Lecture
ONA Fokushalle E7
Ocean Territories: Maritime Geopolitics, Migration, and Global Trade

Refugee Camps on the Western SaharaManuel Herz

The Sahrawi refugee camps, located in southern Algeria close to the border with the Western Sahara give us an opportunity to question the predominant notions connected to refugee camps. An urbanistic and architectural reading of these camps—established forty years in the middle of the Sahara—shows how these spaces have developed into a political project of the refugees. Instead of seeing the camps as a spatial manifestation of the state of exception, the Sahrawi camps, governed by the refugees themselves, not only allow for a process of social emancipation, but also prefigure the state still denied to them. The camps in fact, act as a laboratory for how the concept of the nation-state can be reformulated in the twenty-first century. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Samia Henni.

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