Closing camps

Abstract

Refugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be situated within the exclusionary landscapes in which states manage migrants custody, protection and displacement. We accordingly present camp closures as manifestations of sovereign power and the study of camp afterlives as key to critical understandings of camp geographies.