How do IDP camps operate?

A critical perspective emphasizes that camps are not merely service-delivery sites. They can become restrictive, prolonged spaces where residents face limited work, movement, electricity, or autonomy. When formal governance and aid are inadequate, residents create practical systems through social ties, informal livelihoods, negotiation, and self-protection, sometimes at significant personal cost.

• Camps can become prolonged institutions that constrain freedom, livelihoods, movement, and ordinary social life rather than remaining temporary shelters.
• Residents may experience reduced assistance and insecurity after formal protection arrangements close or are transferred to other authorities.
• People in camps often create bottom-up governance through social networks, religious ties, informal economies, and everyday negotiation of aid.
• Self-protection strategies can improve immediate safety while limiting livelihoods, movement outside camps, and public expression of identity.
• The camp model is criticized as potentially carceral or as separating displaced people from the wider population and normal systems of life.

Featured sourcePrecarity as infrastructure: displacement, everyday governance and the ordinary politics of waiting in Benue State, Nigeriaexa.ai6 sourcesView sources