Elisabeth Olivius. Critical Asian Studies. Volume 49, Issue 3, September 2017.
Introduction
Refugee camps are frequently perceived as aberrant spaces of emergency, misery, and social breakdown. Giorgio Agamben has famously conceptualized the camp as a space of exception where regular laws cease to apply and people are reduced to “bare life.” The construction of refugee camps as exceptional is closely linked to a perception of them as temporary solutions for emergencies; and because camps are assumed to be temporary, the suspension of the human rights of refugees, for example their right to move freely, can be legitimated. As Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles observe, “[w]hile refugees are nominally covered by human rights covenants and refugee law, ‘temporary’ camps have become extra-legal spaces of liminality where rights are optional.” However, contemporary refugee camps are not only a temporary arrangement for the management of emergencies. These also have evolved into a technology for the indefinite containment of large numbers of people. Since the end of the Cold War in particular, refugee camps have increasingly become semi-permanent closed villages and cities where refugees in some cases live their entire lives. Indeed, “the humanitarian apparatus has been transformed into a custodial regime for innocent people.”
Thus, refugee camps are also spaces where millions of people’s everyday lives are lived as they seek to make ends meet and build a life for themselves to the best of their abilities. As such, refugee camps are political spaces where struggles over the right to influence life in the camps and shape how they are governed are continuously ongoing. In this context, what are the opportunities for political participation for refugees living in camps? How and to what extent are refugees able to carve out political space where they can engage with and affect their lives and their situations, despite the constraints imposed upon them by confinement in camps? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of refugee camps in Thailand. Based on interviews with humanitarian workers and refugee activists, it examines how government policies, humanitarian aid practices, and forms of refugee mobilization and organization shape refugees’ opportunities for political participation in a refugee camp context. The analysis shows that the practice of encampment of refugees is situated within a humanitarian regime which privileges refugee passivity and impedes recognition of refugees as political actors. Political organizing and action by refugees is often neglected, bypassed, and even repressed by host governments and humanitarian aid agencies due to concerns about security and order.
Nonetheless, refugees can and do act politically and carve out political space despite the constraints imposed by this regime of governance. This article demonstrates that, as Michel Foucault argued, power and resistance are indeed intertwined; the very technologies of power that are employed to govern refugees are also creatively subverted and appropriated as bases for resistance and political mobilization. In particular, spatial confinement in camps and developmental interventions aimed at educating and modernizing refugees constitute key strategies for control, but are also used by refugees in their own political struggles.
Given current realities in which large numbers of people live their lives in sites such as refugee camps, enabling meaningful political participation and self-governance in such contexts is essential if refugees are to be treated as people worthy of living with dignity, not merely as people whose lives are to be saved or who are viewed as threats to be controlled and contained. However, widespread and increasing securitization of refugees is a major obstacle to the realization of such a vision.
The article proceeds as follows. In the following section I conceptualize refugee camps as political spaces that can accommodate diverse structures of power and governance, and where repression as well as resistance may be enacted. This is followed by an overview of the refugee camp context in Thailand. After this, I analyze how political action by refugees is inhibited, but nevertheless takes place, in these camps. In conclusion, I discuss the political and ethical implications for the governance of refugees.
Theorizing the Camp as Political Space
Scholarly interest in refugee camps recently has increased, not least in the wake of Agamben’s work in which camps are conceptualized as an aberrant space of exception. However, in reaction to this view others have analyzed camps as social and political spaces, emphasizing the agency and political subjectivity of refugees. This article contributes to this latter literature by applying a Foucauldian perspective on power, governance, agency, and resistance in refugee camps. I argue that refugee camps are both sites of repressive and sometimes dehumanizing governance and sites of refugee resistance and agency; indeed, these dimensions of the social world of the camp are interlinked.
In his theorization of modern disciplinary power, Foucault uses two medieval phenomena as models for the two main mechanisms of power that he argues are directed at “abnormal” populations and individuals. First, the exclusion of lepers from society, cutting them off from all contact with humans not branded as lepers, is the model for exclusionary projects targeting groups such as beggars, madmen, and vagabonds. The political dream underlying these “rituals of exclusion” is the dream of a pure community – a community in which those who do not belong have been removed. Second, the plague-ridden, quarantined city is a model for the political dream of a disciplined, perfectly controlled and governed society; a society “traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing.” This is a society where all individual bodies are perfectly distributed in their proper places and subjected to a set of techniques to measure, supervise, correct, and reform them. Thus, Foucault claims, “[a]ll the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive.”
