No Path Home

Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501712500
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Social Sciences

For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition. No Path Home describes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart.

After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. In No Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.

1

THE CAMP AND THE CAMP

When the bomb hit the house Ketevan Okropiridze was pushing a heavy sofa to barricade her mother-in-law’s bedroom, trying to protect herself and her family from the cluster bombs raining down from Russian planes overhead and the artillery coming from all sides. South Ossetia, the breakaway province in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia where Keti lived, had been under attack for more than four days. At the beginning of the war, when the Russian 58th Army first came across the Caucasus Mountains through the Roki Tunnel, the family had decided to try and survive the war in their own home. But the blast made it clear the house offered no safety. Late that night, with the tracer flares of Grad rockets lighting up the sky and the air vibrating with the sounds of rocket engines, gunfire, and cluster bomb explosions, they left. They dodged tanks and soldiers by picking their way through the gardens and the fields surrounding the village, hiding under the cover of trees in orchards. Finally finding transport in a packed minibus, they fled down the main highway toward Tbilisi, the capital. As they drove, a bomb hit the car in front of them and the air was filled with a cloud of earth and glass.

For Temo Javakhishvili the war’s brutality did not end at South Ossetia’s border. He left his village, Eredvi, late in the five-day war, fleeing toward the town of Gori. His son, Zviadi, lived in a five-story Soviet-era apartment block near the main East-West highway with his pregnant wife and their small son. But Temo never made it to Zviadi’s apartment. Russian planes were bombing Gori, and Zviadi’s building was hit. All the windows in the building were instantly blown out, and flames burst from the black holes where the windows once were. Zura, Temo’s other son, tried to save his brother. As he crouched over Zviadi’s bleeding body in the rubble outside the building, a foreign photographer snapped his picture. It became the defining image of the war, shown on television across the world and published on the front page of the New York Times: Zura cradling Zviadi’s corpse, covered in blood and spattered with dirt, howling in grief and anger.

The night the war broke out Manana Abaeva could not walk. She had undergone complicated surgery on her left hip and had developed deep-vein thrombosis, a clot in the blood supply to her leg that caused the leg and foot to swell dramatically. If the clot were to break away from the vein in her leg and travel to her lungs, it could cause a fatal pulmonary embolism. But she could hear the fire of the Grad “Hailstorm” rockets, guns firing in the village, and the rumbling of the ground caused by tanks moving. As bombs began to fall on the village, her daughter helped her into a small Niva car crammed with the village’s most infirm residents. The car set off along the road lined with Georgian tanks and troops, hoping to make it through the fighting without being fired on, carrying Manana away from South Ossetia and into an uncertain future.

The events of the war remain in dispute. Whether it began on August 6 with a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia or on August 7 with a Russian invasion, when each village was taken, what weaponry was used, and which side damaged which village are all facts hotly contested by Russia, South Ossetia, and Georgia. I have no means of independently verifying any claim, and settling debates or placing blame over the events of the war is beyond the scope of this book. But what is clear is that for Ketevan, Temo, Manana, and over twenty-eight thousand people ethnically cleansed from South Ossetia, the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 marked their entry into life in the humanitarian system. Their houses were bombed by Russian aircraft, looted by Ossetian irregular forces, and then burned. In some of the villages that were of strategic or symbolic significance the Russians bulldozed the burned ruins to make the point clear: the residents of the ethnically Georgian villages could never return. Huddled in kindergarten classrooms in Tbilisi or stuck in the tent camp administered by the Red Cross in Gori, they were brought into the humanitarian condition, a way of life determined by a complex web of international, national, and local institutions aimed at preserving life and alleviating suffering in the wake of violence (see Feldman 2012; Barnett 2010). No longer farmers, smugglers, teachers, or soldiers, their primary social identities were transformed as the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Georgian government compiled lists of the displaced and assigned them official status. Now they were now first and foremost internally displaced persons (IDPs), refugees in their own country, part of the target population for the international humanitarian order.

