Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Architecture of Migration is an excellent ethnographic work that interrogates and deconstructs the often ignored postcolonial architecture, iconographies and planning of initially transient spaces of humanitarian displacement: refugee camps. Refugee camps are envisioned as impermanent spaces established to accommodate large numbers of people fleeing from the ravages of conflict and climate-induced changes. The book explores the politics, materiality and aesthetics of how the design, construction and habitation of these spaces are influenced by various local and international forces. Migrants, the book observes, oscillate between their forced mobility for safety and livelihoods and their precarious sedentarization in the temporal abodes of camps, ‘a humanitarian spatiality defined by the interventions of architects and planners’ (p. 28) and linked to international agencies and government institutions. The author also subtly demonstrates how migrants exercise deconstructive agency through the resilience, subversion and transience of indigenous architecture, such as mobile, gendered ‘tuqul dwellings’, which traditionally accompany pastoralist ways of life across the region but now dot the outskirts of humanitarian spaces as transitory homes for newcomers.
Siddiqi delves into intricate colonial and postcolonial histories and ecologies of refugee camps, demonstrating how the land, the people who call it home both now and before, and humanitarians who work there actively participate in the reciprocal and often asymmetrical construction of such spaces. The book challenges readers to recognize that these transient spaces are not devoid of histories and struggles but are imbued with agencies that define their quotidian belongingness.
The author chose Dadaab as a site of humanitarian operations for this beautifully written work. Dadaab stands out in the Horn of Africa amid such initially in-between places that were meant to stem incoming waves of ‘unwanted migrants’ but then became semi-permanent settlements. Currently, small towns for predominantly Somali refugees and others from Ethiopia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other conflict-prone countries, host communities, petty traders and humanitarian workers have been established around Dadaab.
The camps (Dagahaley, Ifo and Hagadera) began in 1991 with the fall of Somalia’s Siad Barre regime. With the internal implosion of Somalia and the subsequent bloody fratricidal civil wars, and following later droughts and famines, hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled across the border into Kenya. The camp has also, at times, been a point of contention and conflict between the governments of Kenya and Somalia, with the former threatening its closure and forceful repatriation of displaced persons to Somalia and other countries. The refugee camp has been used as a bargaining chip in diplomatic impasses, both between the two states and between the states and international humanitarian agencies.
The book is divided into five chapters. The Introduction explores architecture and history in a refugee camp. Chapter 1, ‘From partition’, examines what makes refugee camps what they are. Infused with insightful analysis, the book delves into the ways in which specific historical and rhetorical forces construct camps as oppressed spaces that separate the people from the land. The book, which relies on first-hand descriptions and conversations with refugees, demonstrates how structures of enclosure govern lives in the camps through the issuance or denial of Kenyan citizenship documents and alien cards for refugees; both have immense implications for mobility, sedentarization and access to economic and social benefits. Chapter 2, ‘Land, emergency, and sedentarization in East Africa’, analyses the problem of enclosure that forcefully sedentarizes migrants into neatly defined spaces of humanitarian emergencies. The predominantly nomadic nature of the refugees and host communities, which have an opposing logic to that of mass sedentarization, is demonstrated through constructive resistance via the vernacular architecture of ‘makuti’ and ‘tuqul’. Chapter 3, ‘Shelter and domesticity’, explores the architectural coordinates of shelter, which are central to humanitarian practice and discourse, and the conceptual problem of domesticity, which is crucial for refugee lives. Chapter 4, ‘An archive of humanitarian settlement’, labours in the space of expanded knowledge that has been built over the three preceding chapters to present a history of the planning and settlement of Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera camps. Chapter 5 examines the architecture of the Dadaab camps, focusing on the designs of relief organizations and the refugees themselves, highlighting how structures such as tarps and tents connect the camp to the broader world. This chapter explores humanitarian iconography, key practices and the social lives of objects, connecting the localized efforts of refugees in Dadaab with the global initiatives of humanitarian organizations. This interplay raises questions about the commodification of aid and paradoxical partnerships in the material practices of humanitarian relief, highlighting the contradictions within the discourse of liberal ideologies. The book ends with an Afterword, ‘Poetry is a weapon that we use in both war and peace’, the title based on the words of the Somali poet Hadrawi. This final section reflects on the architecture and history of the Dadaab refugee camps through the poetic ‘weapon’ of critical heritage, which endures through war and peace.
The author fuses meticulously illuminating conversations with pictorial depictions of the architecture of humanitarian emergencies as lived by refugees and workers in the camps and interrogates the lives of those who once called the Dadaab camps home. To some extent, the specialist language, theorization and insightful analysis may appear complex to lay readers, but the message of the book remains incredibly clear: these spaces called refugee camps are complex architectures of postcolonial humanitarian creation as envisioned by neoliberal Western powers and institutions, and they produce all sorts of precarious livelihoods and resistances from the people for whom they were designed. The book is a well-written analytical text that would undoubtedly interest scholars and students of cultural anthropology, Kenyan and Somali studies, refugee studies, postcolonial and colonial studies, art and visual culture, and architecture and political science.
