Léa LEMAIRE, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Lucas OESCH, Université du Luxembourg , Luxembourg
The local turn in refugee studies has primarily focused on the ‘city’. Scholars have explored the role of cities in the reception of refugees (Glorius & Doomernik 2020, Landau 2014). When it comes to camps, it is mainly the spilling-over of refugee camps into the city which has been explored in the global South (Abourahme 2015, Martin 2015) and the bordering process taking place between reception centres and cities in the global North (Fontanari 2015). The involvement of municipal authorities in the daily management of camps has received less scholarly attention. It is frequently assumed that municipal authorities are not involved in the management of camps, whose responsibility often belongs to central states. This presentation aims to go beyond this analysis and to show how across the global South and North, even in cases where the camp and the urban space seem to be disconnected and ‘unrelated’, municipal authorities play an active role in the management of camps alongside a multitude of other actors. Two highly different case studies will be explored: the Azraq refugee camp and town in Jordan, and the Diekirch reception centre and town in Luxembourg. Our methodology is based on interviews with municipal authorities, NGOs, international organisations, and residents of the facilities. We will show that, in both places, local authorities, although not officially recognised as such, are to some extent key actors in the management of the camps, their residents and their infrastructure. The involvement of municipal authorities ranges from providing jobs to local inhabitants within facilities to managing the provision of electricity. Building on a relational approach to space (Massey 2005, Darling 2009), we argue that, in both cases, municipal authorities are contributing to build a network of relations between the camp and the city; network which affects the transformation of both the camp and the city.
Mots clés : reception |refugee |camp |city|local turn
A105409LL