3 - Humanitarian Aid and the Camp Landscape

Summary

How do aid agencies deliver protection and assistance in Uganda’s Kyaka II, and specifically seek to prevent and overcome gender-based violence? In what ways do they affect the women and men living there? Focusing on these questions, the chapter explores the overall camp structures and scope of aid via the humanitarian apparatus, power practices, and decision-making—as well as their effects on the refugees living in Kyaka II. Divided into four parts, the first addresses developments and aid in the camp alongside hierarchies, and argues that refugees are made ‘protection objects.’ The second part centers on projects tackling gender-based violence, and their links with global refugee policies. It reveals how preventive and protective projects against gender-based violence as well as those to support empowerment essentially draw on ‘vulnerability’ categorizations, which portray women primarily as ‘vulnerable protection objects.’ The third part addresses correlations between aid, the camp architecture, and the prevalence of gender-based violence, revealing the three issues of aid workers at times perpetrating violence, the structural effects of aid, and the risks resulting from the camp landscape. Before concluding, the fourth part considers whether the broad critique of aid provision and of the camp is reasonable in light of the challenges that aid agencies themselves face.