Abstract

The notion of "crisis" has been widely deployed to label the turmoil and reorganization spurred by the Arab Uprisings. In this paper we focus on Choucha refugee camp at the Ras-Jadir frontier post on the Tunisia-Libya border in order to chart three intertwined "crisis narratives": humanitarian, securitarian, and economic. Tracing the history of the camp, we argue that the notion of crisis has been adopted as an instrument for governing and controlling the spaces that the Arab Revolutions have created, serving as an all-encompassing "bordering toolkit" for managing the people in the camp, sorting them into different statuses, profiling their condition of war displacement, and organizing their resettlement.