Paper short abstract:

The paper examines debates about refugee protection in contested spaces and takes as a starting point of focus British Overseas territories in Cyprus. It analyses the entangled infrastructures of law, sovereignty, and humanitarianism.

Paper long abstract:

Looking at the case of refugee families stranded on the British bases in Cyprus since 1996, this paper wishes to interrogate the entanglement of protection and sovereignty in areas where both are contested. This entails examining also the entanglement of legal and material infrastructures in the form of case and international law, territory and land, and homes and services. One of the arguments of the paper is that as refugee protection becomes an increasingly complex area of knowledge, contested fields (spatial, legal, conceptual, etc), are becoming more relevant in allowing us to understand and counter-narrate this complexity. Looking at such cases of at the limits of the law and within exceptional sovereign arrangements, it is claimed, can be revealing about wider trends that have come to define the refugee regime. The paper wishes to engage ethnographic and legal insights with insights from geography in advancing this analysis. The case study in question further speaks to the entanglements between power dynamics in postcolonial, postconflict, and humanitarian settings and in so doing also speaks to the longue duree of refugeehood.