Description
This paper explores the postcolonial governmentality and neoliberal governance of refugee assistance programs in urban spaces. While a considerable body of research interrogates the colonial relationships embedded in formal refugee spaces, such as camps and settlements, much less is understood about the relationships between colonialism, refugee governance, and humanitarian aid in urban spaces. My paper addresses this gap in literature through shifting the physical default geography of refugee assistance from the camp to urban centers in the Global South. In so doing, the project draws on literature that examines humanitarian world-making (Feldman 2018) and subjective life-making (Huq and Miraftab 2020), to ask if and how refugee experiences unfold outside of spatially-demarcated camps and settlements, and away from the border. In so doing, the project teases out ways in which postcolonial governmentality and neoliberal governance within refugee protection is both reproduced and ruptured via the ‘care and maintenance’ of refugee assistance programs in urban areas. This project is based on field work in urban refugee centers of Kuala Lumpur and New Delhi. I examine how refugees deploy humanitarian frameworks to access care in non-humanitarian spaces, under conditions of prolonged temporary asylum in the Global South.
