Letters from the camps: UNHCR and refugee voices

This article draws on the idea of ‘économie scripturaire’ (scriptural economy) developed by De Certeau, with the aim of comparing the scriptural practice of UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) as regards the administration and supervision of camps with letters written by refugees to describe their conditions, express their complaints, and set out their demands. Whereas the scriptural practice of UNHCR demonstrates the thinking and the institutional categories that prevail in the management of camps, the letters from refugees open up alternative accounts by introducing themes directly inspired by their experiences of violence and imprisonment and revealing the infrapolitical organization of camps. They are understood here as fragments of a counter-narrative about the camps and are the basis of a reflection on camp politics, understood in the sense of both UNHCR policy in conjunction with individual countries in relation to the creation, administration, control, and closure of the camps, and of the infrapolitics of the refugees within them.