Women, Space, Resistance: Kurdish Refugee-Migrants' Narratives From Lavrio and Skaramagas Camps in Greece

Abstract

Refugee camps have long been theorized as spaces of exception, where sovereign power reduces displaced people to what Agamben terms ‘bare life’. While this frame captures the violence of camp governance, it depicts refugee-migrants as passive and says little about how camp space is inhabited, contested and remade in everyday life, least of all from a gendered perspective. This article asks how the spatial and political organization of a camp shapes the sense of place and agency of Kurdish refugee-migrant women. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork: semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted between 2017 and 2019 in two camps near Athens, both since closed: Lavrio, a self-organized Kurdish camp shaped by Abdullah Ocalan's paradigm of democratic confederalism; and Skaramagas, a multi-ethnic, state-led camp later abandoned to fragmented humanitarian management. In Lavrio, women drew on a political habitus rooted in autonomous resistance through direct participation in decision-making, communal organization, and the contestation of patriarchal norms, and turning the camp into a politically charged place of belonging, in sharp contrast to the depoliticized setting of Skaramagas. The article argues that a camp's spatial layout shapes social life without determining it: open, shared configurations can encourage encounter and a sense of community, while fragmented ones tend to discourage them, yet it is the camp's political organization that proves decisive in enabling women's agency, resistance and reconfigured gender relations.