When the Palestinian refugee camp became a “squatter settlement”

Abstract Palestinian refugees in Amman persistently call what is now a densely built urban environment, a camp (mukhayyam). Officially, however, the camp went from being recognized by Jordanian host authorities to becoming a “squatter settlement” in World Bank projects, all the while remaining non-recognized by the UN body responsible for Palestine refugees. This article uncovers how sustained humanitarian non-recognition ushered in a language of “informality” that justified demolition and displacement as vehicle for development. In locating this lexical shift in the 1980s and 1990s, this article exposes a new form of epistemic and spatial dispossession brought upon the Palestinians. In calling into question acts of classification, this article historicizes how and why the refugee camp component of the question of Palestine became submerged under “informality.” At the same time, attuned to a Palestinian spatial vocabulary and grammar, this article reveals how the mukhayyam remained resistant to the forces that did not recognize its legitimacy and those that sought to informalize it. It is in this sense that the camp, as a broader encompassing Palestinian vocabulary, has a radical currency.