"In a world marked by war, human and natural disasters, and forced displacement, refugee camps enjoy default legitimacy as safe havens that offer shelter, food, medical aid, and protection for people fleeing these compounded crises. In contrast to border control by means of walls, barbed wire, and detention centers, aid programs in Africa and large parts of the Global South are often thought of as more humane infrastructures that can both provide relief and curb the movement of millions of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants. In Occupied Refuge Hanno Brankamp questions this idea of refugee humanitarianism as a nonviolent form of compassionate borderwork. Humanitarian missions, he argues, may aim to protect the lives of displaced people but amount, upon closer inspection, to militarized occupations that treat aid recipients as quasi-colonized subjects held in camps. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, Brankamp shows that wherever aid touches down, it inevitably relies on systems of policing, ethno-racial subjugation, indirect rule, and economic extraction. The Kenyan state, rather than a victim of this humanitarian colonization at the hands of aid agencies and Global North donors, is instead a willing accomplice that seeks to brutally pacify its own peripheral territories, securitize unwanted foreign citizens, and to impose national rule."--