After U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly suspended foreign assistance last year, 100,000 residents of the Kakuma refugee camp were told they would no longer receive humanitarian support. The camp is in Kenya’s arid Turkana County and contains more than 300,000 people, who subsist almost entirely on aid. Trump’s cuts compounded years of diminished support: In 2023, the World Food Programme (WFP) reduced assistance from the equivalent of $17 a month per refugee — enough for 80% of basic nutritional needs — to $13. In 2025, WFP slashed support to $5 a month.

In response, residents protested, and humanitarians asked the Kenyan police to repress the very people they were there to help. The cuts in Kakuma were mirrored across the world. There are 6.6 million people living in refugee camps, some 22% of the world’s refugee population, and their futures are now in question. 

Humanitarianism has been in retreat for some time, even before Trump’s shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Global North is ever more skeptical of foreign assistance, partly because of the wave of austerity that followed the 2008 financial crisis and partly because of the rise of right-wing movements hostile to overseas spending. U.S. reductions in humanitarian funding followed similar cuts by the European Union (EU), France and Germany. Proportionately, the U.K. slashed foreign assistance in 2025–26 even more aggressively than America did.

Over the past year, I’ve watched the collapse unfold. As a writer and researcher on the Horn of Africa, I often brief Western ambassadors, and the diplomats who once celebrated their countries’ support for aid agencies are now reconsidering their prior commitments. The humanitarian sector ballooned in the 1980s as a means of ministering to emergencies. In theory, aid workers would stabilize catastrophes before development agencies took the lead and enabled formerly war-torn countries to become functional states. That worldview no longer makes sense.

Humanitarian emergencies have often become permanent, as countries like Sudan remain mired in conflict, leading to refugee camps that exist for decades, with donors — largely from the Global North — bearing the cost. As the hope of viable governments in much of the Horn of Africa recedes, donors question whether it is worth paying to permanently administer palliative care to the world’s neediest. European funds frequently flow to “migration management” instead. Border enforcement consumes vastly more capital than feeding the displaced. Even before Trump’s cuts, the detention center had replaced the refugee camp as a policy priority.

The crisis in the global refugee regime does not mean that humanitarian catastrophes have gone away. Quite the contrary. By the end of 2025, 117 million people were displaced worldwide, a slight decrease from a world record 123 million in 2024 — a peak partly due to the continuing crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Syria, along with the war in Sudan, which is the world’s largest displacement crisis. In 2000, by comparison, there were 38 million displaced.

For these refugees, the situation further deteriorated after Trump’s cuts. In Rohingya settlements near Cox’s Bazar, on the southeast coast of Bangladesh, more than a million people already faced severe overcrowding and shrinking rations. After the cuts, essential camp services were suspended and hospitals boarded up. WFP, which depended on U.S. funds for many of its operations, was forced to triage between the hungry and the starving. It removed all food assistance for a million refugees in Uganda, while another 800,000 had their rations reduced by up to 80%. 

Across the world, humanitarian operations in refugee camps were plunged into crisis by the implosion of aid budgets. The U.N. refugee agency, the UNHCR, laid off 30% of its workforce and cut assistance to 13 million refugees. The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) let 6,000 staff members go, as its budget fell by 25% in 2025 and contracted further in 2026. The institutions underlying the global refugee regime, which have been in place since the 1950s, were collapsing.

But what is to come will likely be far worse.

“Even before Trump’s cuts, the detention center had replaced the refugee camp as a policy priority.”

In July 2025, I walked through grazing land in South Sudan, the water up to my chest. Once-in-a-century floods occur almost annually, rendering vast tracts of the country uninhabitable. At the end of a particularly arduous trek, I sat, disconsolate and humming with heat, ready to vent my frustrations to anyone within earshot.

An old woman had spent the day hiking through the floods in the opposite direction and let me know she didn’t think much of my complaints. For the last year, she told me, she had been living on a raft, eating only the fish she caught in the floodwaters. She was coming to town to repair her mosquito net, and then she would return to the swamp. It was safer there, she said, before muttering about government airstrikes. Security, for her, meant a more aqueous form of life, as far from the state as possible. Besides, she told me, she was too old to leave South Sudan.

Many have already left, and many more will follow. Globally, the number of people displaced by climate catastrophe is projected to quadruple by 2050. Not that, sensu stricto, they will even be called refugees. Under the terms of the U.N. Refugee Convention, which, along with the 1967 Protocol, provides the basic coordinates of the global regime governing displacement, those fleeing climate-change-induced disaster are not accorded refugee status.

The Convention defines a refugee as an individual with a well-founded fear of persecution because of their political opinions or membership of a particular group. Such a definition does not encompass those forced into exile by desertification or flooding, occurrences that the Convention’s clauses treat as natural phenomena, despite the clearly political dimensions of global warming. 

Some scholars have advocated for an expanded agreement that recognizes climate refugees, but in truth, even the modest clauses of the 1951 Convention would not be ratified today by states more concerned with the sanctity of their borders than with humanely addressing displacement. Though, as has been suggested in these pages, contemporary problems are planetary in nature, our international institutions nonetheless remain resolutely global bodies, answerable to a reactionary set of nation-states whose governments conjure demonic phantasms of cat-chomping migrants to win popular support.

It’s right to be horrified by the consequences of Trump’s cuts, which have left millions without lifesaving assistance. But we should not mourn a humanitarian system that was fundamentally unable to meet the challenges of forced displacement. Reductions in funding had such terrible consequences for refugees precisely because the displaced had been kept in camps, dependent on aid and not allowed to work or travel.

The refugee camp has always functioned as both a cage, constructed to control its inhabitants, and a hospital, intended to keep its patients on life support. Without the funds to sustain humanitarian assistance, camps will become only cages, designed to prevent their inhabitants from crossing borders.

Lineaments Of The Current Crisis

The term refugee camp was coined during the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902), when the British used it to refer to settlements in which they kept both prisoners of war and the internally displaced. Britain’s South African camps were prefigured by its colonial practice in India, where they were built to quarantine the sick and victims of famine, and to restrict population movement and quell political activity. Camps were also employed as a form of colonial control by the Spanish in Cuba and the Americans in the Philippines. As cages, camps have a long history. 

The contemporary global refugee regime takes its lineaments from postwar Europe, as nations were created and the conflict’s survivors searched for new homes. The U.N. Refugee Convention was first adopted in 1951. Under the terms of the Convention, only Europeans displaced in the years before its adoption were considered refugees.

Preliminary discussions of the Convention focused on non-refoulement, the principle that asylum seekers cannot be returned to countries where they face persecution. This was a reaction to the original sin of the Global North: that many countries refused entry to Jewish refugees during World War II. UNHCR was created with a mandate to deal with refugees in the ruins of Europe. It treated them as individuals with political problems and campaigned for their legal rights. They were to find a place within the existing order of nation-states.

“Globally, the number of people displaced by climate catastrophe is projected to quadruple by 2050.”

In 1967, the U.N. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees expanded the category to include non-Europeans and those displaced after 1951. UNHCR campaigned for a more expansive mandate. It soon extended its work to Africa and Asia, where the violent repression of anti-colonial struggles and the creation of new nation-states had produced fresh waves of displacement. This geographical shift came with a change of emphasis for the U.N. agency.

Outside Europe, UNHCR granted refugees prima facie recognition but only addressed their material needs. While the refugee and the asylum seeker can be one and the same person, they would now be separated geographically and legally. In some states, there would be the possibility of seeking asylum, and with it, the promise of eventual citizenship. Countries that have signed the 1951 Convention must admit asylum seekers who arrive at their borders, at least in theory, but no country has a duty to admit refugees living elsewhere, which means the possibility of asylum has always been shaped by national immigration policies.

