In the first part of their 2021 book, The Global Shelter Imaginary, IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief, we looked at how the global shelter imaginary has abandoned justice as it shifts its focus to care. While care is important, it was meant to be temporary until justice can be done. With this shift in focus, the shelter imaginary has provided a good news story for every marginal improvement in care that hides the fact that justice is not being pursued. This is unsustainable because without justice – without fixing the root causes – the crisis will be ever growing and unending. There is also the issue of legitimation; meaning, what is the acceptable behaviour of governments toward the dispossessed?
In chapter 2, “There has Always Been a Better Shelter,” the authors trace the history of humanitarian thought and rights theory to show that it is not really a new problem. But the crisis of legitimation has shifted. Camp humanitarianism started with colonial strategies of internment as a political exception. Political exceptions are supposed to be temporary for particular reasons outside of state control like war or natural disaster. The war or natural disaster provided legitimation for temporary exceptions to the norms of a country. However, as a war ended, or time passed after a natural disaster the legitimacy of exception would be brought into question. Something else had to provide legitimacy for the continued existence of old refugees crises not being solved. “Notions of a ‘better shelter’ actually emerged in the metropolitan West during World War I, in a context where members of a national community who carried with them some expectation of rights—like citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—were presented with the prospect of model emergency housing at the cost of internment. The subsequent history of the model camp is one in which the substitution of shelter for rights protection was rendered so irreducible, necessary, and well-nigh ‘normal’ that it ceased to be questioned as anything but an advance in humanitarian reason.”
The whole of history of refugee shelter can be distilled into three stages. They began as military internment camps under martial law where the occupants were prisoners. Then as the refugee camps became civilianized the issue becomes one of housing – refugees had to be housed and it was a domestic policy issue with all the vagaries of housing “prisoners” inherited from the military stage. The final stage, the privatization of care, gives up on any rights that prisoners or homeless might have in favour of a health dictatorship where rights are exchanged for relief and obedience.
In chapter 3, “Protection Space,” given the shift to architecture as the focus of care, “the given logic of the global shelter imaginary, the provision of humanitarian relief either disqualifies the dispossessed from consideration as humanitarian subjects worthy of political rights or, worse, recruits them into a new specifically urban paradigm of protection that is functionally indistinct from abandonment.”
The reality of many old camps is that many refugees who have been born and matured there “have decided to abandon lives under a permanent state of exception and to take their chances in environments where the UN offers no prospect of or appeal to protection.” Essentially many second-generation refugees in long term “temporary” camps end up in slums worldwide. A look at the birthrate to deathrate ratio would show that most refugee camps should be huge, much bigger than they actually are. It seems most people would rather become part of the “unprotected” urban precariat than live in a refugee camp under UN political protection.
In one representative case from 2005 a group of about 2500 Sudanese migrants who had been denied refugee status decided to form their own refugee camp in a park across from the UN offices in Cairo. Publicly the UN responded by closing its offices and moving location. Several months into the protest the Egyptian authorities “dispersed” the camp killing 28 in the process. What was going on behind the scenes, both prior to and after this incident is the bureaucratic equivalent in the form of euphemizing that lack of protection. Quoting a UN document in a foot note, the authors point out how the UN offices are to deal with “irregular movers”: “UNHCR staff should not hesitate to seek the intervention of local authorities against refugees or asylum-seekers who break national laws. [note that crossing a border illegally is breaking the law] Experience has shown that clear messages, such as closing down the Branch Office and calling the local police at the beginning of a violent protest, is the most effective way of bring it to an early and peaceful close.” A further example of euphemizing is in the notion of a “‘safe return,’ which stipulated that condition in the home country did not have to improve ‘substantially’ but only ‘appreciably’ in order for the UN—and not the dispossessed—to determine what might reasonably qualify as ‘voluntary repatriation’” in other words “safe return” used to mean that the repatriation destination was safe but now it means that the journey back to the home country would be safe. The UN repatriated over 300,000 South Sudanese refugees safely transporting them into a conflict zone. “The key point here is…UNHCR established a precedent for euphemizing abandonment-as-protection”.
The newest and most recent development in the global shelter imaginary is the emergence of the Airbnb refugee. It is new way of taking rights away and subordinating the refugee to a particular image in the public eye. In February of 2017 Airbnb started its “Open Homes” program. It allows “hosts to offer their rooms for free to asylum seekers and refugees”, and other groups with housing needs such as “evacuees, relief workers, medical patients and their caregivers”.
“The substitution of rightless relief for rights is here at once rehearsed and expended: with the advent of Open Homes, now the ‘public’ is able to augment the state in the provision of this relief.” While this may be designed to sound good, as a moral triumph, what is happening is the privatization of relief under a landlord tenant model rather than a rights based protection/care model under international law. “This substitution marks the liberation of the paradigm of abandonment as assistance from the camp and its global deployment in the fiction of its liberalization…. it furthers the transformation of refugee protection from a right that states are obligated to respect into a privilege that is provide according to … supply and demand…. The fate of refugees with respect to accommodation now can rest on being chosen as a ‘guest’ by an Airbnb host.”