'Madmen, Womanisers, and Thieves': Moral Disorder and the Cultural Text of Refugee Encampment in Kenya

In this talk, I will draw on part of my doctoral research on humanitarianism, policing, and violence in Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya which I conducted between June 2016 and September 2017. Over the years, Kenya’s city-sized refugee camps have evoked rather spectacular imaginaries, two of which have revolve around ‘terrorism’ and ‘humanitarian crisis’. This is not least a result of continuing humanitarian interventions over more than three decades and recurrent attacks by the Somali Al-Shabaab militants across Kenya. Going beyond these dominant narratives, however, this paper argues that neither the spectre of terrorism nor notions of compassion are sufficient to explain the workings of aid, protection, and refugee governance in the camps. Rather, these narratives are underwritten locally by deeper concerns about the imagined ‘otherness’ and moral degeneracy of the displaced. Refugees are hereby portrayed as criminals and crooks, sexually deviant and idle, as well as ‘mad’ and uncivilised. Together these tropes constitute a cultural text of encampment that reproduces postcolonial imaginings of difference and engrains the notion that refugeeness equals a state of ‘moral disorder’. This paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and draws particularly on everyday discourses and shared knowledges among ‘camp administrators’ in Kakuma refugee camp, namely aid workers, Kenyan government officials, and police officers. The discursive production of refugees as immoral subjects has thus not only practical effects for the actions of these administrators but also rekindles a binary colonial mapping of the world into ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ spaces. The Kakuma camp is thereby doubly excluded: from the modernity that humanitarianism ostensibly embodies and the imagined moral community of Kenya.