The aim of the thesis is to make a change in the understanding of refugee camps - away from a technical view of the space of exception towards a view of the space of living, which has multiple parallels with the everyday city spaces. While many authors focus their analyses on specific aspects of the camp (economy, health, architecture, food, infrastructure, etc.), I undertake an integrated sociological-urbanist analysis of the refugee camp.
I start with an overview of the development of the camp throughout history and, through the emergence of concentration camps, bring it to the refugee camps as they appeared after the Second World War and as we know them today. To this, I add a theoretical definition of the camp, which in recent years has been dominated by Agamben's concept of the state of emergency. I critically analyse the UNHCR Emergency Handbook as the fundamental document that dictates the planning and management of refugee camps.
In the second part, I continue with an urban-sociological analysis of refugee camps of Western Sahara, drawing from written primary and secondary sources, visual materials, and field research in which I participated in 2016. Although the camps can be characterized as spaces of exception, in the conclusion, I present arguments against Agamben's hypothesis that refugee camps necessarily produce only bare life, arguing that they can also be spaces of agency, trapped in a specific geographical and temporal space of liminality.
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