Refugee camps, asylum detention, and the geopolitics of transnational migration: Disability and its intersections with humanitarian confinement

Abstract

Both disabled and displaced people, Mansha Mirza notes, are perceived as subverting the “natural order of things,” a subversion that leads to the long-term confinement of both groups. In this chapter, Mirza uses this connection, as well as shared experiences of marginalization within the “global hierarchy of mobility,” as jumping-off points to argue for the importance of attending to the figurative and literal intersections between disability and displacement. Tracing the emergence of refugee camps, in part due to what she describes as “misguided funding mechanisms” that prioritize emergency aid while making it difficult to secure long-term development funds, Mirza draws parallels to the institutionalization of disabled people, which is also structured by the concept of segregation from the mainstream community. Turning to the experiences of disabled people within refugee camps and detention centers, she unpacks the additional barriers faced by disabled people within these sites (and the additional barriers to resettlement they may encounter), as well as some of the contexts in which disability might “facilitate rather than limit” movement across borders. Ultimately, she offers a cautionary note on the use of disability to justify exceptions to the confinement of refugee camps and detention centers, arguing that it is “not that people with disabilities must be exceptional to confinement because they are inherently vulnerable” but that “the act of confinement itself must be an exception.”.