Kenya’s longstanding role as a host country for displaced populations has been accompanied by enduring tensions between international obligations and national sociopolitical realities. Despite successive commitments to global and regional frameworks promoting refugee integration, the lived experience of displacement remains characterised by containment, marginalisation, and precariousness. This study interrogates the policy of encampment as it is experienced by both refugees and host communities in Kakuma Refugee Camp, exploring how it shapes notions of integration and community relations. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between May and July 2023 and analysed through a thematic framework, the research examines the ambivalences inherent in protracted displacement. It highlights how refugees articulate integration primarily as access to fundamental rights and freedoms, whereas host communities tend to frame it in terms of peaceful coexistence and equitable access to humanitarian resources. These divergent conceptualisations reflect not only personal and collective aspirations but also the structural conditions imposed by the humanitarian regime and the national state apparatus. The findings further reveal the camp as a paradoxical space: a site of refuge from external violence, yet one where new forms of social suffering are produced. Experiences of encampment are differentiated along lines of nationality, gender, and socio-economic status, complicating simplistic narratives of protection or integration. Interactions between refugees and hosts oscillate between fragile solidarity and latent conflict, shaped by unequal access to aid, competition over limited resources, and exclusionary governance practices. Rather than integration being a linear or inevitable process, it emerges as a contested terrain, where hopes for belonging are continually negotiated against the backdrop of structural inequality and political abandonment.