments led schemes to incorporate
refugees into rural settlements. In Africa, things changed during the
1980s. The 1979 oil spike led to spiraling commodity and energy prices
and was swiftly followed by brutal debt crises and the hollowing out
of many of the continent’s developmental states. African governments
struggled to cope with increased flows of displaced people.

The problem was made more difficult by the presence of armed groups
inside refugee camps set up in the 1990s for those who had fled wars
in Burundi, Congo and Rwanda. As was already the case in the Global
North, for many African governments, refugees were best kept out of
national politics rather than integrated.

The refugee camp became a politically expedient way of dealing with
displaced persons in Africa and Asia, satisfactory to all parties
except for the displaced, who were not consulted. In the 1980s, as
African states contracted, the humanitarian sector expanded. It
shouldered responsibility for refugees, as long as they were in camps.
Western governments — the principal donors to the humanitarian
agencies — were only too happy with this development, which
strengthened their control over Africa just as regional states were
being weakened, all under the banner of a depoliticized
humanitarianism.

In the official rhetoric of the U.N. and the nations that fund it,
camps were unfortunate, temporary measures. In reality, refugee camps
became the default option for the displaced. Funding them meant
providing food and canvas tents to the neediest — a humanitarian
gesture that avoided tricky questions about rights.

Camps were also politically useful. Housing refugees in remote rural
settlements in the Global South, donors hoped, would mean they
wouldn’t travel north and claim asylum. For host governments, the
camps helped prevent debates over citizenship. They also proved
profitable. Governments made money from humanitarians — partly by
providing the logistics the aid sector needed and partly by taxing aid
workers — and local communities could find work in the camps.

Refugee camp governance has always been intertwined with and dependent
on state power. In Kakuma, aid workers have relied on the hard edge of
the Kenyan police force, a point the geographer Hanno Brankamp noted
in his book published earlier this year, “Occupied Refuge:
Humanitarian Colonization and the Camp in Kenya.”

Despite the great diversity of political situations that have led to
camps worldwide, those run by UNHCR are remarkably consistent. Because
residency in camps is predicated on the idea that refugees are there
temporarily, either to be resettled or to return home, refugees are
not allowed to work, be politically active or acquire citizenship. In
2023, one young humanitarian, working in a Sudanese refugee camp in
South Sudan, told me: “We can’t give people careers. We just address
basic needs. And the truth is, we don’t do that very well.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, each major African conflict zone produced its
own camps, a development mirrored elsewhere as camps soon spread
across Asia. Henceforth, refugees would be held in limbo, captured in
canvas, without political rights, and the humanitarian sector would
care for them until they could return home.

In Um Rakouba, Sudan, where Ethiopian refugees fled in the early
1980s, the displaced insisted that employment opportunities should be
equitably rotated among the camp’s residents, so everyone had access
to cash. The humanitarians in the camp were appalled: hiring decisions
were to be made by the aid agencies. The refugees refused rations when
their wishes were not granted. The two sides clashed over everything,
from how food was to be distributed to where refugees were to settle.

The anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond, the doyenne of refugee
studies, published one of the first critiques of camps in 1986,
“Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees.” UNHCR ruled the
camps like a dictator, Harrell-Bond argued, denying refugees any
control over their own lives. The very category of the refugee, she
claimed, was an artificial imposition, maintained for the convenience
of the NGOs. Humanitarian budgets might be bolstered by portraying
refugees as victims, but that didn’t help the displaced, who wanted to
have a say in their own futures.

The humanitarians whom Harrell-Bond interviewed blamed the suspension
of refugee rights on the demands of host governments. But this was a
dodge, and only ever partially true. Across the Horn of Africa, I’ve
heard aid workers argue that refugees only require material
assistance, not political rights. In any event, they tell me, such
measures, like the camps themselves, are temporary.

That was 40 years ago. What was intended as a stopgap has become a
permanent fixture of our world. Each war creates another set of camps.
Few close, as conflict and disaster render return impossible. Refugee
camps today are an institutionalized feature of the U.N.’s response to
displacement. There are best-practice manuals, trade fairs where IKEA
hawks new refugee shelters, hundreds of international organizations
and aid workers who have made careers out of camps.

The two main Kenyan refugee camps, Dadaab and Kakuma, were founded in
the 1990s. Children born in the first years of these settlements are
now in their thirties but still have no right to either citizenship or
political participation in the country in which they have grown up.
The camps were designed to be non-places, intended for non-people.

This stopgap solution never really made sense, not if you were a
refugee in Kakuma, waiting for life to begin. Over the last couple of
years, even the material assistance offered by the aid agencies has
largely ceased. The refugee camp, in its humanitarian guise, existed
from the 1980s through to 2025. What comes next is already visible:
the camp as a cage.

