Drawing on a 36-month ethnography of the Kutupalong Rohingya Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, we present a theory of institutional totalization capturing the process through which humanitarian task organizations become authoritarian total institutions. We reveal that the institutional totalization process begins with the formation of a seemingly innocuous bureaucratic organization that is initially used for the humanitarian tasks of registering and administering refugees. In response to changing camp dynamics and shifting public and political attitudes towards refugees, however, this bureaucratic architecture is subsequently used to turn them the camps’ inmates. Our processual theory of the totalization process elucidates it from two sides: it shows how the camp authorities allow the bureaucratic organization to evolve into two different sets of dominance structures—dehumanization and subjugation—and it maps refugees’ reaction patterns as they develop in response to these dominance structures. We document three types of reaction patterns—regenerating, indigenizing, and potentiating—which the refugees devise in response to the changing camp environment. We argue that these shifting reaction patterns are central to institutional totalization as they challenge as well as help sustain the structure of dominance. Our institutional totalization framework presents a novel theoretical tool for understanding the transformation of apparently benevolent humanitarian organizations into authoritarian total institutions. Frameworks like ours are urgently needed to better understand the organizational consequences of the global rise of autocracy, illiberalism, and intolerance of others. Our work thus speaks to the literatures on total institutions, institutionalization, and resistance.
