On Writing the History of a Modern Refugee Camp
Azraq refugee camp was built in 2014 off a two-lane highway in the middle of the eastern Jordanian desert, 35 kilometres from the nearest town on either side. Flat rocky terrain gives the land the impression that it is void of life and emptied of history. The 13,000 white modular prefab caravans that sit atop this beige terrain give the landscape an air of emptiness. Time here appears neutral, unmoving for the moment.
The refugee camps of today are often assumed to be spaces without history by those who study them and sometimes those who work in them. Anthropologist Liisa Malkki famously critiqued the conflation of territory and refugee identity; because camp residents are not rooted in the territory – having come from some other place and hoping to return to that place or settle in another – the land that shelters them seems to take on the quality of a blank slate. There is no past or future for such a space, only the present.
How can the history of a space be written when it has no future? When I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Azraq in 2017 and 2018, I was interested in parsing out this temporal paradox to explore the role that time plays in camp settings. My book, Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp: A Nine-to-Five Emergency (AUC Press, 2023), illustrates how time passes in Azraq beyond painting the tired portrait of refugees waiting for the future. While camp studies are often concerned with time in clear stages – the past pre-war lives of camp residents, the ongoing ‘stuckedness’ of the present, the desired future outside of the camp – I situate the camp as at once past, present, and future.
In my book, I describe a camp in which white caravans have yellowed and the terrain is interrupted by informal paths where the gravel has been smoothed by pedestrian traffic. I take note of spatial and temporal movement and rhythms, following the daily routines of camp residents who whip by on bicycles and aid workers who wind along the camp’s paved streets in vehicles. I show how these routines reveal complex power dynamics in Azraq in which the camp’s humanitarian-led government forecloses certain futures for its Syrian residents while also enabling opportunities for residents to negotiate timelines and life trajectories. But while residents do wait for a future elsewhere, this does not foreclose the possible histories and futures of Azraq camp itself. Indeed, the history of the camp is being written every day.
Azraq will turn ten years old this April, closing out a decade rich with overlapping and multiple histories. To write these histories, we could begin with the history of the Azraq desert. The land itself, though barren, is not empty. It is land which travelers cross to reach Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and a space that once briefly hosted Iraqis and Kuwaitis fleeing the Gulf War in the early 1990s. The camp site is imbued with the political decision-making of the Jordanian governors who chose Azraq camp’s isolated location and the humanitarian actors who accepted this choice in order to serve its residents. These decisions were informed by the history of another camp - Zaatari to the east - where residents took advantage of their proximity to the city of Mafraq for trade and built a flourishing camp economy that threatens Jordan’s plans to prevent integration.
Atop this storied land, Azraq camp itself holds a history that has been unfolding since it opened in 2014. For the past ten years, the camp has been the birthplace for thousands and the final resting place for many others. Traditions and customs around music, dance, food, dress, and language carry over and adapt to the camp space from residents’ home cities. Religious holidays such as Ramadan and Eid are celebrated in new ways, albeit undermined by the precarity of camp life. The daily decisions of camp residents and aid workers navigating the everyday mundanity and chaos of Azraq are small and potentially interconnected choices that have contributed to the camp’s history.
Zooming out from the everyday histories of Azraq reveals how the camp is situated within a grander history of modern political technologies of care and control. The model of the humanitarian-run refugee camp has emerged as a postcolonial device to separate, exclude, and criminalise the stateless Other, paid for in part by Northern powers interested in keeping refugees in the South, and employed by Southern governments interested in reaping the benefits. The carceral technology of the camp is camouflaged behind caring facades of brightly painted NGO centres and smiling aid workers, fed by the century-long legacy of humanitarian altruism.
Humanitarian planners designed Azraq to prevent refugee mobilisation, and the camp therefore has the aura of a uneventful site, free of history, in contrast to the refugee-led demonstrations that arose in Zaatari. Aid workers would often describe how Azraq’s residents do not engage in the kind of ‘troublemaking’ associated with Zaatari’s residents, a compliance that gives the impression of peace but is actually underlined by a constant threat of deportation. This ‘untainted’ history of the camp, itself not intended to have a future, has secured Azraq’s image among humanitarians as the ‘future of camps’. Azraq’s model has already been repeated in other sites, from Syria to Chicago, creating a chain of intentionally future-less sites that collectively write the future of state responses to refugees. These sites have come to define the era of the refugee camp.
By paying attention to the spatial and temporal fabrics of places like Azraq, we not only trace the legacies of camp technologies, but we also witness the histories of the camp itself being written by the people who govern them and those who live and work in them. The camp’s overlapping pasts, presents, and futures inform a legacy of refuge that urges us to look more closely at the lives playing out in the seeming emptiness.
