Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp: Gender, Violence, and Coping in Uganda

Description

Although refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains difficult there. Building on empirical research with refugees in a Ugandan camp, Ulrike Krause offers nuanced insights into violence, humanitarian protection, gender relations, and coping of refugees who mainly escaped the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This book explores how risks of gender-based violence against women, in particular, but also against men, persist despite and partly due to their settlement in the camp and the system established there. It reflects on modes and shortcomings of humanitarian protection, changes in gender relations, as well as strategies that the women and men use to cope with insecurities, everyday struggles, and structural problems occurring across different levels and temporalities.

Ulrike Krause is Junior Professor of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and the Institute for Social Sciences, Osnabruck University, Germany, and affiliated Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is co-editor of the volume Gender, Violence, Refugees (2017), and co-founder and co-editor of the German Journal of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies. Her research focuses on the conflict-displacement nexus, refugee protection, gender, gender-based violence, resilience, and agency; with a regional concentration on Sub-Saharan Africa as well as global developments.

'This important and original work unpacks the ways in which confinement and encampment exacerbate gender-based violence against both women and men. Providing a granular focus on a single Ugandan refugee camp, it integrates insight into refugees' lived experiences with critical engagement with the role of humanitarian organizations. Ulrike Krause offers a voice to harrowing human stories and shows why they matter for policy and practice.' Alexander Betts, University of Oxford 'Whether you are a scholar, a policy maker or a practitioner, you will find this thought provoking book extremely valuable and its richly informed polyphonic analysis persuasive. Drawing from her experience in a refugee camp in Uganda, Dr Krause engages in an in- depth, thoughtful yet robust dialogical interaction which unravels, contests or refines a wide range of theories, concepts and practices on gender based violence as a continuum (i.e: humanitarian/dehumanizing aid; women vulnerable objects/actors). Forced migration is a complex process in which gender roles and relationships are continuously and contextually renegotiated. A must-read.' Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed, McMaster University 'Through her in-depth knowledge of life and coping in a refugee camp and her careful attention to detail, Krause explores how gender-based violence needs to be understood in relation to humanitarian governance and coping strategies in the camp - moving beyond the moral binaries of much work on this contentious subject.' Simon Turner, University of Copenhagen