A political ecology of the camp

Abstract

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.

Spatial-Moral Ordering in the War on Terror: Ungoverned Spaces as a Challenge to Humanitarianism

“…The spatial-moral ordering of humanitarian aid, which relies on 'othering', can take a variety of forms. The camp is the most debated spatial conceptualisation of the humanitarian idea (Meiches 2015). Approaches such as 'neutralised zones' or 'zones of safety' which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) developed to overcome the claustrophobic camp situation turn out to follow the same logic of creating an extra-territorial space, in which a boundary between physical life and social and political existence is drawn (Yamashita 2004;McQueen 2005).…”

Humanitarian spill-over: the expansion of hybrid humanitarian governance from camps to refugee hosting societies in East Africa

“…16 In a similar vein, Meiches reflects on the 'elasticity of the modern camp', stressing how its boundaries fluctuate and the regulatory effects of the camp and its contestations, may expand, detract or indeed come to apply to a more diverse human population, including non-refugees. 17 As a result, images of camp-dwellers as mere non-political bare life, 18 and of camps as bounded spaces, both become problematic.…”

The Post-2015 European Border Regime. New Approaches in a Shifting Field

“…We therefore propose a conceptualisation of the camp as a legal-material space, thus bringing back the question of infrastructures and exceptionality in an empirical way. Meiches (2015) has already highlighted the relevance of material elements of the camp, while a perspective of the camp as a space where rights are processed on a practical and daily basis by material, administrative and legal devices is still missing. Conceptually, this entails an understanding of the legal-material space of the camp as a highly dynamic and contested assemblage (Ong, Collier 2005).…”