(In)accessible refugee camps: insights on localizing knowledge production

Abstract

In Jordan, Syrian refugee camps are restricted areas that are inaccessible without official entry permission. As the humanitarian-development apparatus-often referred to as ‘research brokers’-facilitates most academics’ access to the camps, questions of power, ethics and exclusion arise. This paper first examines how a researcher’s access is shaped by their positionality, showing how asymmetric academic hierarchies between the so-called global South and North determine who is enabled to produce knowledge, and thus to publish. Second, it considers how the conditions of surveillance and control within camps-structured by NGO gatekeeping and state policing-shape the kinds of knowledge produced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in refugee camps and interviews with researchers, it analyzes the different pathways scholars-including myself-navigated to gain access and problematizes the regulation and ownership of that access. It asks how such development-academic (un)partnerships affect the decolonization of knowledge production in encamped refugee studies, revealing the intersecting nexus between academia, the state, and the humanitarian sector, given that the latter act simultaneously as facilitators and gatekeepers of research. The article calls for a more inclusive and reflexive approach to knowledge production in refugee camps, attentive to constraints on methodology, timelines, ethics and the depth of engagement with refugees.