By Tabea Scharrer, Chinwe Beneditte Ogbonna, and Gerhild Perl | Issue 26
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered diverse quarantine measures worldwide to curb the spread of the virus. In refugee camps, such as the Bakassi IDP (internally displaced persons) camp in Nigeria, the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya (see Stefan Millar on 'Coronavirus Containment'), and the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, these measures led to increased confinement of refugees, disrupting livelihoods, economic activity, and access to education. In our contribution, we argue that such containment policies reflect a broader global trend of isolation and deglobalisation, marked by political fragmentation, economic disconnection, and intensified mobility restrictions – processes that accelerate inequalities. In retrospect, the pandemic can be viewed as an unintended, temporary laboratory of ‘global deglobalisation’, where experimenting with bordering policies, previously thought no longer possible, gained traction.
In 2020, the Bakassi IDP camp in northeast Nigeria was home to approximately 30,000 people who had become displaced by the violence of Boko Haram, with some residents having lived there for five years. In April 2020, the Nigerian government shut off the camp from the surrounding urban areas in order to ‘protect’ the camp population from the Covid-19 virus. For the camp residents, quarantine meant isolation and thus a standstill of the circulation of labour and money and a loss of access to education. As a result, the inhabitants became even more dependent on external aid, provided not only by Nigerian NGOs, but also by many international organisations, such as IOM (International Organization for Migration), WFP (World Food Programme), UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund), and WHO (World Health Organization). However, these international actors were themselves affected by global restrictions on the movement of goods and people, which weakened their ability to provide aid. In addition, the little aid entering the camp was unequally distributed between different groups, following hierarchies of people and populations in the camp. The ensuing poverty was one of the most striking remnants of the pandemic. Having lost homes, employment, and other sources of income, many IDPs relied on paid work outside the camp as unskilled labourers in laundry or farming. The spatial restrictions during the pandemic had a severe impact on people’s agency to secure their livelihood, resulting in escalating hunger, ill health, and poverty in the camp. New survival practices, such as transactional sex for food in the camp became an option for some women, also causing unwanted (teenage) pregnancies and increasing everyday hardships further. Isolation, however, was only the first step. In November 2021, the Nigerian government officially closed the IDP camps in the area, including Bakassi.
We argue that the Bakassi camp, like others around the world, can be seen as a microcosm of a global development of deglobalisation, where the pandemic has served as a ‘laboratory’ for pushing the limits of confinement. It was a 'laboratory' in so far as different, but interrelated, actors experimented with policies of bordering and disconnection not thought possible shortly before, as for instance in the Schengen area. Sealing off refugee and IDP camps was only part of a broader global movement to quarantine, isolate, and fence off, as stopping mobility and social mixing was seen as key in preventing the virus from spreading. Yet, we contend that these containment policies were no new inventions, but part of a broader global trend of deglobalisation, where restrictions on mobility as well as political and economic fragmentation accelerate existing inequalities. Hence, the pandemic has laid bare processes already under way, shaped by the dialectic of globalisation and deglobalisation, or connection and fragmentation.
Developments of the second half of the 20th century, such as increased globalisation, transnationalism and the deceptive promise of hypermobility, are today confronted with new forms of nationalism and protectionism. Nevertheless, before the pandemic, processes of global entanglement seemed ever increasing, making the possibility of a reverse process appear unrealistic. Yet, at the beginning of the pandemic that was exactly what happened – borders previously open were quickly closed and the mobility of people and goods restricted and monitored more closely. Therefore, the pandemic caused not only the assumption of continuous acceleration to crumble, since suddenly the rhythm of social life decelerated, but it also served as a moment for states to justify intensified border control and to employ policies of disconnection.
Indicators for processes of deglobalisation, an undoing of ties, exchange, and mobility had already been discussed before 2020. The economic historian, Harold James, argued in 2018 that especially on the political level a disembedding of domestic rules from the international order was taking place due to economic nationalism and unilateralism. While in the economic realm evidence of deglobalisation in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was only incremental, in the sense of a temporal decrease of cross-border financial flows and more protectionism, political deglobalisation had advanced further. James argued that this political deglobalisation would lead to more intense conflicts over trade and financial regulation, and would have immense social repercussions, expressed particularly in hostility towards emblematic figures of the global, namely ‘the migrant’ and ‘the refugee’. Comparing the current situation with similar developments in the 1930, Andreas Novy (2017) described developments of continuing global neoliberal capitalism and a simultaneous turn towards protectionist nationalism or, as a step further, isolationist authoritarianism; and Achille Mbembe (2018) pointed at the mobilisation of technology for creating new omnipresent borders, making them even more violent in their “war against mobility”.
We took the quarantine measures in the Bakassi IDP camp during the Covid-19 pandemic as a point of departure to reflect upon the broader theoretical link between the isolation of individuals, with their activities becoming disconnected in the name of protection, with a larger global trend of increasing political and economic isolation and fragmentation. Thereby, deglobalisation does not mean the end of globalisation processes, but rather indexes how quickly these interconnections can unravel in a dialectic process, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations such as those in the Bakassi IDP camp. The camps’ forced reliance on insufficient international aid reflect the deepening inequalities exacerbated by confinement and isolation.
Tabea Scharrer is a social anthropologist working on (forced) migration, inequality, and religion, with a regional focus on Kenya. In addition to journal articles, she has published books on Islamic missionary movements in Kenya and Tanzania (2013), African middle classes (2018), Somali urban presence in East Africa (2019), and a handbook on forced migration research (2023). She is on the editorial board of Comparative Migration Studies. To connect: @tabeascharrer.bsky.social; https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tabea-Scharrer; https://www.tabea-scharrer.de
Chinwe Beneditte Ogbonna is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Freiburg. Her research interests include international relations, politics, culture, history, conflict, gender issues, and the Sustainable Development Goals (Agenda 2030) in Eastern Nigeria and Africa. She co-authored the chapter Conflict and Displacement on the Psychosocial Well-Being/MentalHealth of Females: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-8235-6_14. To learn more about Chinwe, kindly visit: https://www.grk2571.uni-freiburg.de/people/docs/chinwe-ogbonna.
Gerhild Perl is an assistant professor at Trier University. She is a social anthropologist and her research interests include migration and border regimes, the affective dimension of social life and negotiations of responsibility.
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