This conceptualization of disciplinary power is an apt description of the global governance of refugees, which sheds light on the function of refugee camps as technologies of governing. On the one hand, refugees are governed as undesirables who must be excluded from ordinary society. In a world order of nation states, refugees are anomalies or “misfits” who simultaneously threaten the nation state system and, by being its constitutive other, reaffirm the norm of territorial belonging and citizenship. In this context a camp is the preferred model for delivering humanitarian aid to refugees and a key technology to make refugees governable. Encampment of refugees is preferred by host governments and humanitarian agencies because it enables spatial control of refugees, efficient delivery of aid, and isolation of refugees from the host society. Refugees in camps are typically not allowed to move outside the camp boundaries, constituting an enclave ambiguously situated outside of the social and political systems of the host state. Moreover, together with measures such as the externalization of asylum in the global North, refugee camps serve the purpose of keeping refugees in the global South, where the global majority of refugees are located. They thus contribute to keeping communities in the North “pure.”
On the other hand, refugees have often been problematized as amoral, dangerous, and prone to terrorism and crime. In this context, the refugee camp does not only operate as a technology of control, but also as a technology of care, making refugees available to a range of therapeutic interventions seeking to rehabilitate, reform, and develop them. Because refugees are not considered to possess the capabilities of self-regulation, responsibility, and autonomy required for liberal citizenship, humanitarian interventions in refugee camps seek to foster these capabilities and make refugees fit to enter the national order of things. Further, the existence of refugees is today frequently represented as a global security threat resulting from the “underdevelopment” of their societies and regions of origin. Refugees are therefore not only governed as populations that must be separated out and excluded, but also as individuals who need to be developed, modernized, and improved. Thus, the refugee camp is a technology which enables exclusion as well as reform – to brand as well as to alter the “abnormal individual.” Importantly however, the containment and the development of refugees in camps are interlinked; both mechanisms of power serve the purpose of preventing the dangerous effects of underdevelopment and disorder from spreading beyond the “global borderlands.” The existence of refugee camps is thereby intimately intertwined with global relations of power and inequality.
However, given its function as a technology for exclusion and reform of refugees, how can the refugee camp be understood as a political space? The concept of political space draws analytical attention to the material and discursive boundaries that define what actors, interests, and ideas may gain access to and which are excluded from political participation and influence. As these boundaries are continually contested, some actors strive to expand political space to make claims on governing authorities or effect social or institutional change; others aim to delimit and police the boundaries of political space. In the case of the Thai refugee camps, a wide variety of formal and non-formal activities that aim to shape the conditions of camp life or achieve more long-term goals such as elections, protests, and engagement in community-based organizations (CBOs) are conceptualized as instances of political participation, transpiring within and shaping the boundaries of political space.
In refugee camps a multitude of different actors with different interests and motivations are present, and struggles over the power to influence life in the camp are constant. Camps are thus far from unanimously controlled by one hegemonic governing power. Rather, the governance of refugee camps involves complex relations of authority and divisions of labor. Formally, camps are under the jurisdiction of the host state, whose authority is enforced by the presence of police or paramilitary personnel, typically focusing on controlling the movement of refugees and punishing offences committed by them. In most situations, the day-to-day administration of camps and the distribution of material assistance are carried out by United Nations organizations and humanitarian NGOs, usually coordinated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). As a result, refugee camps are governed by a diverse constellation of international humanitarian organizations and host state authorities that do not necessarily agree on perceptions, goals, and priorities. The composition of these constellations varies considerably between different camps, as do their specific divisions of responsibility and relations of authority. The involvement and role of refugees themselves in the provision of aid and camp governance also differ widely. Thus, the political space of the refugee camp is populated by a variety of actors and characterized by complex and unequal relations of power. As Barbara Harrell-Bond and Eftihia Voutira have noted, “[a]lthough aid is the unifying principle that brings these diverse groups together, the administration of aid requires a whole machinery of power, the struggle and exercise of which defines the social reality of each refugee camp.”
Obviously, refugees occupy a subordinated position in camp power relations, dependent as they are on the goodwill of other actors. However, this does not mean that refugees cannot act politically to shape their situations and their lives. As Foucault emphasized, the exercise of power is never without cracks and openings where resistance takes place. Rather, “[w]here there is power, there is resistance … points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network.” Thus, all governing projects are perpetually unfinished and open to contestation. Consequently, exclusion and reform are not necessarily the only logics that shape refugee camps as political spaces. Foucault defined resistance and contestation as integral to power relations; resistance is always exercised on the terrain established by existing relations of power, and does not operate from outside power. For example, as Amrita Pande demonstrates in an analysis of surrogacy clinics in India, confined spaces do not only serve purposes of control, but can also give rise to new forms of collective identity and political mobilization. In a similar fashion, Erin Baines has noted how Guatemalan refugee women’s political awareness and engagement increased in displacement, because life in camps in Mexico provided more opportunities to come together, share experiences, and discuss their situations in comparison to village life.
