Description:
Worlding Home interrogates the social, spatial, and architectural lifeworlds of United Nations (UN) peacekeepers accommodated in contingent camps throughout Goma, the capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From 2017 to 2019, more than twenty of these camps existed in and around the city, operating as sites of global outreach even as they generated new ways of being at home for peacekeepers and the peace-kept population.
Through multisited ethnography and deep engagement with anthropological and urban theory, author Maren Larsen explores the entanglements of camp and city. Pushing against readings of Goma's peacekeeping camps as either more privileged enclaves or as outliers in camp studies when compared to refugee camps, Larsen argues for an understanding of "camp" as a process and practice. Between dwelling and journeying and "here" and "there," the everyday lives and embodied practices of Goma's peacekeepers and Congolese civilians co-construct a "city as elsewhere" in which camping is a vital urban practice.
By offering a more expansive understanding of how UN peacekeeping camps fit within Goma's urban fabric, Worlding Home reveals the intertwined sociospatial processes of making a home, building a city, and reimagining the world.
Review Quotes:
"By considering the camp as a social and urban formation, Larsen's fine-grained ethnography offers a key reading for scholars interested in the complex geographies of encampment and urbanity in the context of global humanitarianism."--Timothy Raeymaekers, author of The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean
"This beautifully written book contributes to and challenges efforts to reformulate global urban studies through a lively, engaged ethnography of placemaking among Global South peacekeepers."--Garth Myers, author of Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South
"In the end, the reader comes away understanding the peacekeepers' camp as deeply entangled in the life of Goma: a space of global circulation, local negotiation, and everyday improvisation. Worlding Home stands as a perceptive and timely contribution to the study of peace operations in an urban context and the anthropology of encampment. It invites us to rethink what it means to make a home - however temporary - amid intervention, and what it means for a city to continually absorb, reshape, and respond to the demands of those who camp within it."--Silvia Danielak, LSE Review of Books