By the 1970s, as economies in the Global North were thrown into turmoil, opportunistic politicians scapegoated migrants for their countries’ woes. The world’s richest countries were pulling up their drawbridges, making it increasingly difficult for the displaced to find places to claim asylum. 

This left UNHCR in some difficulty. What was it to do with the world’s refugees? The agency has long had three preferred solutions for dealing with those who have fled their homelands: return, resettlement or integration. UNHCR’s overwhelming preference is to return refugees to their country of origin. This is difficult to do when states are whole only on maps. UNHCR hoped that the wars that scarred the Horn of Africa in the 1990s would be exceptions, and their end would enable refugee return and state-building. These conflicts, however, have proved more enduring than many of the region’s nation-states, which means that for these refugees, return is rarely an option. 

Resettlement in a foreign country, UNHCR’s second preferred option, has only ever been possible for a vanishingly small number of refugees. While resettlement was occasionally a useful propaganda tool during the Cold War, in the decades since, political fears around migration in the Global North have made it ever more restricted. The pandemic sounded an initial death knell for resettlement, with numbers falling by over 50% from 2019 to 2021. In 2024, 188,800 of a total of 42.7 million refugees globally were resettled in a third country. Trump’s cancellation of the U.S. resettlement program in January 2025 was a dramatic spectacle, but one that followed a script written many years before.

Integrating the displaced into host communities, the third of UNHCR’s preferred options, seemed possible during the 1960s and 1970s, as optimistic postcolonial governments led schemes to incorporate refugees into rural settlements. In Africa, things changed during the 1980s. The 1979 oil spike led to spiraling commodity and energy prices and was swiftly followed by brutal debt crises and the hollowing out of many of the continent’s developmental states. African governments struggled to cope with increased flows of displaced people.

The problem was made more difficult by the presence of armed groups inside refugee camps set up in the 1990s for those who had fled wars in Burundi, Congo and Rwanda. As was already the case in the Global North, for many African governments, refugees were best kept out of national politics rather than integrated.

The refugee camp became a politically expedient way of dealing with displaced persons in Africa and Asia, satisfactory to all parties except for the displaced, who were not consulted. In the 1980s, as African states contracted, the humanitarian sector expanded. It shouldered responsibility for refugees, as long as they were in camps. Western governments — the principal donors to the humanitarian agencies — were only too happy with this development, which strengthened their control over Africa just as regional states were being weakened, all under the banner of a depoliticized humanitarianism. 

In the official rhetoric of the U.N. and the nations that fund it, camps were unfortunate, temporary measures. In reality, refugee camps became the default option for the displaced. Funding them meant providing food and canvas tents to the neediest — a humanitarian gesture that avoided tricky questions about rights.

Camps were also politically useful. Housing refugees in remote rural settlements in the Global South, donors hoped, would mean they wouldn’t travel north and claim asylum. For host governments, the camps helped prevent debates over citizenship. They also proved profitable. Governments made money from humanitarians — partly by providing the logistics the aid sector needed and partly by taxing aid workers — and local communities could find work in the camps.

“Humanitarian budgets might be bolstered by portraying refugees as victims, but that didn’t help the displaced, who wanted to have a say in their own futures.”

Refugee camp governance has always been intertwined with and dependent on state power. In Kakuma, aid workers have relied on the hard edge of the Kenyan police force, a point the geographer Hanno Brankamp noted in his book published earlier this year, “Occupied Refuge: Humanitarian Colonization and the Camp in Kenya.”

Despite the great diversity of political situations that have led to camps worldwide, those run by UNHCR are remarkably consistent. Because residency in camps is predicated on the idea that refugees are there temporarily, either to be resettled or to return home, refugees are not allowed to work, be politically active or acquire citizenship. In 2023, one young humanitarian, working in a Sudanese refugee camp in South Sudan, told me: “We can’t give people careers. We just address basic needs. And the truth is, we don’t do that very well.” 

In the 1980s and 1990s, each major African conflict zone produced its own camps, a development mirrored elsewhere as camps soon spread across Asia. Henceforth, refugees would be held in limbo, captured in canvas, without political rights, and the humanitarian sector would care for them until they could return home.

