Abstract
Like thousands of other Rohingyas, Aman (pseudonym) had to flee for his life after violence broke out on 25 August, 2017 in the Rakhine (previously Arakan) state in Myanmar. Aman had got married a few months back and had no intention of leaving his home. But there was no other option left. He had to endure a horrific journey from Myanmar to Bangladesh to save his life. Like Aman, most of my informants’ traumatic journeys to the camp overshadow many Hollywood fictions. Many of them still sustain traumas from those days, especially those who witnessed the killing of their friends and family and the burning of their homes. After walking for days, they crossed the Naf River that lies between the two countries, and finally they could breathe without fear of fire and bullets. Crossing the border, they saved their lives but handed them over to the mercy of others. They did not know where to go and what to do, or how to make a living. ‘It was like the keyamot [the apocalypse]’ Aman recalled.
Still, mostly because of their religious identity, Rohingyas received all-out support from fellow Muslim Bangladeshis. Host community families housed many Rohingyas for days when they first arrived at the camp. The initial, spontaneous welcome turned into disorganized and chaotic hospitality. To bring order to the chaotic camps, hundreds of local and international NGOs rushed to help. Over time, with a coordinated effort, all the camps got basic facilities such as drinking water, walkways, toilets, et cetera. But soon things started to change. Within a year the host government began to feel the pressure of hosting such an enormous number of refugees in a small space. Illegal activities started to rise and, capitalizing on the refugee situation, both local and refugee criminals started expanding their criminal activities. Camp-based crimes such as human trafficking, the drug trade, and prostitution reached such a height that the government faced an increasing challenge to keep them under control. To re-establish law and order for the safety of the host community, the government started to put restrictions on the refugees. They were driven away from host community houses, their movements were restricted to the camp boundaries, and their children were banned from local educational institutions.
In mid-2018, government officials saw their very first effort to repatriate some Rohingyas to Myanmar fail. They expected to send back some in their second effort in August 2019. ‘We won’t return until we are granted full citizenship’, Rohingyas made clear in a demonstration, seeking justice for the genocide committed by the Burmese Army, and a dignified return that included the granting of Burmese citizenship. At this point, the Bangladesh government went hardline in managing the camps. They further restricted refugees’ movements, banned several NGOs which were sympathetic to Rohingyas, and restricted the earning opportunities of the refugees. Finally, when they put a barbed-wire fence around the camps, Kutupalong turned into an open-air prison.
With the new restrictions imposed on them, Rohingyas lost many of their basic human rights. The new camp system tends to show no respect for the Rohingyas’ past identities, while through its organizing principles it imposes a new institutional identity (i.e., ‘refugee’) upon them. Such organizing principles, which were designed to ‘manage’ the displaced Rohingyas, are reminiscent of those used by totalitarian governments. They also inflict indignity and a feeling of being a burden to a foreign land. Since August 2019, the government and NGOs have been working together to bring ‘discipline’ to the camp by making the refugees entirely dependent on them. Rohingyas are not allowed to organize to earn a dignified living themselves: their livelihood activities are considered a threat to the integrity of the camp, they are banned from organizing to educate their children, and they are not allowed to form civic organizations to fight for their rights. By taking over all these tasks from the community itself, NGOs became their master.
The ideas of social order and control have been fundamental for civilizations and human progress. Since the beginning of modernity, these ideas have given rise to many social control institutions such as asylums, prisons, camps, ghettos, and other arrangements. Goffman (1961) termed such social control institutions ‘total institutions’ and defined them as ‘[places] of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed formally administered round of life’ (p. 11). Total institutions have long been seen as a modern, rational approach to removing the socially inadequate and unwanted populations from public space and accommodating them at a distance, so that nation states could progress uninterruptedly.
The refugee camp is a peculiar form of a total institution. It exists because of global, regional, and local socio-political crises, often fueled by identity politics. In most cases, people are made refugees and encamped in refugee camps because they have the ‘wrong’ identity in the eyes of those in power. Their identities become a threat to the power and the security of the polities which deny them the right to citizenship. Here ‘identity’ has become the object of control and power. Through control over identity, refugee-camp-like total institutions make it possible to control both the ‘body’ and ‘mind’ of the inmates, making them docile and irrelevant (Agamben, 1998).
