In the latest issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Hanno Brankamp and Zoltán Glück (American University, Washington DC) examine the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. They analyse the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. The article provides a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. It concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya’s counterterror state is (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid.
Read the article: Camps and counterterrorism: Security and the remaking of refuge in Kenya