Caging Humanity

As the Syrian refugee crisis worsened in 2015–16, more than a million
people fled to Europe in search of help, the largest population
movement on the continent since World War II. The crisis led Europe to
intensify its efforts to move its border-enforcement mechanisms
farther south, effectively externalizing its frontiers. With the
notable exception of Germany, which opened its doors to over a million
refugees, most European states not only closed their borders but also
proactively paid to keep the displaced outside them. The EU signed a
$6.6 billion deal with Turkey in 2016 to keep Syrian refugees on its
soil.

By 2018, European officials were calling Niger, Libya and Sudan
“Europe’s new southern border.” The people who were to be prevented
from moving to Europe were not just Syrians, but almost anyone from
the Global South. Where there were once refugee camps, there is now a
21st-century fortress, constructed from drones and digital
surveillance networks, guarded by militias funded by the EU.

Such externalization of national borders takes different forms
elsewhere in the Global North. In Australia, the government has
created a system of offshore processing centers for asylum seekers who
manage to reach its shores; America has a growing set of detention
centers inside its borders and has also subcontracted prisons
elsewhere in the world — from the Centro de Confinamiento del
Terrorismo in El Salvador, where deportees are kept incommunicado and
subjected to torture, to the Matsapha Correctional Complex in
Eswatini, where similar things happen.

Agadez, Niger, lies at the edge of the Sahara and is a staging post
for refugees making the long journey to Europe. The Nigerien
government established a camp there in 2018, which is managed by
UNHCR. Funding for the camp comes from European nations that want to
prevent movement north. As of September 2025, it housed some 2,000
refugees, largely from Sudan. Its residents are not allowed to work or
move freely.

UNHCR calls the Agadez camp a “humanitarian centre,” though there is
little humanitarian about it. There is limited access to health and
educational services, and since July 2025, only 270 of the 2,000
refugees have received food rations. Protests have occurred daily
since September 2024, and the Nigerien security forces have responded
violently. In August 2025, the government disappeared six human rights
activists from the site.

Even if the refugees held in Agadez somehow made it north, they would
encounter detention centers in Libya, where the EU has poured millions
into security forces to detain the displaced. Across the country,
refugees are rounded up by these forces, imprisoned, and transferred
at gunpoint into warehouses where they are tortured and kept without
food or medical care until they can pay for their release.

Other refugees flee to Tunisia, where the EU also funds security
services and conditions are just as dire. If the refugees make it onto
boats, they might drown at sea (more than 600 people died crossing the
Mediterranean in the first two months of 2026), or else be arrested by
the Libyan coast guard, which might forcibly expel them or abandon
them in the desert.

If refugees manage to escape the detention centers, cross the
uncertain waters, and avoid being detained or killed by the Libyan
coast guard, then they will arrive in Europe, where there are more
than 400 detention centers ready to greet them. The ones at Europe’s
edges tend to have the harshest conditions. After Moria, a camp on
Lesbos, Greece, was destroyed by a fire in 2020, the Greek government
used EU funds to construct a detention center on the island of Samos.
The camp is hidden in a forest far from town, with high walls crowned
by barbed wire. It resembles a prison. This isn’t an accident. “Return
or prison” was the ultimatum Greece’s Minister of Migration, Thanos
Plevris, gave “illegal migrants” in a speech in October 2025.

Migrants in Germany are now being removed to two detention centers in
Bulgaria, where prisoners have little access to medical care or legal
services, and face swift deportations after farcical asylum hearings.
Europe, the continent for which the 1951 Convention’s right to asylum
was created, is doing its best to criminalize it.

This attempt to block refugees from entering Europe will only
intensify. Europe has seen a wave of nationalist parties gain
popularity, and the policies of even the more progressive parties have
shifted rightward. The cruelty of Europe’s asylum legislation today is
determined by an electoral calculus, as politicians across the
continent vie to be the toughest on migration.

The rightward tilt of global politics over the last decade indicates
that drumming up such hatred is a vote-winner. The Alternative für
Deutschland — a far-right party that wants to effectively end asylum
as a right — won almost 21% of the vote in the February 2025 national
election. Germany now wishes to expel the very refugees it once
welcomed. In March 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged Syrian
refugees to voluntarily return, even though two-thirds of Syria
remains dependent on humanitarian aid. If they refuse, Merz promised
to deport them.

On June 12, a new European Pact on Migration and Asylum went into
effect. Under this agreement, people who arrive in Europe irregularly
(bureaucratese for those without the legal means to enter the EU) will
be detained and then pushed into accelerated asylum procedures without
safeguards like legal aid. This effectively criminalizes asylum, for
there is no regular way for Afghans and Somalis to reach Europe and
apply, and Europe — like the rest of the Global North — does not
accept asylum applications from outside its borders.