However, like most other refugee camps, the Kutupalong refugee camp is a humanitarian space administered by humanitarian organizations that work to keep the refugees alive and maintain peace. Along with the local governments, several NGOs work in different areas such as food distribution, health care, sanitation, shelter, and peacekeeping. To coordinate all these activities the camp is turned into a complex bureaucratic organizational space, in which a set of rules and regulations are formulated and institutionalized. The obsession of the government and NGOs to manage the camp systematically and bring discipline to desperate displaced people made the lives of refugees highly administered and restrictive. Rules formulated by NGOs to provide basic services become the technology of control, making the refugees mere NGO projects. Ultimately, in the name of helping refugees and ensuring national and regional security, refugees are encaged and reduced to an institutionalized life of dependency and indignity. They are imprisoned in the perennial present and made to feel ‘less than human’ beings.
‘Refugee’ and ‘refugee camp’ are usually seen as objects of two popular discourses: violence and humanitarianism. Consequently, the organizing principles of refugee camps, their evolution, and the lived experiences of inmates in them are usually left to laypersons’ imagination and anecdotal narratives at best. Only recently have organization scholars started to pay attention to studying the institutional and organizational dynamics of displacement and their impact on the displaced (e.g., Hultin, Introna, Göransson, & Mähring, 2022; Pawlak, 2022). What is left underexplored, however, is the technology of control used in such organizing. My three-year-long ethnographic fieldwork in the Kutupalong refugee camp reveals that ensuring basic needs such as food and healthcare to keep the refugees alive does not guarantee them a dignified life. On the contrary, it takes away the modicum of dignity left to them. There is no opportunity to attain a respectable position for those who deserve one, no freedom of movement, and no permission to engage in political activities or public gatherings. This denies the Rohingyas the option to live a decent life, as all are made to live under a tarpaulin, in indignity and as projects of NGOs.
We are living in the age of mass displacement, and millions have ended up in camps like the one in Kutupalong. However, many more individuals globally are currently struggling to live worthy lives allowing them human dignity (Nussbaum, 2009). From the people who constitute marginalized society and populate stigmatized groups to those trapped in hollow occupations comprising post-modern society, many are spending their lives in search of some dignity in living. But such lives can only be achieved through the social validation of human roles and capabilities, for which the freedom to (self-)organize for a desired future is preconditional. Refugee crises and refugee camps are extreme contexts where freedom of organizing is curtailed heavily in the name of welfare. Studying these processes and the involved temporal dynamics reveal new types of technologies of control that are being pioneered and used in the type of welfare-state-like organizing that has become a key feature of contemporary total institutions.
Some may say a welfare-state-like total institution is unavoidable in handling forcibly displaced people, or that it is the best form of organizing available to deal with the displaced. Yet, we have to shed light on the dark side of such total institutions, as they rely on technologies of control that turn refugees into secondary objects of value in the business of living. Can taking away their right to organize bring any good to anyone? It cannot! To the contrary, individuals’ right to organize for a dignified life, even in the context of a refugee camp, need to be restored. If they get back their right to (self-)organize, they will be able to work on identity projects like becoming an entrepreneur, community volunteer, civic or religious leader, or artist. In doing so, individuals regain their agency, purpose, and dignity in living. This will also reduce financial pressure on host governments and donor countries; surveillance work can be reduced, and host communities can benefit from social, cultural, and economic relationships with the displaced groups that can remain even after their repatriation.
Organizing is powerful – it anchors people in time and space and provides them with meaning, identity, and a sense of dignity. When people are forcibly displaced from their homes, they are deprived of all these: if they are denied the right to organize, they are denied a life project of their own (Hultin et al., 2022). Unfortunately, forced displacement has become a common phenomenon in recent times. According to UNHCR data, due to conflict and violence, one in every 78 people on earth has been forcibly displaced. To survive, many of these people take refuge in refugee camps. As these camps evolve into Goffmanesque total institution, refugees’ struggles for dignity exacerbate. Gradually they are embedded in organizations in which their value as dignified human beings is denied. Eventually they are put on a trajectory of docility and helplessness. They are reduced to bare life, a problem for both the host and home countries as well as for the world. And this is not done by host governments only; NGOs are complicit in this. It is important that we unpack how and when NGOs become a state’s technology of control. In other words, we must ask when and how welfare-state-like organizing stigmatizes individuals and groups and how we can avoid this happening. Just keeping refugees alive by providing them with the minimum means of subsistence is not enough. We need to think of alternative ways of organizing which ensure that refugees have access to the type of opportunities we associate with flourishing human beings. Because only in striving to flourish and in our ability to exercise our ‘higher’ faculties do we find dignity. While all our collective efforts should focus on reducing the number of refugees and refugee camps in this world and the longevity of the camps, we must also strive to ensure that refugees have the freedom to organize their present and future. After all, taking away this freedom to organize equals denying them a human existence.