The Georgian IDPs joined a global population of displaced people growing at an astronomical rate. In 2000 there were 21 million displaced people. By 2009 there were 43.3 million displaced people, two times as many as were displaced at the beginning of the decade. By 2016, more than 65 million people had been forced from their homes (Harild and Christiansen 2010, 2; Sengupta 2015). If people who are displaced by conflict or disaster cross international borders, they are formally designated as refugees and have a set of well-defined rights under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Officially they come under the mandate of the UNHCR, which assumes significant responsibility for their welfare. But refugees make up only 36% of the population of displaced people around the world. The rest, 64% of the world’s displaced, are IDPs, people who have been forced from their homes but have not crossed international borders. Although IDPs should retain the rights accruing to all the members of their own countries, they fall into a “protection gap” because they are neither protected by international law nor, in practice, fully protected as citizens in their own countries. They pose a disquieting challenge to the nation-state system, which assumes that every person should be clearly assigned to one state or another: IDPs are, instead, neither the responsibility of the international community nor fully governed by the nation-state (see Cohen and Deng 1998). Although they are often considered exiles, people living on the margins of both their own societies and the international order, it is more fruitful to think of them as insiles, people caught in the interstices of an emerging system of humanitarian governance that confounds territorial boundaries (see Miéville 2009).

In one sense the Russo-Georgian War was short. The active fighting lasted only five days and the scale of the damage was comparatively small. But the war garnered an enormous humanitarian response from the international community, and thus placed the Georgian IDPs into the byzantine bureaucratic workings of the international humanitarian system. Over $4.5 billion in aid was given by international donors (Piccio 2013), with over $350 million earmarked specifically for IDPs. Six UN agencies and over ninety-two NGOs, many of them newly arrived in the wake of the war, joined forces to provide emergency assistance for the people ethnically cleansed from South Ossetia. Like all humanitarian aid to IDPs, this aid was supposed to be temporary, a short-term response to a catastrophic emergency. Emergency aid—the food, water, shelter, and medical care that agencies like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders portray in their appeals for donations—is aimed at the immediate preservation of physiological life. This emphasis on preserving life in the midst of crisis gives the humanitarian enterprise a rushed tempo, as humanitarian agencies move from war to war and disaster to disaster (Polman 2010; Redfield 2005; Calhoun 2008; Calhoun 2010). Yet for the Georgian IDPs, as for millions of displaced people around the world, the humanitarian system is not a temporary state of emergency and not only a series of life-saving measures but a way of life in which they must make do on a day-to-day basis over a long period of time. Around the world, once IDPs enter the humanitarian system they are often stuck there for decades and even generations—the average length of stay in a camp is now over seventeen years, which is hardly temporary. Sometimes crushed between institutions competing for sovereignty, more often left in the gaps of legal protection and service provision, and frequently pinned between warring states and marooned in the no-man’s land of militarized borders, IDPs often find it difficult or impossible to leave the camps and settlements where they have been sent to live. This long-term confinement means refugee camps and IDP settlements are often not merely temporary encampments but rather enduring political problems. The Palestinians, for example, have been in refugee camps for nearly seventy years, and two generations have grown up in exile. Hutus and Tutsis both have been in camps for more than forty years. Dadaab, one of the world’s largest camps for displaced people, in Kenya, is now entering its twenty-fifth year and contains more than three hundred thousand people, many of whom were born there and have never lived elsewhere. Even in Georgia displacement has become a multigenerational phenomenon: in addition to the people displaced by the 2008 war, the “old caseload,” nearly a quarter of a million IDPs displaced from South Ossetia and Abkhazia between 1991 and 1993, remain in “temporary” housing. The “new caseload,” people displaced from South Ossetia during the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, still hope to return to their villages of origin. But almost from the beginning of their displacement the camp has been not only a space for the delivery of aid but also of long-term residence (Agier 2011, 71). Although the Georgian government still pays lip service to the possibility of return, it has formally acknowledged that return is not imminent and, with the help of UNHCR, USAID, and other humanitarian agencies, has resettled the IDPs into thirty-eight new settlements where they are supposed to stay for the foreseeable future.

The first and most immediate question of this book, then, is why millions of displaced people around the world find themselves chronically ensnared in the humanitarian condition. In recent years the UNHCR has focused on the problem of protracted displacement and has sought to end it by calling for “durable solutions” for displaced people. Where the preferred solution—voluntary repatriation—is not a realistic option, UNHCR has advocated for forms of social reintegration that would make displaced people into full social actors in the places they currently reside (Harild and Christensen 2010; Mundt and Ferris 2008; Brookings Institution 2010). Yet despite millions of dollars from donor governments and aid agencies meaningful social reintegration remains elusive. Why do displaced people remain trapped in what Agier (2011) calls “the continent of camps” for so long? How do they experience the aid they receive and how does it shape the ways they can reenter society? Why does humanitarian aid appear to leave them oscillating between dependency and abandonment for so long?