As popular as these policies may be, the detention center, like the
refugee camp, is not a meaningful response to mass migration into
Europe. When the EU externalized its frontiers into North Africa, the
migrant sea route from Senegal to the Canary Islands saw traffic
surge. When Europe hardened Morocco’s borders, building fences and
surveillance systems, departures from Mauritania along the risky
Atlantic route skyrocketed. The EU is now expanding its deportation
agreements with Senegal and Mauritania and supporting the construction
of yet more detention centers in those countries.

All these schemes ignore the fact that migratory flows into Europe are
fundamentally driven by geopolitical conditions rather than by EU
border policy. The global number of the displaced changes due to wars
and catastrophes, not barbed wire and drones. The detention center
fails to recognize the dynamics that undergird population movement and
offers no answer to the question of what should be done in an era of
climate-change-induced migration.

Today’s UNHCR is in an unenviable position. The U.N. agency has two
fundamental duties: to protect refugees and find durable solutions for
them. Yet none of its three preferred solutions — return, resettlement
or integration — are politically viable for the agency. Even before
the pandemic and the accession of Trump 2.0, UNHCR resettled just
2,000 of the refugees in Libya each year, due to the reluctance of
states in the Global North. Host governments in North Africa have
hardened their policies toward refugees in response to the promise of
EU funding and have little interest in offering them viable lives,
which takes integration off the table.

UNHCR has today become a proxy for its principal donors, which wish to
block refugee movement, not enable it. Since 2015, it — like the EU —
has provided training workshops and equipment to the Libyan coast
guard. The U.N.’s IOM has also helped the EU block migration to
Europe. In Libya, it assisted more than 30,000 voluntary refugee
returns in 2017–18, though human rights organizations argue these
returns aren’t voluntary if the alternative is detention.

Elsewhere, U.N. agencies find themselves on the soft side of America’s
deportation campaigns. In Panama, IOM helps Trump with those who
self-deport from the U.S. In Greece, IOM oversees the “Assisted
Voluntary Return and Reintegration” program and receives a cash bonus
for every refugee it deports. UNHCR assists in policing Greece’s
detention centers. Its three preferred solutions have narrowed to two:
forced return or indefinite detention.

UNHCR and IOM’s new roles are political choices. These agencies accede
to the Global North’s framing, which treats protecting borders as
essential and protecting human life as optional. At its origin, UNHCR
was mandated to help refugees find a place in Europe. Now it tries to
do everything it can to bar their entry. The reactionary policies of
the U.N. represent a profound failure of the imagination. How might we
imagine a world in which we can all lead flourishing lives, as climate
change radically transforms our planet? To such a question, the U.N.
has no answer.

Can The Camp Be A City?

UNHCR is ultimately answerable to its donor states, and it is naïve to
imagine there will be a shift in the nativist logic of the Global
North’s politics. If there is a role for UNHCR beyond that of a prison
warden, it is to once again advocate for refugees’ political rights
and support their efforts to define their own futures, rather than
treating their political activity as a threat, as the agency does in
Agadez and Kakuma.

For though the era of humanitarian refugee camps is over, the
settlements themselves are not going anywhere. Some scholars hope that
the refugee camps of the past might become the cities of the future,
and refugees may be able to lead productive lives exactly where they
are. In much of the discussion of such future cities, refugee voices
themselves have been sidelined. UNHCR could advocate for the displaced
just as it did in Europe in the 1950s.

One scheme that warns against optimistic readings of the world after
the refugee camp is the Jordan Compact, a three-way agreement between
the Jordanian monarchy, the EU and the U.N. Launched with much fanfare
in 2016, the compact would draw on “Refuge: Transforming a Broken
Refugee System,” by political scientist Alexander Betts and economist
Paul Collier, which mourns the waste of life in refugee camps and
instead suggests putting refugees to work. European states would
provide the grants and concessional loans, and Jordan would issue the
refugees’ work permits.

Goods produced in Jordan’s special economic zones by companies with at
least 15% Syrian workers would also receive a range of EU incentives.
Further cash flowed into Jordan to support this program, including a
$1.4 billion line of credit from the World Bank and some $4 billion in
refugee-related aid from Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere — more than
any other country in the world that year.

The Jordan Compact failed at every level. Refugees were restricted to
menial labor to limit competition with locals and were unwilling to
travel long distances to work for low wages. The government also
required increased social security contributions from the refugees,
which risked putting them in debt for very low-paying jobs. Investors
and industry also proved uninterested in the scheme. Two years into
the project, only 11 companies were involved.

