The Dangers of Boredom: Refugee Daily Life and Structurelessness after International Interventions 'succeed'

In 2014, 400,000 Ezidis fled their villages in and around Sinjar, Iraq, at the advance of Daesh (the Islamic State). The vast majority settled in Kurdistan, Iraq, amongst the 18 Internally-Displaced Person (IDP) camps hastily built by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) government, the United Nations, and other organisations. The immediate concern was to provide shelter and food for the families. Now that a decade has passed, tens of thousands of Ezidis still find themselves in the camps. Many children have memories of life only spent in the camp.

A significant concern within disaster response, one which the paper investigates and one which has been historically ignored, is the significant role that boredom plays in everyday lives of camp inhabitants. So much energy is focused on the initial logistics of tent number, size, and food provided—all requirements at the start of the life of a camp for the displaced—and none is given to the daily experience of inhabitants after the immediate danger has passed. Yet, if no plan for the future exists, boredom itself becomes a danger. A 2021 study dedicated to the role that boredom plays in refugees’ daily life quotes one refugee in a holding centre, when asked what the worst thing in the camp is: ‘Boredom’.

Utilising ethnographic interviews with women in the world’s largest Ezidi IDP camp, this work begins by discussing the existence of boredom as well as its dangers. The second half of the work focuses on what interventions can remedy this issue—what can combat boredom. Lessons from this paper can help improve not only the lives of IDP and refugee camp inhabitants but the lives of those migrants and asylum seekers who are in their destination country but still held back from fully participating in daily life by legal regulations.