In Um Rakouba, Sudan, where Ethiopian refugees fled in the early 1980s, the displaced insisted that employment opportunities should be equitably rotated among the camp’s residents, so everyone had access to cash. The humanitarians in the camp were appalled: hiring decisions were to be made by the aid agencies. The refugees refused rations when their wishes were not granted. The two sides clashed over everything, from how food was to be distributed to where refugees were to settle.

The anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond, the doyenne of refugee studies, published one of the first critiques of camps in 1986, “Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees.” UNHCR ruled the camps like a dictator, Harrell-Bond argued, denying refugees any control over their own lives. The very category of the refugee, she claimed, was an artificial imposition, maintained for the convenience of the NGOs. Humanitarian budgets might be bolstered by portraying refugees as victims, but that didn’t help the displaced, who wanted to have a say in their own futures.

The humanitarians whom Harrell-Bond interviewed blamed the suspension of refugee rights on the demands of host governments. But this was a dodge, and only ever partially true. Across the Horn of Africa, I’ve heard aid workers argue that refugees only require material assistance, not political rights. In any event, they tell me, such measures, like the camps themselves, are temporary. 

That was 40 years ago. What was intended as a stopgap has become a permanent fixture of our world. Each war creates another set of camps. Few close, as conflict and disaster render return impossible. Refugee camps today are an institutionalized feature of the U.N.’s response to displacement. There are best-practice manuals, trade fairs where IKEA hawks new refugee shelters, hundreds of international organizations and aid workers who have made careers out of camps. 

The two main Kenyan refugee camps, Dadaab and Kakuma, were founded in the 1990s. Children born in the first years of these settlements are now in their thirties but still have no right to either citizenship or political participation in the country in which they have grown up. The camps were designed to be non-places, intended for non-people.

This stopgap solution never really made sense, not if you were a refugee in Kakuma, waiting for life to begin. Over the last couple of years, even the material assistance offered by the aid agencies has largely ceased. The refugee camp, in its humanitarian guise, existed from the 1980s through to 2025. What comes next is already visible: the camp as a cage.

Caging Humanity

As the Syrian refugee crisis worsened in 2015–16, more than a million people fled to Europe in search of help, the largest population movement on the continent since World War II. The crisis led Europe to intensify its efforts to move its border-enforcement mechanisms farther south, effectively externalizing its frontiers. With the notable exception of Germany, which opened its doors to over a million refugees, most European states not only closed their borders but also proactively paid to keep the displaced outside them. The EU signed a $6.6 billion deal with Turkey in 2016 to keep Syrian refugees on its soil.

“What was intended as a stopgap has become a permanent fixture of our world.”

By 2018, European officials were calling Niger, Libya and Sudan “Europe’s new southern border.” The people who were to be prevented from moving to Europe were not just Syrians, but almost anyone from the Global South. Where there were once refugee camps, there is now a 21st-century fortress, constructed from drones and digital surveillance networks, guarded by militias funded by the EU.

Such externalization of national borders takes different forms elsewhere in the Global North. In Australia, the government has created a system of offshore processing centers for asylum seekers who manage to reach its shores; America has a growing set of detention centers inside its borders and has also subcontracted prisons elsewhere in the world — from the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in El Salvador, where deportees are kept incommunicado and subjected to torture, to the Matsapha Correctional Complex in Eswatini, where similar things happen.

Agadez, Niger, lies at the edge of the Sahara and is a staging post for refugees making the long journey to Europe. The Nigerien government established a camp there in 2018, which is managed by UNHCR. Funding for the camp comes from European nations that want to prevent movement north. As of September 2025, it housed some 2,000 refugees, largely from Sudan. Its residents are not allowed to work or move freely. 

UNHCR calls the Agadez camp a “humanitarian centre,” though there is little humanitarian about it. There is limited access to health and educational services, and since July 2025, only 270 of the 2,000 refugees have received food rations. Protests have occurred daily since September 2024, and the Nigerien security forces have responded violently. In August 2025, the government disappeared six human rights activists from the site. 

