Protection and containment: surviving COVID-19 in Palabek refugee settlement, Northern Uganda

Humanitarian assistance is framed around ‘protection’. Deciding whom to protect and against what is not straightforward, particularly during a pandemic. In Uganda, policies to protect against COVID-19 embraced containment through the reduction of movement and the securitisation of borders. Refugees in Uganda were described as particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 and therefore in need of protection, whilst simultaneously perceived to be a health security threat. This article critically explores containment and protection by focusing on refugee self-protection. Ethnographic research was carried out during COVID-19 in Palabek refugee settlement in northern Uganda, amongst refugees from South Sudan. In contrast to containment policies that curtailed mobility in order to ‘protect’, research findings demonstrate that self-protection included dynamic social boundaries around the settlement, and harnessed mobility. The latter drew on social, political, and historical borderland dynamics between (South) Sudan and Uganda. Effective social boundaries around Palabek were only created when policies of containment had legitimacy. Boundaries were circumvented when legitimacy waned and wider socio-economic challenges, particularly regarding food insecurity, came to the fore. If humanitarians and the Ugandan government had understood the essential need to consider self-protection, they might have paid more attention to ensuring the long-lasting legitimacy of COVID-19 containment policies amongst refugees.