The wrong of refugee containment

Abstract

Abstract Encampment continues to be one of the dominant modes of responding to refugee situations. I suggest that we would do well to conceive of the wrongfulness of refugee camps not just in terms of their effects, but also in terms of their function. I endorse the view that camps currently function primarily to contain displaced persons and develop a novel conception of the wrong of encampment in terms of that function. Drawing on Heidegger's account of the spatiality proper to different entities, I argue that practices of containment reduce refugees to the status of objects to be, in effect, immobilized and stored away for an indeterminate amount of time.