Even if the refugees held in Agadez somehow made it north, they would encounter detention centers in Libya, where the EU has poured millions into security forces to detain the displaced. Across the country, refugees are rounded up by these forces, imprisoned, and transferred at gunpoint into warehouses where they are tortured and kept without food or medical care until they can pay for their release.

Other refugees flee to Tunisia, where the EU also funds security services and conditions are just as dire. If the refugees make it onto boats, they might drown at sea (more than 600 people died crossing the Mediterranean in the first two months of 2026), or else be arrested by the Libyan coast guard, which might forcibly expel them or abandon them in the desert.

If refugees manage to escape the detention centers, cross the uncertain waters, and avoid being detained or killed by the Libyan coast guard, then they will arrive in Europe, where there are more than 400 detention centers ready to greet them. The ones at Europe’s edges tend to have the harshest conditions. After Moria, a camp on Lesbos, Greece, was destroyed by a fire in 2020, the Greek government used EU funds to construct a detention center on the island of Samos. The camp is hidden in a forest far from town, with high walls crowned by barbed wire. It resembles a prison. This isn’t an accident. “Return or prison” was the ultimatum Greece’s Minister of Migration, Thanos Plevris, gave “illegal migrants” in a speech in October 2025.

Migrants in Germany are now being removed to two detention centers in Bulgaria, where prisoners have little access to medical care or legal services, and face swift deportations after farcical asylum hearings. Europe, the continent for which the 1951 Convention’s right to asylum was created, is doing its best to criminalize it.

This attempt to block refugees from entering Europe will only intensify. Europe has seen a wave of nationalist parties gain popularity, and the policies of even the more progressive parties have shifted rightward. The cruelty of Europe’s asylum legislation today is determined by an electoral calculus, as politicians across the continent vie to be the toughest on migration.

The rightward tilt of global politics over the last decade indicates that drumming up such hatred is a vote-winner. The Alternative für Deutschland — a far-right party that wants to effectively end asylum as a right — won almost 21% of the vote in the February 2025 national election. Germany now wishes to expel the very refugees it once welcomed. In March 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged Syrian refugees to voluntarily return, even though two-thirds of Syria remains dependent on humanitarian aid. If they refuse, Merz promised to deport them.

“The cruelty of Europe’s asylum legislation today is determined by an electoral calculus, as politicians across the continent vie to be the toughest on migration.”

On June 12, a new European Pact on Migration and Asylum went into effect. Under this agreement, people who arrive in Europe irregularly (bureaucratese for those without the legal means to enter the EU) will be detained and then pushed into accelerated asylum procedures without safeguards like legal aid. This effectively criminalizes asylum, for there is no regular way for Afghans and Somalis to reach Europe and apply, and Europe — like the rest of the Global North — does not accept asylum applications from outside its borders.

As popular as these policies may be, the detention center, like the refugee camp, is not a meaningful response to mass migration into Europe. When the EU externalized its frontiers into North Africa, the migrant sea route from Senegal to the Canary Islands saw traffic surge. When Europe hardened Morocco’s borders, building fences and surveillance systems, departures from Mauritania along the risky Atlantic route skyrocketed. The EU is now expanding its deportation agreements with Senegal and Mauritania and supporting the construction of yet more detention centers in those countries. 

All these schemes ignore the fact that migratory flows into Europe are fundamentally driven by geopolitical conditions rather than by EU border policy. The global number of the displaced changes due to wars and catastrophes, not barbed wire and drones. The detention center fails to recognize the dynamics that undergird population movement and offers no answer to the question of what should be done in an era of climate-change-induced migration.

