Introduction

In her essay ‘We Refugees’, Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘We have lost our home which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world’ (2007 (1943): 264). What does ‘home’ mean for children and their parent(s) who live for months and years in transitional situations and the improvised community of a camp? Studies discussing camp life describe the structural conditions as gruelling for residents and staff. Jaji (2012) calls refugee camps ‘a form of human warehousing’ (p. 227). UNICEF (2017) describes growing up in German camps as ‘childhood in waiting’. A study by World Vision and the Hoffnungsträger Foundation (2016) showed that because of unregulated structures, cramped living conditions and restrictions of privacy, camps were ‘unsuitable places for children to stay’ (p. 49). In Switzerland, infants, toddlers, children and young adults, together with their parent(s) or adult siblings, live from several months to several years in communal accommodations/ camps before they may rent apartments. Waiting and uncertainty are the main structural and emotional elements of everyday life for thousands of people in Swiss cantonal camps.

In recent years, studies in the field of forced migration/refugee studies have demonstrated a growing interest in documenting the living conditions in camps (Fozdar and Hartley, 2013; Dilger and Dohrn, 2016; Hartmann, 2017; Fichtner and Trần, 2020). Ethnographical studies of refugee camps in the global South offer solid comparative evidence (see for example Inhetveen, 2010; Lutz, 2017). While certainly not all, some of the results are transferable to camp life in Europe. A commonality between these studies is that for refugees housed in camps, stagnation prevails for an indefinite period of time and provisional accommodation settings become permanent:

Werdermann (2016) demonstrated that German camp accommodation was a central element of the deterrence policy of the 1980s (p. 89f). Berthold (2014) examined camps as a ‘sanctioning device’, when, for example, families, because they do not want to cooperate in their deportation, live for many years in precarious circumstances.