Abstract
The spatialities and materialities of humanitarianism are important sites in which the politics of refugee protection and refugee aid are contested and re-negotiated. As such, they are emerging as a significant field of research in development and international studies. Following this body of work, and drawing on extensive fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt, this chapter explores how the spatial practices of international humanitarian organizations influence their relations with asylum seekers and refugees, and how these relations intersect with broader urban dynamics of social exclusion. Located in a ‘satellite city’ and guarded by United Nations (UN) security and CCTV cameras, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Cairo office provides an interesting example of the impact of securitization on both asylum seekers and humanitarians. The chapter shows how asylum seekers contest the growing contradictions of the local system of urban refugee governance through sit-ins and daily acts of ‘encroachment’ and spatialized resistance.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I use ‘securitization’ in a manner akin to the original definition by the Copenhagen school of international relations (Bouzan et al. 1998), namely, the reframing of a specific subjectivity or relation (refugees expressing frustration and protesting, and their interactions with aid workers) as a security problem. However, I maintain a rather broad definition of the term, encompassing the organization of the physical environment in which aid is delivered and the ways in which issues are problematized in security training, aid workers’ narratives and refugees’ claims.
- 2.
The agency was renamed ‘Homeland Security’ after the 2011 uprising.
- 3.
Although the majority of the people involved were men, during my ethnography I did meet women who were actively participating in protests—particularly Ethiopian-Oromo and Sudanese women. In the case of the person quoted here, an Arab-Iraqi woman, not only gender but also national belonging and chances for improving her legal status might have played a role in explaining why she had never taken part in mobilizations. As highlighted by the quote, in 2011–12, Iraqis, like all other categories of asylum seekers, had to endure prolonged waiting times for the completion of legal procedures. However, access to refugee status and resettlement was much easier for them than for other nationalities, which might explain their general lack of engagement with asylum seeker mobilization.
References
Atkinson, R., & Blandy, S. (2005). Introduction: International perspectives on the new enclavism and the rise of gated communities. Housing Studies, 20(2), 177–186.
Ayeb, H., & Bush, R. (2012). Introduction: Marginality and exclusion in Egypt and the Middle East. In H. Ayeb & R. Bush (Eds.), Marginality and exclusion in Egypt (pp. 3–13). London: Zed Books.
Bauman, Z. (2004). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bayat, A. (2012). Politics in the city-inside-out. City & Society, 24(2), 110–128.
Bayat, A. (2013). Life as politics: How ordinary people change the Middle East. 2nd edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bayat, A., & Biekart, K. (2009). Cities of extremes. Development and Change, 40(5), 815–825.
Brenner, N., & Theodore, N. (2002). Spaces of neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Buzan, B., Waever, O., & de Wilde, J. (1998). Security: A new framework for analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Caldeira, T. P. R. (1996). Fortified enclaves: The new urban segregation. Public Culture, 8(2), 303–328.
Caldeira, T. P. R. (2000). City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Denis, E. (2006). Cairo as neo-liberal capital? From walled city to gated community. In D. Singerman & P. Amar (Eds.), Cairo cosmopolitan: Politics, culture and urban space in the new globalised Middle East (pp. 47–72). Cairo: American University of Cairo Press.
Duffield, M. (2010). Risk-management and the fortified aid compound: Everyday life in post-interventionary society. Journal of Intervention and State Building, 4(4), 453–474.
El Ibrashy, W. (2011). After the universities when will the security leave the unions, parties, mosques, churches, newspapers and satellite TV? Sout el Umma (original version in Arabic, English translation), viewed 20 August 2016. http://www.madamasr.com/content/egypt-three-years-state-vs-journalists
Fawaz, M. (2009). Neoliberal urbanity: A view from Beirut’s periphery. Development and Change, 40(5), 827–852.
Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program (FMRS). (2006). A tragedy of failures and false expectations: Report on the events surrounding the three-month sit-in and forced removal of Sudanese refugees in Cairo, September–December 2005. Cairo: American University in Cairo, viewed 3 August 2016. http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cmrs/reports/documents/report_edited_v.pdf
Gorman, A. (2015). The Italians of Egypt: Return to diaspora. In A. Gorman & S. Kasbarian (Eds.), Diasporas of the modern Middle East: Contextualizing community (pp. 138–170). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Grabska, K. (2006). Marginalization in urban spaces of the global south: Urban refugees in Cairo. Journal of Refugee Studies, 19(3), 287–307.
Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. New York/London: Routledge.
Grant, R., & Thompson, D. (2013). The development complex, rural economy and urban-spatial and economic development in Juba, South Sudan. Local Economy, 28(2), 218–230.
Hackworth, J. (2006). The neoliberal city: Governance, ideology and development in American urbanism. New York: Cornell University Press.
Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haugen, H. Ø. (2012). Nigerians in China: A second state of immobility. International Migration, 50(2), 65–80.
Hyndman, J. (2001). Managing displacement: Refugees and the politics of humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hyndman, J., & Giles, W. (2011). Waiting for what? The feminization of asylum in protracted refugee situations. Gender Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 18(3), 361–379.
Ismail, S. (2006). Political life in Cairo’s new urban quarters: Encountering the everyday state. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jennings, K., & Bøås, M. (2015). Transactions and interactions: Everyday life in the peacekeeping economy. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 9(3), 281–295.
Kagan, M. (2012). The UN ‘surrogate state’ and the foundation of refugee policy in the Middle East (Scholarly Works Paper 781), viewed 18 August 2016. http://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/781
Kuppinger, P. (2004). Exclusive greenery: New gated communities in Cairo. City & Society, 16(2), 35–62.
Lees, L. (2004). The emancipatory city: Urban (re)visions. In L. Lees (Ed.), The emancipatory city? Paradoxes and possibilities (pp. 3–20). London: Sage.
Low, S. (2003). Behind the gates. New York/London: Routledge.
Mitchell, T. (2002). Rule of experts: Egypt, technopolitics, modernity. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Moulin, C., & Nyers, P. (2007). “We live in a country of UNHCR”: Refugee protests and global political society. International Political Sociology, 1, 356–372.
Murray, P. (2011). City of extremes: The spatial politics of Johannesburg. Durham: Duke University Press.
Osman, T., Divigalpitiya, P., & Arima, T. (2016). Quantifying the driving forces of informal urbanization in the western part of the Greater Cairo Metropolitan Region. Environments, 3(2), 13. doi:10.3390/environments3020013.
Parakash, G., & Kruse, K. M. (2008). The spaces of the modern city: Imaginaries, politics, and everyday life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pascucci, E. (2016). The humanitarian infrastructure and the question of over-research: Reflections on fieldwork in the refugee crises in the Middle East and North Africa. Area, 49, 249–255. in press.
Pascucci, E. (2017). From “refugee population” to political community: The Mustapha Mahmoud refugee protest camp. In G. Brown, A. Feigenbaum, F. Frenzel, & P. McCurdy (Eds.), Protest camps in international context: Spaces, infrastructures, and media of resistance (pp. 289-308). Bristol: Policy Press at the University of Bristol.
Peck, J., Theodore, N., & Brenner, N. (2009). Neoliberal urbanism: Models, moments, mutations. SAIS Review of International Affairs, 29(1), 49–66.
Roth, S. (2011). Dealing with danger: Risk and security in the everyday lives of aid workers. In A. M. Fechter & H. Hindman (Eds.), Inside the everyday lives of development workers: The challenges and futures of aidland (pp. 151–168). Sterling: Kumarian Press.
Smirl, L. (2008). Building the other, constructing ourselves: Spatial dimensions of international humanitarian response. International Political Sociology, 2, 236–253.
Smirl, L. (2015). Spaces of aid: How cars, compounds and hotels shape humanitarianism. London: Zed Books.
Stewart, D. J. (1996). Cities in the desert: The Egyptian New-Town Program. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86(3), 459–480.
Tadros, M. (2012). Backstage governance. Institute of Development Studies Bulletin, 43(1), 62–70.
Verdirame, G., & Harrell-Bond, B. (1995). Rights in exile: Janus-faced humanitarianism. New York/Oxford: Berghahn.
Wahdan, D. (2012). Transport thugs: Spatial marginalization in a Cairo suburb. In H. Ayeb & R. Bush (Eds.), Marginality and exclusion in Egypt (pp. 112–132). London: Zed Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pascucci, E. (2017). Seeking Asylum in Neoliberal Cairo: Refugee Protests and the Securitization of Humanitarianism. In: Vecchio, F., Gerard, A. (eds) Entrapping Asylum Seekers. Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58739-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58739-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58738-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58739-8
eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)