Worlding Home

An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC

Maren Larsen

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English

Indiana University Press
28 October 2025

Regional studies; Urban communities; Social & cultural anthropology

Series: Framing the Global

Worlding Home interrogates the social, spatial, and architectural lifeworlds of United Nations (UN) peacekeepers accommodated in contingent camps throughout Goma, the capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. From 2017 to 2019, more than twenty of these camps existed in and around the city, operating as sites of global outreach even as they generated new ways of being at home for peacekeepers and the peace-kept population.

Through multisited ethnography and deep engagement with anthropological and urban theory, Worlding Home explores the entanglements of camp and city. Pushing against readings of Goma's peacekeeping camps as either more privileged enclaves or as outliers in camp studies when compared to refugee camps, author Maren Larsen argues for an understanding of ""camp"" as a process and practice. Between dwelling and journeying, ""here"" and ""there,"" the everyday lives and embodied practices of Goma's peacekeepers and Congolese civilians co-construct a ""city as elsewhere"" in which camping is a vital urban practice.

By offering a more expansive understanding of how UN peacekeeping camps fit within Goma's urban fabric, Worlding Home reveals the intertwined socio-spatial processes of making a home, building a city, and re-imagining the world.

By: Maren Larsen
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780253074485
ISBN 10: 0253074487
Series: Framing the Global
Pages: 274
Publication Date: 28 October 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Dedication Acknowledgments Acronyms Introduction: The City as Elsewhere 1. Urbanization and Encampment: A Century in the City 2. Through the Gates 3. The (Extra-)Ordinary Spaces of Peacekeeping 4. At Home in the Camp 5. Being Global in Goma Conclusion: Camping the City Notes Bibliography Index

Maren Larsen is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Basel.

Reviews for Worlding Home: An Urban Ethnography of Peacekeeping Camps in Goma, DRC

""By considering the camp as a social and urban formation, Larsen's fine-grained ethnography offers a key reading for scholars interested in the complex geographies of encampment and urbanity in the context of global humanitarianism.""—Timothy Raeymaekers, author of The Natural Border: Bounding Migrant Farmwork in the Black Mediterranean ""This beautifully written book contributes to and challenges efforts to reformulate global urban studies through a lively, engaged ethnography of placemaking among Global South peacekeepers.""—Garth Myers, author of Rethinking Urbanism: Lessons from Postcolonialism and the Global South