Refugee urbanism in Sri Lankan Tamil life between camp and city

For four decades, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in South India have lived between encampment, urban settlement, and partial social incorporation. Refugee scholarship has treated camps as exceptional humanitarian spaces, while urban studies has focused on migration and informal urbanization, leaving the long-term urban lives of refugees between camp and city largely unexamined. Introducing the concept of “refugee urbanism,” this Perspective examines how protracted refugee populations reshape, and are reshaped by, urban life, racialized governance, and ethnic marginality across generations. Drawing on Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu after the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms, it argues that camps are not merely temporary humanitarian infrastructures. They become entangled with nearby towns through labor mobility, informal housing transitions, educational aspirations, gendered survival strategies, and negotiations of belonging. The intersection of ethnic identity, legal precarity, and spatial segregation produces “urban statelessness.” Camps and cities therefore require an integrated analytical framework attentive to race, ethnicity, spatial governance, and temporal uncertainty.