Humanitarian crisis within humanitarian places: A case study of the Somali refugees in Kenya

Abstract

The international regime of refugee protection has been argued to function in order to provide those who lost their citizen status with legal protection under the idea of humanitarianism. In such regime, the policy of containment has been familiar. It metes out a practice of states hosting refugees within their territories by containing them in humanitarian camps. This article focuses on the conceptualization of B. S. Chimni about the link of ideology of humanitarianism to the erosion of refugee protection, and particularly the policy of containment in practices of hosting states. In order to concretize Chimni's critique to see how the erosion of refugee protection manifest within the containment policy, I then complement his conception with Nanda Oudejans' clarification about the conception of the refugee as persons who have lost a legal place to live. Under this complemented theoretical framework, I argue that the ideology of humanitarianism of the refugee protection regime neglects the hidden but inevitable inequality of the refugee who stay in the territory of the hosting state. It is because while the rights of refugees are enshrined in legal instruments, their rights require a place for them to enjoy, a place which they must receive from the hosting states. In order to cultivate empirical case study, I then turn to investigate the situation of Somali refugee in Kenya. Dadaab camp in Kenya has been known as one of the oldest and largest humanitarian camps that contain the Somali refugees. Although providing the refugees with humanitarian place, the Somali refugees were deprived of a legal place for them to enjoy their enshrined rights. Bearing inhabitable conditions inside the camps, yet encountering rejections outside those camps, the refugees asymmetrically depended on the Kenyan government, while this situation is perpetuating their refugees status.