In this book I argue that the long-term limbo of displacement stems not just from the ongoing nature of modern conflict but also from the lifeworlds humanitarian aid creates. From the perspective of aid agencies and donor governments, displacement is largely a technical problem, which can be resolved by providing food, shelter, sanitation, medical care, and so on. Indeed some aid agencies have become highly specialized in providing that kind of assistance and have developed significant expertise in logistics and supply-chain management. But for refugees and IDPs themselves displacement is something beyond a technical problem of logistics and delivery. It is an existential dilemma posed by the destruction not only of their homes but also of the world they once knew, including many of their social relationships, their attachments to places, and the structures and practices they used to create meaning. Their attempts to use socially, politically, and spatially informed practices to make the world a relatively stable and comprehensible place once again tell us more generally about how people structure the things in experience, relate them to one another, and establish a basis for meaningful action. By focusing on people who sit in the ragged holes of a damaged society, I hope to show how social orders are built, broken, and constructed again out of the free-floating shrapnel of existence.

The problem of reconstructing a lifeworld that has literally been blown apart would be difficult enough. But IDPs do not reconstruct their lifeworlds unimpeded. Although humanitarian aid is meant to help displaced people begin their lives again, it often inadvertently puts them at a grave disadvantage in remaking a coherent and stable existence where they can make plans and where actions have a reasonable chance of achieving goals. Finnstrom (2008) argues that people in war-torn regions experience “a lessened control over ontological security in everyday life.” I argue that this lessened control is caused not only by war but also inadvertently by the practice of humanitarianism and by the unplanned ways it impedes displaced people from reconstructing their own lifeworlds. The chapters that follow show that humanitarianism creates six states of being that pin displaced people in place: war, chaos, nothingness, pressure, authoritarianism, and death. A “state of being” is both a simple and a complex notion, one that I develop in more detail below, but as a first pass, I mean it as a mode of existing in the world that both incorporates and exceeds the world planned and administrated by the international humanitarian apparatus. I do not argue that displaced people’s worlds are fully controlled by the humanitarian system. Rather, the states of being that displaced people experience are apart from the humanitarian system but intersect with it and are shaped by it, along with other forces such as religion and the nation-state. I want to distinguish carefully between what Feldman (2012) calls the “politics of life,” and “the politics of living,” that is, between the biopolitical techniques used by humanitarian actors to triage displaced people, provide social services to them, manage their economic activity, and govern them as a population, and the existential problem that displaced people face living in close proximity to that system. Rather than focusing on changes in policy at the international level, which often express intentions and aspirations rather than actual practice, or on the bureaucratic practices of aid agencies, which often show remarkable disjunctures with the way aid is given and used in IDP settlements, or even on the practices of aid workers, who are well-meaning but have a different perspective on aid than the beneficiaries of aid do, I have sought to understand the lifeworlds of the displaced from the practices of IDPs themselves, paying attention to how displaced people actually make do in the humanitarian condition and sticking as closely as I can to their understanding of the structures, agencies, and actors that both sustain and constrain them. My view, then, is not from the perspective of policymakers or aid workers, who often have a better understanding of the structural and political constraints around aid than displaced people do. Instead I have tried, to the best of my ability, to reflect a view of the humanitarian system from the ground of the camp and from the perspective of the people who live in it, even when this means perhaps perceiving aid differently than aid providers do.

What I ask, then, is how the practices of international actors, the dictates and programs of nation-states, the politics of local government, and the beliefs and practices of IDPs themselves intersect in ways that often trap displaced people in the suspended temporality of camp life. How do displaced people work against being stuck in prolonged liminality? How do they draw on memory, history, religion, and the social relations of their prewar lives as they seek to rebuild some sort of normal life in the spaces of the camp? What kinds of work—material, social, cultural—have to go on in order to socially reintegrate the displaced? And most important, why does the practice of humanitarian aid, which is aimed at facilitating that process, so often create a situation in which rebuilding a life and becoming a full member of society again becomes difficult or impossible? In asking these questions, I am trying to understand why the political and social constellation of life in the humanitarian condition leaves IDPs in purgatory, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.