Thus, while spatial confinement and interventions aiming to reform and improve refugees are technologies of power deployed in the governance of refugees, they can also provide bases for resistance to humanitarian aid practices or host government policies, and give rise to new forms of political mobilization and agency. Foucauldian analytics, I argue, are well suited to capturing this ambiguity of refugee camp power relations. Such an approach is therefore useful in an analysis seeking to explore the refugee camp as a political space where repressive governance as well as political mobilization and resistance are enacted in locally specific ways.
Burmese Refugees and Humanitarian Aid in Thailand
Most of independent Myanmar’s history has been marked by military dictatorship, civil war, and ethnic conflict. However, in recent years significant steps toward democratization have been taken, accompanied by a number of parallel peace processes which have managed to halt fighting in much of the country. While this constitutes a promising development, ethnic discrimination and persecution have not ceased, and violence between the government and armed insurgency groups still occurs. Furthermore, internal displacement remains high, and nearly 500,000 refugees from Myanmar remain displaced in neighboring countries, making this one of the most protracted refugee situations in the world. As of 2017, conditions are still not deemed to be conducive for refugees to return to Myanmar.
During Myanmar’s conflict years, Thailand has been the main destination for political exiles, refugees from various ethnic minorities, and ethnic insurgent armed forces. The first refugee camps on the Thai side of the Thai–Myanmar border were established in 1984 when Karen refugees fled following advances in the counterinsurgency campaign of the Burmese military against the Karen National Union (KNU). The KNU, formed in 1947 to fight for an independent Karen nation, was engaged in armed struggle against the government until a ceasefire was agreed to in 2012. Pervasive human rights abuses committed as part of the government’s counterinsurgency campaign have forced people in the border regions of eastern Myanmar to live in constant fear during nearly sixty years of war. Since the establishment of the first camps, the number of refugees in Thailand has steadily increased due to gradual losses of territory controlled by the KNU and other ethnic insurgent forces.
Currently there are about 110,000 refugees in nine camps along the border. The majority are Karen, but there are also Karenni, Shan, Mon, as well as some Burman refugees. Humanitarian aid and services are mainly provided by a network of approximately twenty national and international NGOs. The Thai government has historically taken a comparatively hands-off position, although military police are present in the camps to maintain law and order and monitor the movement of refugees. The UNHCR began operations on the Thai–Burmese border in 1998, fourteen years after the establishment of the camps, and have a primarily monitoring role.
Aid and services are coordinated and partly implemented by the refugees themselves through a system of community-based camp management. This model gives the refugees a considerable degree of self-governance and is significantly different from the way humanitarian assistance is usually administered. The camps are governed by elected refugee committees. In seven of the nine camps in Thailand the Karen Refugee Committee (KRC) and a camp committee are responsible for the day-to-day running of each camp and coordinate services such as education, health, and justice. The camps and their refugee leadership have remained closely linked to the KNU struggle for Karen self-determination, and have been bases for various kinds of political activism targeting the situation in Myanmar as well as in the camps. In addition to the KRC and its subcommittees, these camps also have a number of other CBOs, for example women’s organizations, youth organizations, and student organizations. Many of these CBOs are involved in political activism relating to the situation in the camps and in Karen State in Myanmar. The most prominent of these is the Karen Women Organization (KWO), founded in 1949 and with a current membership exceeding 49,000 in Myanmar and in the Thai border camps. Camp governance structures and forms of civil engagement, modeled on Karen social norms, have gradually evolved in the encounter with humanitarian agencies and donors over the years.
Since 2005 a large-scale resettlement program has been ongoing, and to date more than 80,000 refugees have been resettled in foreign countries. However, people have continued to seek safety in the camps, so the total refugee population has not decreased significantly in the intervening years. Recent developments in Myanmar have raised hopes that the ongoing political reforms and the still fragile peace in Karen areas of the country may eventually create conditions where repatriation is possible.
The comparatively strong position of refugee organizations in the governance of the Thai camps arguably creates a relatively favorable environment for refugees’ political participation. However, these Thai camps are by no means unique in being sites of various forms of refugee activism and political struggles. The high degree of political mobilization in these camps makes them a useful case for studying not only how refugees claim political space, but also how governing authorities seek to manage and restrict this space.
Method and Materials
The analysis presented here is based on thirty-three formal interviews with humanitarian workers employed by United Nations agencies and NGOs, and refugee activists representing the refugee governance structures and other CBOs in the camps. The interviews were conducted in 2010 and 2011. Most interviews were conducted in the area around the border town of Mae Sot, a major hub for the humanitarian aid operation along the border; others were conducted in Bangkok. Interviews have been complemented with reports and documentation from humanitarian UN agencies and NGOs, as well as notes and observations made during my fieldwork in Thailand.
This study primarily focuses on the three camps closest to Mae Sot: Mae La, Umpiem Mai, and Nu Po. While many aspects of my analysis may be relevant to all nine camps along the border, my material primarily covers humanitarian agencies and refugee organizations in the three Mae Sot camps. The interviewees consisted of women and men of various ages, both foreign and domestic. Each interview lasted for approximately one hour.
My initial interviews focused on how the promotion of gender equality was organized in the work of the interviewees, and on the meanings they ascribed to gender equality as a policy goal in the context of humanitarian aid in refugee camps. I sought to capture how power, participation, and influence were distributed in the politics of gender equality policy and practice. However, the narratives of the interviewees directed my attention to more general questions about the refugee camp as a space for political action and participation, and the conditions for refugee agency in this space. In my analysis I have used Foucault’s twin mechanisms of disciplinary power – spatial containment and developmental reform – as my point of departure. As discussed above, these theoretical mechanisms are highly useful in characterizing and understanding contemporary international governance of refugees. I have identified how these mechanisms of power operate in the Thai camps, and what the effects are with regards to the space for political participation for refugees. Further, I have analyzed how refugees make use of and subvert these mechanisms of power as bases for resistance to the conditions of the camps or as tools in the pursuit of their own political agendas.
Spatial Containment as Oppression and Opportunity
A defining feature of the current refugee regime is the use of spatial confinement in camps as a key technology of governance. This section describes how refugee camps in Thailand function as technologies of control, suspending refugees’ rights to move freely and severely constraining their abilities to shape the conditions of their lives. Nonetheless, as discussed above, these camps also constitute societies of their own, with particular institutional structures and governance arrangements. Within the confines of the camps, refugees can and do seek to shape their lives and the politics of camp society as well as political developments in their home country. Indeed, as discussed here, the spatial concentration of refugees in densely populated camps has actually provided opportunities for new forms of political mobilization and activism.
Refugee Camps as Technologies of Control
The refugee camp emerged as a standardized model for the management of mass displacement by the end of World War II, and the camp model has been most extensively used in host states in the global South in the post-Cold War period. Today, refugee camps remain the preferred model for the provision of humanitarian aid to refugees. Humanitarian organizations perceive refugee camps as facilitating efficient delivery of aid by enabling a spatial concentration of refugees, while for host states camps provide a means for controlling the movement of foreign populations. The refugee camp context forecloses many forms of political participation, as refugees are generally prevented from exercising political rights in their country of origin as well as in their host country. Thus, refugees generally have few opportunities to affect and change their situation in the sense of finding alternatives to camp life or long-term solutions to their displacement. In addition, many basic human rights are in effect suspended.
In Thailand, refugees are denied freedom of movement and prohibited from working outside of the camps. When they do so anyway in order to supplement often insufficient aid rations, they put themselves in a legally precarious position in which violence and exploitation is frequent. These restrictions on movement make camps feel like prisons. As related to me by a middle-aged woman in Mae La camp, restrictions on movement made it impossible for her to feel content living in the camp and was the primary reason why she wanted to apply for resettlement. Unsurprisingly, the suspension of human rights in refugee camps produces fear, insecurity, and dependence, and thereby closes down political space and discourages refugees from challenging the living conditions of camp life. While the changing political situation in Myanmar has increased cross-border movement and raised hopes for an eventual return, the constraints of camp life have not eased; on the contrary, donor support for humanitarian aid to the camps has decreased at the same time as Thai government restrictions on the movement of refugees has been more strictly enforced since the military coup in 2014. In a statement issued on International Women’s Day 2017, the KWO describe the situation of Karen refugees as increasingly difficult:
For more than 30 years Karen people have struggled for a life of dignity in camps. Refugee life is never an easy one and is becoming harder and harder for us as basic services and resources are being reduced each year. Refugees are not allowed out of camps to earn our own incomes, to try to increase control in our lives. We struggle still just to have enough to eat, to have a say in how we are governed, and in what and how assistance is given us.
However, as this statement implies, refugee camps do not only function as technologies of control with regards to refugees’ physical mobility, but also constrain the political voices of refugees. Integral to the notion of camps as humanitarian spaces is an impulse to control the political activities of their inhabitants. The original principles of the Red Cross (humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence) are still central to the self-perceptions of many humanitarian workers and organizations. As a basis for humanitarian identity, these principles are linked to an understanding of humanitarianism as the opposite of politics: an apolitical delivery of impartial, life-saving aid insulated from the moral pollutant of politics. This understanding of the nature of humanitarian aid work further shapes expectations of what a refugee is, or should be. Refugees are constructed as victims in need of aid. While it is obviously true that many refugees often require aid, the reduction of all refugees to the status of victim amounts to a denial of agency and political subjectivity. Humanitarian discourses and practices tend to reduce refugees to “bare life.” Thus, refugees in camps are seen as lives to be saved, but not as people with a political voice. They are “expected to be passive recipients of aid, and the camp is the location where that passivity is expected to be played out.” In this context, advocacy geared toward an international audience through forums such as social media is an essential strategy for the political activism of refugee organizations, and one that is skillfully used by actors such as KWO.
Nonetheless, due to expectations that refugee camps should be apolitical, humanitarian agencies and host governments often neglect, bypass, or even repress the political activities and self-governance structures that exist in refugee camps. Indeed, political activities by refugees are frequently seen as dangerous, constituting security threats and breaches of humanitarian principles. In Thailand, many humanitarian organizations and donors have been highly suspicious of the refugee leadership structures as well as of CBOs such as KWO due to their links to the KNU. While the model of community-based camp governance that has emerged in the Thai camps has enabled the camps to be run with relative efficiency and success, it has also given rise to criticism and efforts to rein in refugee activism. Speaking about the situation in the camps when the UNHCR first intervened in 1998, a former employee was strongly critical toward the NGOs who were already present, accusing them of allowing the camps to be “politicized.” Another humanitarian worker explicitly described the “politicization” of refugee leaders as a problem because it made it hard to control them: “We have very little control over these camp committees, because they are much more related, we believe, to KNU and other political forces.” As argued by an NGO worker critical of this attitude, the fact that refugees have political goals and agendas is in itself seen as problematic by humanitarian organizations and donors:
I think a lot of what it is about is neutrality versus politicization. Donors see it as politicization if the community is in charge because they have a political agenda, but then don’t governments and humanitarian organizations?
While humanitarian organizations now encourage refugee participation, for example in various forms of consultative exercises, refugees who organize independently of humanitarian organizations are frequently perceived as threatening and unruly. Thus, when refugees do not conform to the image of passive victim void of agency, they are instead perceived as security threats and challenges. In effect, passivity is made a precondition for assistance and a criterion of refugeeness. This conception of appropriate refugeeness causes political activities and mobilization by refugees to be met with hostility, and constrains opportunities for refugees to exercise political agency without repressive consequences. The result is humanitarian rule as “compassionate authoritarianism,” resting on a commitment to refugee welfare yet refusing to recognize them as political actors. However, not all humanitarian workers and organizations adhere to this approach. In particular, numerous individual humanitarian workers express sympathetic attitudes toward refugee self-governance and privately criticize instances where refugee voices are neglected or repressed.
Refugee Camps as Sites of Activism
Despite the constraints, compared to rural village life, living in densely populated camps has also enabled more intensive communication and interaction between greater numbers of people, thereby facilitating the establishment of a number of refugee associations and organizations. In the camps, a culture of widespread popular engagement has developed and a vibrant civil society has emerged. While refugee self-governance has been challenged and modified in recent years, the degree of refugee involvement and actual decision-making power in the camps is still significant. Among the camps’ population there is a strong sense of being a nation in exile which rightly should enjoy self-determination and the level of public engagement in various forms of political activism and organizations is high. While many humanitarian workers are critical of refugee self-governance, there are others who defend it, seeing this as an issue of justice as well as an issue of making it possible to live with well-being and dignity in displacement:
Living in a camp for twenty-five years, it’s like having an indeterminate prison sentence, you know? And the only way to manage with some semblance of sanity and some semblance of mental and emotional well-being is to have control over your own life. We know that, that’s not any kind of secret. It’s not news. We know that having control and being an active participant in your own destiny, that’s what people need. And people do that through, they don’t do that as individuals, they do that through being part of organizations rooted in the community.