One reason it failed, according to historian Laura Robson in “Human
Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work,” is that Syrian
refugees were too closely connected to local networks and had higher
wage requirements than the poorly paid Egyptian and South Asian
migrant laborers who typically sustain Jordan’s manufacturing sector.
Even if it had created new proletarians, though, the scheme would not
have afforded a flourishing life for the Syrian refugees, for it
offered them no political rights.

The “Shirika Plan” unfolding in Kenya is likely to repeat some of the
same mistakes. As part of its “encampment policy,” which began in
1991, the Kenyan government pushed its more than 840,000 refugees into
Dadaab and Kakuma. That policy meant refugees had no freedom of
movement or rights to work or live outside of the camps; those who
managed to get to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, lived in constant fear of
arrest.

In 2021, the Kenyan government passed a Refugee Act that, if fully
implemented, would allow refugees freedom of movement, the right to
work and access to financial services. One of the central planks of
the new policy is to turn the two camps into cities. Kakuma, at least
before the economic crisis produced by Trump’s cuts, had an economy of
$56 million. In 2025, both Dadaab and Kakuma were redesignated as
municipalities, initially under U.N. management, but they will
eventually be administered by their host counties, Garissa and
Turkana, respectively. The redesignation, including infrastructure
construction, will cost around a billion dollars, largely funded by
the World Bank.

Refugees have questioned whether the plan will work. Both camps are in
arid landscapes, which make agriculture very difficult, and both have
been extremely dependent on humanitarian aid. It’s unclear whether the
camps will be economically viable, given the extent of the aid agency
cuts and continued uncertainty over whether refugees will actually be
allowed to work outside the camps. There is also doubt about whether
refugees will have any say in how municipalities develop. As one
refugee journalist based in Dadaab told “The New Humanitarian”:

“Kenyan citizens have their rights, but we don’t have any
representation. They have MCAs [Members of the County Assembly], MPs,
a president and governors. But we have no one to represent us. The
only representation we have is in UNHCR. Our representation starts
there and ends there. And in any conflict, the one who will be
affected is the refugee.”

The danger is that the Shirika Plan will preserve what was most
fundamentally baleful about Dadaab and Kakuma under humanitarian rule:
the absence of political structures in which refugees could actualize
their own programs and desires. The polis, for thinkers from Aristotle
to Hannah Arendt, is a space for political beings. For Arendt, it is
only through moral and intellectual exchange among citizens that one
might arrive at a flourishing life.

The Shirika Plan suspends questions of citizenship and political
rights and therefore tends in the same direction as the Jordan
Compact. While it doesn’t treat the camps’ residents as pure victims,
as humanitarians might, they now become laborers. It is still unclear
whether they would have the freedom to leave the confines of Garissa
and Turkana. The camps may end up looking like cities, but they would
nonetheless remain cages.

A World Of Camps

Though the era of the camp is over, the cages continue to be built. In
the detention center, the special economic zone and the faux city, one
can observe the same combination of suspended political rights and
denial of movement that characterized the refugee camp. All
contemporary debate about mass displacement is desiccated by its
assumptions: that the sanctity of nation-state borders is the highest
good, and that, ultimately, refugees are a problem.

Earlier generations thought much more imaginatively about the issue.
In 1949, a group of intellectuals, including Albert Einstein —
himself, of course, a refugee — and Bertrand Russell, wrote a letter
to U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie, suggesting a more cosmopolitan
way to deal with refugees: a world passport for the displaced.
“History made them citizens of the world, and they should be treated
as such.”

The refugee problem was an opportunity to “let the ideal of
world-citizenship subsist not exclusively in theories and programs,
but also in courageous experimenting and a genuine respect for the
human person.” The International Refugee Organization, a precursor to
UNHCR, reacted with hostility:

“Here are people to whom you say: be proud of your statelessness,
remain this way and become the first world citizens! … But stateless
persons know all too well what they desire: to stop being stateless.
Not out of sentimentality, but to obtain asylum, passport, a work
permit, or access to a hospital.”

Their response has produced our world today, with its growing numbers
of stateless people and refugees. Our inability to think beyond the
nation-state has been held in abeyance by a humanitarian system that
at least enabled refugees to sustain life. But that system has been
replaced by a darker vision of the world as an archipelago of
detention centers, violently and fruitlessly trying to contain the
displaced people of the globe and prevent them from coming to the
Global North.

We stand at the dawn of massive climate-change-induced displacement,
with no substantive discussion about how to deal with it, and no
interest in exploring our planetary responsibility for those whose
homes will be devastated by desertification and flooding. For the
children of the old woman whom I met in the South Sudanese swamps in
July 2025, the Global North offers only indifference and detention
centers.

https://www.noemamag.com/what-comes-after-the-refugee-camp/

END
______________________
John Ashworth

ashwor...@gmail.com

+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)

PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya