The return of the Camp

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope1

“…However, according to UN Special Rapporteur François Crepeau it has become the norm (UN 2013: 12). 6 As a number of political geographers have analysed, Agamben uses the concept of the 'camp' as a spatial-ontological device beyond the literal sense to refer to the suspension of the law (see for example Debrix and Barder 2012;Minca 2005Minca , 2007. 7 For a commentary on Agamben and bordering see Vaughan-Williams (2009).…”

La production culturelle de la norme spatiale à travers l’habitat illégal dans l’Hérault

“…Si beaucoup ont vu dans Guantanamo le modèle achevé de ces espaces d'exception et le retour du camp (Minca, 2005), il faut bien lire ce que propose Agamben (1997) : la banalité de l'inscription dans l'espace de horslieux où des hommes sans mérite (homines sacri) sont bannis, à la merci d'une exceptionnalité qui devient leur norme. Il ne faut pas l'envisager dans le sens habituel de l'expression : l'exception de l'homo sacer, ici travailleur pauvre, étudiant, gitan, journalier agricole ou saisonnier du tourisme, retraité sans fortune, vient de la normalisation personnelle de ces destins de réprouvés qui ne sont plus envisagés collectivement, en tant que groupe social, mais comme des individus à la merci des caprices d'une suspension de la loi, et du hasard de la rencontre avec des acteurs susceptibles d'acquérir des droits sur leur destin.…”

Giorgio agamben and the spatialities of the camp: an introduction

“…This is not only because the logic of the camp stretches itself outside the concentration camp but also because the camp is materialized (and in its spatial and material form finds its most potent expression) (Agamben, 2005;Minca, 2005). In its political form as a territoriality of power, this materialization turns the capacity of exemption into an awesome weapon of the sovereign authority.…”

“…In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity' (Agamben, 2002b, p. 1). The politics of security may be seen increasingly as a fundamentalist belief; as a kind of new church of faith (Diken and Laustsen, 2006b), involving increased domestic hegemony of militarism in the USA (Cunningham, 2004), the rearticulation of the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship legitimized by the 'new normalcy' as a central metaphor (Bhandar, 2004), the justification of 'just wars' (Palladino, 2005) and the branding of the Guantánamo Bay camp as though it were the public face of exceptionalism (see further Johns, 2005;Minca, 2005;Neal, 2006).…”