Interestingly, this humanitarian worker describes political engagement in the community as an effect of and response to the hardships of living in a refugee camp. In order to stand this situation, people organize and act collectively to try to influence their circumstances. Thus, the camp context gives rise to political participation and activism through constituting a form of forced urbanization that facilitates communication, but also as a reaction to the repressive and constraining effects of spatial confinement.
Moreover, political activism in the camps is not only geared toward influencing camp society, but is to a significant extent also directed at changing the situation in Myanmar. A significant driving force for various kinds of political activism in the Thai camps is the association with a broader Karen struggle for ethnic self-determination in Myanmar. For more than sixty years, the KNU was engaged in an armed insurgency in pursuit of this aim. In recent years however, negotiations have been ongoing and fighting has ceased with the signing of a preliminary ceasefire agreement in January 2012. Links between camp residents and the Karen struggle in Myanmar have remained strong, and the camps have provided important bases for Karen nationalism and political activism. In the work of many refugee CBOs in the camps, the aim of influencing camp life and working for long-term change in Myanmar are different aspects of taking responsibility for the welfare of the Karen people. For example, the KWO is actively involved in governance and social service delivery in the camps, as well as peace advocacy and social welfare work relating to the situation in Myanmar. As many scholars on diasporas and homeland conflicts have argued, ethno-nationalist sentiments may be intensified among refugee and migrant communities that have left the country of conflict, either because they are removed from the immediate consequences of the conflict or as an effect of the trauma of war and displacement. In the case of refugees living in camps, confinement in densely populated camps also contributes to increased political awareness and ethno-nationalist mobilization, and this is arguably the case in the Thai camps.
However, links between refugee communities and non-state armed groups such as the KNU are generally seen as problematic by humanitarian policy-makers and workers. This is particularly due to concerns about the presence of “refugee warriors” among the refugees, the diversion of aid for military purposes, and exploitation of the wider refugee population by military actors. While such concerns are often rational and necessary, the role and influence of armed groups in refugee communities is not always and exclusively negative. Such groups can also contribute to refugee protection and welfare. Further, “refugee warrior communities” have been described as highly politically conscious communities in which integration in a broader political struggle brings positive attributes such as the assertion of agency and political identity.
In the Thai refugee camps, links with the KNU and to a broader Karen struggle is an essential ideological driving force, motivating political engagement and sustaining hope for a better future. While the identity and political ideas of the Karen people is by no means homogeneous, the vision of self-determination in a future, peaceful Myanmar nonetheless provides a strong sense of common purpose. In this context, a refugee leader in one of the camps described his work as preparation and training for the eventual return of the Karen people to Myanmar:
When we go back to a democratic Burma, we can apply the experience from here: we can show them. We see your future; some day we will go back, whether Burma has become democratic or not, if the political stability is considered to be there. So we need a lot of preparation and political knowledge is important. We can share this with some communities in Burma. So this is a good example, a good situation.
Instead of viewing the situation of encampment as a situation of indeterminate waiting and relative powerlessness, he reinterpreted this as a meaningful and useful experience in preparation for the fulfillment of the goal of Karen self-determination.
Human Rights, Gender Equality, and Democracy: Tools with Multiple Uses
The use of refugee camps for the governance of refugees does not only enable spatial containment and population control; in camps refugee populations are also made accessible to a range of development interventions aimed at modernizing, educating, and improving them. Furthermore, as this section demonstrates, a conception of refugees as objects to be reformed also de-politicizes them and de-legitimizes their political activities in the camp context. However, while the introduction of norms such as human rights, gender equality, and democracy often takes the form of a top-down project of reforming the Other, these norms are also taken up by refugees who use them for their own political agendas through processes of creative appropriation and reinterpretation.
Modernizing “Backward” Refugees
In humanitarian policy and practice, refugee communities are regularly assumed to be traditional societies in which concepts such as democracy and human rights are unfamiliar. By contrast, humanitarian organizations are assumed to bring modernity and progress into new territory. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee for Humanitarian Coordination exemplifies this assumption in the following statement on the importance of education in emergencies:
Education in emergencies provides a channel for conveying health and survival messages; for teaching new skills and values, such as peace, tolerance, conflict resolution, democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. An emergency can be a time to show and teach the value of respecting women, girls, boys and men equally in society.
Notably, values of peace, tolerance, democracy, human rights, and gender equality are assumed to be absent in societies affected by emergencies. Humanitarian aid interventions are thereby seen as providing the foundation for the improvement and development of these societies.
Consequently, international humanitarian aid workers in the Thai camps frequently express a default assumption that they are more qualified than the refugees they assist in issues ranging from how camps should be governed to how human rights norms should be interpreted. In discussions about gender equality programming, the camps are frequently described as “traditional societies” where male dominance is upheld because the refugees are “clinging to their traditions and values” and the causes of gender inequality and violence are represented as originating in “the cultural mindsets of the refugees themselves.” Such perceptions have caused humanitarian workers to question the legitimacy and capacity of refugee women’s organizations as agents of change toward gender equality because the women in these organizations are seen as belonging to a “traditional” culture. As exemplified by the quotation below, whether CBOs can really carry out legitimate and effective work in this area is questioned because they are part of the culture that humanitarian actors perceive as the root of the problem:
Some of the women working in these organisations have the same perceptions … so for someone who is working to promote what we call international standards and guiding principles, from my point of view I see that as problematic. You know, some of them are part of this culture which is accepting of some forms of SGBV [sexual and gender based violence] against women.
Thus, because the culture of refugees is assumed to be an obstacle to gender equality, program or activities initiated or driven by refugees are also frequently assumed to constitute obstacles to gender equality by default. The perception of refugee communities as traditional, backward, and underdeveloped causes the work of refugee women’s organizations, which have been implementing programs promoting women’s rights and addressing violence against women for many years, to be neglected and duplicated. As one humanitarian worker explained, in the area of sexual and gender based violence programming, international actors must establish and control their own programs even when refugee women’s organizations are already active; otherwise they cannot trust that international standards will be met. The arrogance of this attitude, and the resulting failure to cooperate with and build on the work of refugee organizations, has sparked considerable anger among refugee activists:
They [international humanitarian workers] are speaking like they are the highest, like they know everything about gender equality, but by the way they speak I’m not sure they understand at all! […] they think they have all the ideas and principles about gender equality but how can you disregard to learn from what is already there? … NGOs who work in the camps, we don’t want them to come and duplicate or overlap our work. They come with a bag of money and we have to work with very scarce resources. Instead of duplicating they should support what’s already there, but it’s not like that … we want NGOs to work on women’s issues, gender equality, GBV, but they should consult with us and avoid duplication.
In the Thai camps, the self-perceived right and responsibility of humanitarian organizations to define the meaning of gender equality and control its promotion, even though strong advocates for gender equality exist among the refugees, has led to tension and conflicts. While humanitarian organizations want refugees to participate in ways that facilitates program implementation, they cannot easily accommodate refugees who strive to govern themselves in accordance with their own priorities, goals, and political visions. As Kirsten McConnachie observes, “the problem is not simply a failure to recognize that refugee self-governance exists, but a perception that where it does exist it is in competition with or even threatening international ideals and norms.” In effect, the assumption that international humanitarian organizations are culturally more advanced and normatively superior denies refugees a role as political actors in the transformation of their own communities.
International Norms as Tools for Mobilization
As discussed above, ideas such as democracy, human rights, and good governance are frequently constructed by humanitarian agencies as emanating from the international level, and thus as external and even contradictory to refugee cultures and communities. Gender equality policy and programming is a prime example where this logic is played out. As the long-time presence of strong women’s organizations in the Thai camps makes clear, ideas about gender equality and efforts to promote it were by no means absent before the arrival of humanitarian organizations. However, members of local women’s organizations testify that the increased international pressure to take gender into account in delivery of services and governance of camps have enabled them to strengthen their position within the camp communities, and better achieve goals such as women’s representation in leadership positions. Refugee women have been able to strategically use international efforts to increase women’s participation in camp governance to increase their influence over issues they find important. Describing changes in the camps over time, an activist relates that:
Compared to in the start there has been a lot of change. Before there were no women in camp committees, no women security guards, no head teachers. The change is not only a result of our struggle, but also due to donor requirements, international requirements are also important. So change takes not only the struggle of women here but other people have to contribute.
Other refugee activists emphasize how education on women’s rights by humanitarian agencies “has opened our eyes and given women self-confidence,” thereby increasing their political awareness and engagement.