Today’s UNHCR is in an unenviable position. The U.N. agency has two fundamental duties: to protect refugees and find durable solutions for them. Yet none of its three preferred solutions — return, resettlement or integration — are politically viable for the agency. Even before the pandemic and the accession of Trump 2.0, UNHCR resettled just 2,000 of the refugees in Libya each year, due to the reluctance of states in the Global North. Host governments in North Africa have hardened their policies toward refugees in response to the promise of EU funding and have little interest in offering them viable lives, which takes integration off the table. 

UNHCR has today become a proxy for its principal donors, which wish to block refugee movement, not enable it. Since 2015, it — like the EU — has provided training workshops and equipment to the Libyan coast guard. The U.N.’s IOM has also helped the EU block migration to Europe. In Libya, it assisted more than 30,000 voluntary refugee returns in 2017–18, though human rights organizations argue these returns aren’t voluntary if the alternative is detention.

Elsewhere, U.N. agencies find themselves on the soft side of America’s deportation campaigns. In Panama, IOM helps Trump with those who self-deport from the U.S. In Greece, IOM oversees the “Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration” program and receives a cash bonus for every refugee it deports. UNHCR assists in policing Greece’s detention centers. Its three preferred solutions have narrowed to two: forced return or indefinite detention.

UNHCR and IOM’s new roles are political choices. These agencies accede to the Global North’s framing, which treats protecting borders as essential and protecting human life as optional. At its origin, UNHCR was mandated to help refugees find a place in Europe. Now it tries to do everything it can to bar their entry. The reactionary policies of the U.N. represent a profound failure of the imagination. How might we imagine a world in which we can all lead flourishing lives, as climate change radically transforms our planet? To such a question, the U.N. has no answer.

Can The Camp Be A City?

UNHCR is ultimately answerable to its donor states, and it is naïve to imagine there will be a shift in the nativist logic of the Global North’s politics. If there is a role for UNHCR beyond that of a prison warden, it is to once again advocate for refugees’ political rights and support their efforts to define their own futures, rather than treating their political activity as a threat, as the agency does in Agadez and Kakuma. 

For though the era of humanitarian refugee camps is over, the settlements themselves are not going anywhere. Some scholars hope that the refugee camps of the past might become the cities of the future, and refugees may be able to lead productive lives exactly where they are. In much of the discussion of such future cities, refugee voices themselves have been sidelined. UNHCR could advocate for the displaced just as it did in Europe in the 1950s.

“At its origin, UNHCR was mandated to help refugees find a place in Europe. Now it tries to do everything it can to bar their entry.”

One scheme that warns against optimistic readings of the world after the refugee camp is the Jordan Compact, a three-way agreement between the Jordanian monarchy, the EU and the U.N. Launched with much fanfare in 2016, the compact would draw on “Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System,” by political scientist Alexander Betts and economist Paul Collier, which mourns the waste of life in refugee camps and instead suggests putting refugees to work. European states would provide the grants and concessional loans, and Jordan would issue the refugees’ work permits.

Goods produced in Jordan’s special economic zones by companies with at least 15% Syrian workers would also receive a range of EU incentives. Further cash flowed into Jordan to support this program, including a $1.4 billion line of credit from the World Bank and some $4 billion in refugee-related aid from Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere — more than any other country in the world that year.

The Jordan Compact failed at every level. Refugees were restricted to menial labor to limit competition with locals and were unwilling to travel long distances to work for low wages. The government also required increased social security contributions from the refugees, which risked putting them in debt for very low-paying jobs. Investors and industry also proved uninterested in the scheme. Two years into the project, only 11 companies were involved.

One reason it failed, according to historian Laura Robson in “Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work,” is that Syrian refugees were too closely connected to local networks and had higher wage requirements than the poorly paid Egyptian and South Asian migrant laborers who typically sustain Jordan’s manufacturing sector. Even if it had created new proletarians, though, the scheme would not have afforded a flourishing life for the Syrian refugees, for it offered them no political rights.

The “Shirika Plan” unfolding in Kenya is likely to repeat some of the same mistakes. As part of its “encampment policy,” which began in 1991, the Kenyan government pushed its more than 840,000 refugees into Dadaab and Kakuma. That policy meant refugees had no freedom of movement or rights to work or live outside of the camps; those who managed to get to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, lived in constant fear of arrest. 

