Community infrastructures: shelter, self-reliance and polymorphic borders in urban refugee governance

Community infrastructures: shelter, self-reliance and polymorphic borders in urban refugee governance. Territory, Politics, Governance. Over the last two decades community-based programmes have become important tools of migration and refugee governance. Governmentality approaches have argued that the same technologies of governance applied to advanced liberal societies are being translated onto spaces of forced displacement in the Global South through the notions of community' and self-reliance'. Other accounts have instead focused on the potentially emancipatory character of migrant and refugee self-organization. This article contributes to this body of work by drawing on ethnographic research on refugee community shelters in Cairo, Egypt. It theorizes community as an informal and precarious infrastructure in which refugees' social relations are mobilized as substitutes for direct, material humanitarian assistance in a global condition marked by the shrinking of aid budgets. Predicated as it is on the institutionalization of national and ethnic belonging, community-based shelter provision constitutes a relational bordering practice in which the new universal humanitarian values of empowerment and resilience reproduce old exclusions. Refugees in Cairo perceive these policies as inadequate and contest the ethos of self-reliance as practically untenable. Community infrastructures are thus also sites of friction where repoliticization can occur.