Notably, international women’s rights instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Violence against Women (CEDAW) and Security Council Resolution 1325 are frequently used by refugee women’s organizations as a basis for claims-making. For example, KWO is a highly active member of the umbrella organization Women’s League of Burma, which has published numerous reports documenting abuses such as the Myanmar Army’s use of sexual violence as a weapon of war; submitted several shadow reports to the UN CEDAW committee; and engaged in extensive international advocacy efforts drawing attention to the situation of minority women in Myanmar. Moreover, international women’s rights instruments are also used as tools in the power struggles of camp politics. For example, when criticizing an international humanitarian organization for trying to monopolize the position of gender equality experts, a refugee activist employed Security Council Resolution 1325 as a tool to challenge its legitimacy and competence in this role: “Sometimes [their] staff does not know about international norms like SC 1325. I guess they think that refugees know nothing!”
Thus, refugee women have been able to use norms and guidelines emanating from donors and aid agencies to mobilize support and achieve results for their own political agendas. Such processes, where refugee women actively appropriate and use ideas about gender equality and human rights transmitted by humanitarian organizations, are examples of how governing tools can be modified and reclaimed as tools of resistance. This conception of power and resistance emphasizes the agency of subordinated groups; despite the obvious inequalities present in the encounter between humanitarians and refugees, it is not simply a unilateral relation of dominance.
Examples of the appropriation of international norms by refugees for their own political agendas are also evident in the broader cases of democracy and human rights. In the Thai camps, refugee leaders and activists explain that being in these camps gives them opportunities for learning through their interactions with the international community. Learning about international norms, they argue, equips the Karen people to govern themselves better, in the camps and in the case of their eventual return to Myanmar:
The international community provides understanding of human rights, political awareness, opportunities to learn about the way the international community works, women’s rights, women’s participation. There was no talk of this in Burma. Here we are communicating with the international community, with the UNHCR, donors. We can learn a lot, it improves our community a lot. There are many trainings and workshops, and we are already experiencing the changes.
International norms promoted in refugee camps are thus useful for political projects which challenge and go beyond the agendas of aid agencies and donors. As Niamh Reilly observes, human rights discourse can be a tool for Western dominance and false universalism reproducing global inequality, but it can also be a tool for political mobilization and social change from within diverse local contexts.
Conclusion
Based on a case study of refugee camps in Thailand, this article has examined how refugees living in these camps claim political space and act to shape their situations and their futures, as well as how governing authorities seek to manage and restrict this space. The analysis demonstrates how key strategies employed to govern refugees, namely spatial confinement and developmental interventions, are also creatively subverted by refugees and appropriated as bases for resistance and political mobilization.
Confinement in camps severely limits refugees’ opportunities to exercise formal political rights and often effectively amounts to a suspension of basic human rights, such as freedom of movement. Further, despite a recent emphasis in humanitarian policy on participatory and community-based approaches, recognition of refugees as political actors remains fundamentally at odds with the logics currently shaping the global governance of refugees. Consequently, political mobilization among refugees in camps is frequently met with skepticism, hostility, and repression by humanitarian aid agencies as well as host governments. When refugees do not conform to images of passive victims to be acted on and reformed by external actors, they become perceived as threats and the authenticity of their claims to protection and assistance is questioned. Nevertheless, living in densely populated camps has also facilitated communication and given rise to new forms of political mobilization and activism. The experience of encampment is utilized and made meaningful for the political projects of refugees, for example when it is constructed as an opportunity to prepare for Karen self-governance in a future, post-conflict Myanmar.
Further, while concepts such as human rights, gender equality, and democracy are often introduced in a top-down manner as part of a project of educating and modernizing “traditional” refugee populations, the Thai case shows how politically engaged refugees have been able to appropriate humanitarian policy goals such as the promotion of gender equality as tools and bases for mobilization for their own political struggles. Thus, the specific strategies, structures, and norms that are used to govern refugees also create openings for resistance, contestation, and new forms of political action by those who are governed.
However, the fact that it is possible for refugees to resist and reclaim political space in camps does not make it any less problematic that the current humanitarian regime remains premised on a narrow, dualistic image of refugees as victims to be saved and threats to be controlled. This approach to refugees amounts to a dehumanizing denial of agency and political subjectivity. Could the governance of refugees take other forms? The existence of numerous humanitarian workers in the Thai camps who have made a different choice by supporting refugee self-governance, despite criticism from their donors and colleagues, testify to the possibility of devising other approaches in which refugees are treated as people worthy of living with dignity, not merely as lives to be saved and threats to be controlled. Given the current context of widespread and increasing securitization of refugees, not least in wealthy Northern states, it is likely that large numbers of people will continue to live their lives confined in refugee camps. It is therefore essential to fundamentally challenge and transform dominant humanitarian approaches to aid in order to enable meaningful political participation and self-governance in refugee camp contexts.