Critical scholarship on the camp tends to focus on the institution's historical role in producing forms of social exclusion often by linking the emergence of the camp to the creation of abstract political divisions such as citizenship and nationality. While this approach has unquestionable value, it overemphasizes the importance of social constructions in the history and development of the camp. This article calls for a re-examination of the material elements composing camp spaces by offering attention to how non-human entities and processes contribute to the development of practices of confinement, security and governance. Drawing on the work of Manuel DeLanda, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, this article develops an outline of the camp as a material assemblage and examines how the camp emerges from the interaction of barbed wire, war, and the rise of motorized transport. This process of historical emergence helps to explain the elastic and transient dimensions of the camp as constitutive of a new form of fluid political control. Moreover, the article claims that attending to the materiality of the camp helps to explain the expanding role that camps will play in the future of political governance.
Traumas sin cuerpos: Una réplica a las Comunidades Afectivas de Emma Hutchison
Both classical and critical studies of warfare often comment on the relationship between war and excess. However, even in richly theoretical work, this connection is unanalyzed. This article focuses on the link between excess and war, and seeks to deepen our understanding of why excess reappears so frequently in the study of armed conflict and security studies. Specifically, the article turns to the work of Georges Bataille, an overlooked figure in the critical tradition, who extensively theorized linkages between excess and war. In Bataille’s thought, excess is a key term for explicating the design, mobilization, and transformation of war. Moreover, Bataille sees the exposure to excess as playing a key part in social attachments to violence and armed conflict. The article unpacks how Bataille theorizes excess and applies his insights to the context of precision warfare. Using the case of the accident in the era of precision war, it reveals how Bataille anticipates many of the dynamics that structure late warfare through his understanding of excess. The article concludes by describing how Bataille’s vision of excess would challenge critical war and security studies literatures in relation to the problems of war experience, relationships to death, and scholarship.
The term “international regime” was originally used to describe formal agreements between states, but the concept has since evolved after going through considerable critique and reformulation. A universal agreement on the precise nature or elements of a regime has remained elusive, despite a general consensus on the definition. Nevertheless, the concept of regime offers a unique opportunity to better understand international relationships by underscoring the importance of specific attributes of international, multinational, and nongovernmental groups, sets of behavioral or epistemic practices, and processes of learning. As a heuristic device, regime theory helps to explain the rise of complex interaction between states, organizations, corporations, and other institutions as well as the potential for ideas or behavior to shape the international system. Regime theory has supplemented traditional explanations of international order, including hegemonic stability theory or neorealism, by explaining the emergence of cooperation and organization within what would traditionally be considered anarchical or highly unpredictable conditions. Common approaches to regime theory include realism, neoliberalism, cognitivism, and constructivism. Part of the strength of regime theory is that it has remained an elastic concept and has been used to analyze a huge diversity of issues, with many promising results. Regime theory should continue highlighting both the ideational and material dimensions of organization and bringing together positivist, inductive, and critical approaches to understanding power, interest, and identity so as to generate a series of new conversations or trajectories for exploring the creation of international order.
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