Abstract
Refugees are often accommodated in mass shelters or camps, where they usually have to follow strict rules and remain under close observation. Such facilities are meant to provide shelter, care and other basic necessities. But by living in a mass shelter or camp, the inhabitants can also experience disempowerment and loss of control over their day-to-day responsibilities and freedoms such as food provision, work, leisure time, and so on. The way refugees are housed has far-reaching implications for their physical and mental health, as well as for human rights. States, international institutions or local actors carry responsibility for policy and practice surrounding refugee accommodation. In the opening chapter, we explain how we approach the three aims of this edited volume: (1) assessing types of refugee housing from different disciplinary perspectives; (2) discussing how to balance the trade-off between giving shelter to, and restricting freedom of refugees; and (3) proposing how to improve the way refugees are accommodated.
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Notes
- 1.
Hannah Arendt (1973 (1951)) originally proposed three types of concentration camps with increasing levels of dehumanization, namely Hades, Purgatory, and Hell. She classified camps for “superfluous” persons such as refugees as Hades. Agier (2002), however, sees refugees as being segregated to such a degree that “life has to redefine itself within wholly unprecedented and unknown contexts”, making it irrelevant as if the person never really existed—which corresponds to Purgatory in Arendt’s typology. For more details, see the chapter by Schulze Wessel & Razum in this volume.
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Razum, O., Dawson, A., Eckenwiler, L., Wild, V. (2022). Refugee Camps: Paradise or Purgatory?. In: Razum, O., Dawson, A., Eckenwiler, L., Wild, V. (eds) Refugee Camps in Europe and Australia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12877-6_1
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