World leaders adopted a new refugee response framework last year in a renewed global effort to tackle the refugee crisis. At the heart of it is a renewed shift towards supporting host countries to integrate refugees into their national development plans, moving away from the encampment-based model towards a policy entailing greater mobility and freedoms for displaced persons. However, despite being confined in camps, refugees have almost always created positive economic relationships with their host communities, actively participating in the growth of the local economy and as a result turned camps into ‘accidental cities’ as Bram Jansen rightly puts it in this book. He argues that Kakuma has evolved from a camp…
