Liisa H. Malkki

News From Nowhere Mass Displacement and Globalized `Problems of Organization'

Michel Agier opens his reflections on the ‘city-camp’ by observing that the settlement of tens of thousands of refugees in camps run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other organizations is much more common in Africa and Asia than in Europe, and that this approach to the care and control of refugees seems to be a ‘speciality of poor countries’. The ‘dominant, even massive, use of the camp formula in the most dispossessed regions of the world’ forms the basis of Agier’s two principal hypotheses. First, he argues that the camps as a prominent institutional means of dealing with massive displacements of people stand for a larger phenomenon: