The Camp, Formalized: Authority and the Built in the Management of the Interim

Chapter 2 looks at the place of the camp in the United Nations (UN) regime established for Palestinian refugees. It unpacks the UN’s early planning efforts (1950–69), before following the archival record around a moment of crisis—the Cairo Agreement of 1969 in which the Palestine Liberation Organization entered and assumed control of Lebanon’s camps. It shows that the primary means of order lay in the regulation of the built environment itself, in domesticating the refugee as inhabitant. But it also shows that the camps went from being the basis of the UN Relief and Works Agency’s authority to the very sites where that authority broke down. Camps should be seen not simply as legal artifacts but as built objects. The chapter posits that this history preempts the broader managerial turn in politics. The concept of authority emerges as the stuff of technical competence, decoupling authority from sovereignty.