Are Syria's Do-It-Yourself Refugees Outliers or Examples of a New Norm?

Refugee camps are often treated as incubators of social unrest, violence, terrorism, and illicit trade. This provokes their overseers in the United Nations (UN) and other relief agencies to conduct frequent social engineering to enhance the camps' legibility. Hence, me see orderly, perpendicular rows, standardized units from redistricting to the allocation of diapers, and so forth--all of the follies of high modernism that fames Scott predicted in Seeing Like a State, but writ small. Indeed, my qualitative research from the Za'atari refugee camp, located in Jordan along the Syrian border, indicates that refugees, especially middle-class ones like Syria's, rebel against uniformity--or what Scott describes as metis--and seek to recreate their domiciles as best they can from the meager canvas tents and campers allotted to them. Put simply, they see their surroundings more as the disorderly sidewalk ballet of fane Jacobs' Greenwich Village than the high modernist yet sterile functionalism of Robert Moses. This holds important policy implications for the future of how we devise refugee camps, which increasingly resemble small cities; how we settle internally displaced persons (IDPs); and how we deal with the aftermath of mass population displacements. From direct cash transfers to the districting of refugees, some bureaucratic flexibility is required but so is an acknowledgement and embrace of refugees' do-it-yourself ethos that is rooted in their resistance to authority and trauma from violence. Drawing from the literature in social anthropology and political science, this article presents new evidence from Za'atari that disputes the utility of a high modernist approach to the social engineering of large displaced populations. ********** design refugee camps; refugees build cities, Kilian Kleinschmidt, UN director of Za'atari. (1) Over the past few decades, the total number of people displaced by war, natural disasters, and other calamities has eclipsed 50 million. That is the highest number since the aftermath of World War II, despite the number of conflict zones continuing to ebb in recent years. (2) Refugee camps have swelled in numbers and have essentially transformed into makeshift cities. Demand has far outstripped supply, as these camps have become overcrowded, underfunded, and under-resourced. Reports of crime, prostitution, violence, and health epidemics are common in most camps. Like favelas or urban slums, they are often treated as incubators of social unrest, terrorism, and illicit markets. This threat has prompted UN administrators, aid agencies, and receiving states to conduct substantial top-down social engineering to enhance camps' legibility and uniformity. (3) We see orderly perpendicular rows, standardized domiciles, and top-down micromanagement, from redistricting to the allocation of diapers--all of the follies of high modernism that Yale University's James Scott predicted in Seeing Like a State, but writ small. (4) Migration scholar Jennifer Hyndman has likened the policing strategies in Kenya's refugee camps to those of former European colonial administrators. (5) Given that such top-down standardization is harmful for human interaction and enterprise, this approach, while efficient on paper, ignores modern realities and may even exacerbate the very threat it seeks to mitigate. This article makes two main arguments. First, refugee camps have the potential to become more than just makeshift temporary shelters for displaced persons; they can become engines of social and economic dynamism. Such a philosophy can not only help refugees become self-sufficient and self-reliant, providing a socioeconomic outlet and reducing the rate of recruitment into criminal or terrorist networks by shrinking the informal economy, but can also help the host state and its local economy. There are some 3,500 small businesses in existence within the Syrian refugee camp I visited. …

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