In 2021, the Kenyan government passed a Refugee Act that, if fully implemented, would allow refugees freedom of movement, the right to work and access to financial services. One of the central planks of the new policy is to turn the two camps into cities. Kakuma, at least before the economic crisis produced by Trump’s cuts, had an economy of $56 million. In 2025, both Dadaab and Kakuma were redesignated as municipalities, initially under U.N. management, but they will eventually be administered by their host counties, Garissa and Turkana, respectively. The redesignation, including infrastructure construction, will cost around a billion dollars, largely funded by the World Bank.

Refugees have questioned whether the plan will work. Both camps are in arid landscapes, which make agriculture very difficult, and both have been extremely dependent on humanitarian aid. It’s unclear whether the camps will be economically viable, given the extent of the aid agency cuts and continued uncertainty over whether refugees will actually be allowed to work outside the camps. There is also doubt about whether refugees will have any say in how municipalities develop. As one refugee journalist based in Dadaab told “The New Humanitarian”:

“Kenyan citizens have their rights, but we don’t have any representation. They have MCAs [Members of the County Assembly], MPs, a president and governors. But we have no one to represent us. The only representation we have is in UNHCR. Our representation starts there and ends there. And in any conflict, the one who will be affected is the refugee.”

The danger is that the Shirika Plan will preserve what was most fundamentally baleful about Dadaab and Kakuma under humanitarian rule: the absence of political structures in which refugees could actualize their own programs and desires. The polis, for thinkers from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, is a space for political beings. For Arendt, it is only through moral and intellectual exchange among citizens that one might arrive at a flourishing life.

The Shirika Plan suspends questions of citizenship and political rights and therefore tends in the same direction as the Jordan Compact. While it doesn’t treat the camps’ residents as pure victims, as humanitarians might, they now become laborers. It is still unclear whether they would have the freedom to leave the confines of Garissa and Turkana. The camps may end up looking like cities, but they would nonetheless remain cages.

“The camps may end up looking like cities, but they would nonetheless remain cages.”

A World Of Camps

Though the era of the camp is over, the cages continue to be built. In the detention center, the special economic zone and the faux city, one can observe the same combination of suspended political rights and denial of movement that characterized the refugee camp. All contemporary debate about mass displacement is desiccated by its assumptions: that the sanctity of nation-state borders is the highest good, and that, ultimately, refugees are a problem. 

Earlier generations thought much more imaginatively about the issue. In 1949, a group of intellectuals, including Albert Einstein — himself, of course, a refugee — and Bertrand Russell, wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie, suggesting a more cosmopolitan way to deal with refugees: a world passport for the displaced. “History made them citizens of the world, and they should be treated as such.”

The refugee problem was an opportunity to “let the ideal of world-citizenship subsist not exclusively in theories and programs, but also in courageous experimenting and a genuine respect for the human person.” The International Refugee Organization, a precursor to UNHCR, reacted with hostility:

“Here are people to whom you say: be proud of your statelessness, remain this way and become the first world citizens! … But stateless persons know all too well what they desire: to stop being stateless. Not out of sentimentality, but to obtain asylum, passport, a work permit, or access to a hospital.” 

Their response has produced our world today, with its growing numbers of stateless people and refugees. Our inability to think beyond the nation-state has been held in abeyance by a humanitarian system that at least enabled refugees to sustain life. But that system has been replaced by a darker vision of the world as an archipelago of detention centers, violently and fruitlessly trying to contain the displaced people of the globe and prevent them from coming to the Global North.

We stand at the dawn of massive climate-change-induced displacement, with no substantive discussion about how to deal with it, and no interest in exploring our planetary responsibility for those whose homes will be devastated by desertification and flooding. For the children of the old woman whom I met in the South Sudanese swamps in July 2025, the Global North offers only indifference and detention centers.