To find out the answer to these questions, I spent more than sixteen months between 2009 and 2012 in the Georgian IDP camps. I arrived in Georgia five months after the war, on the day that the IDPs were moving from the kindergartens and libraries where they had been sleeping on the floor to thirty-six (later thirty-eight) new settlements. Thus I have been able to follow the process of postwar reconstruction almost from the beginning. That first year, which was the first year of their displacement, living in the camps was impossible for me: there was literally no room in the crowded cottages and none of the IDPs had food to spare. The political situation was still extremely tense and the Russians were only 30 kilometers from Tsmindatsqali, the settlement I spent the most time in. They were even closer in Khurvaleti, another camp in which I did research. It was literally inside the border, between the Georgian and Russian lines of control, about 500 meters from a checkpoint controlled by Ossetian militia and Russian forces. So I rented an apartment in the capital, Tbilisi, and commuted an hour and a half each way, five days a week, in the roving minivans called marshrutkas. After a few months, when I had made friends among the IDPs, I began spending several nights a week in Tsmindatsqali. In 2010 I lived in an apartment within walking distance of two settlements, and in 2011 I lived in Tsmindatsqali itself for nearly three months.1 My job, as I reluctantly came to define it, was to accompany the IDPs as they lived as humanitarianism’s beneficiaries, to understand what it meant to be the subject of humanitarian governance, to know the particular combinations of relief and suffering that humanitarianism engendered, and to see the resources and constraints it provided people seeking to remake some sort of tolerable existence.

MAP 1. IDP camps in the Republic of Georgia

What Is Humanitarianism?

Protracted displacement is often seen as the result of outside political forces: displaced people are prevented from returning to the towns and villages they came from until fighting has stopped and are also prevented from socially reintegrating into their host society by the host government. But in this book I show that the limbo of the camp is at least in part the result of the humanitarian enterprise itself, including the way it deals with material goods, handles information, and thinks about the role of displaced people in the system of aid governance. But before holding the humanitarian enterprise responsible, it is important to define what I mean by “humanitarianism,” a word that has taken on several distinct meanings. Humanitarianism is often understood as a sentiment, an ethical impulse to help distant strangers. But it has become many other things, too: an ideology, a system of categorization, a massive industry, a set of bureaucratic practices, and, for many people, a way of life (see Bornstein and Redfield 2011b; Feldman 2014). Anthropologists have used several lenses to understand what the advent of humanitarianism as a globalizing force entails, including sovereignty and statehood, morality and ethics, suffering and precarity, and urbanization and the right to the city. In this book I use each of these lenses at different points. What has always startled me is how different humanitarian action looks from each of them.

The question of sovereignty opens a view of humanitarianism at a global scale. Humanitarianism’s centrality to international politics is a result of dramatic changes in the international system since the end of the Cold War that have made it one of the new ordering principles of the international system. As a principle that allocates both power and money differentially among countries, humanitarianism divides the world’s nation-states not into North and South, colonist and colonized, as during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nor into East and West, or socialist and capitalist countries, as during much of the twentieth century. Rather, it divides the post–Cold War world into donors and receivers, states that are capable of adequately caring for their citizens and states that are not (Barnett 2010). This new norm in the international system, which stems from the United Nations’ 2005 Responsibility to Protect initiative,2 means that sovereignty is no longer absolute. Rather, under the aegis of global humanitarianism, the international community is increasingly willing to consider superceding a national government and intervening in various ways when a state cannot protect its citizens, including by making policy, providing material care for populations, and even by carrying out military action, such as the “humanitarian” bombings of Serbia or Libya.

The integration of humanitarianism as a moral value in global politics has driven great changes in the agencies that are tasked with providing aid, including international organizations in the UN syste...

Table of contents

• Note on Place Names in the South Caucasus
• 1. The Camp and the Camp
• 2. War
• Intertext 1: The Normal Situation
• 3. Chaos
• 4. Nothing
• Intertext 2: Void
• 5. Pressure
• 6. The Devil and the Authoritarian State
• Intertext 3: The State and the state
• 7. Death
• Intertext 4: Bright Objects
• 8. All That Remains
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index